• Ad Age, Monday, May 9, 2011 2:16 PM

"Media Guy" columnist Simon Dumenco relates the sad story of "Media Cat," an elderly feline who used to spend time napping on piles of magazines at a neighborhood newsstand.  Alas, the newsstand remodeled, so its low-lying stacks of glossies are gone - along with the cat.

Media Cat may well be alive and hanging out in back of the store these days, but perhaps a sadder story is the vanishing retail visibility for print magazines.   Retail outlets stocking magazines have decreased 11.3% in three years, according to Ad Age's Nat Ives, and "magazine covers essentially served as eye-level (and waist-level and ankle-level) billboards for their own brands."

"In the consumer marketplace," Dumenco writes, "magazines are literally vanishing."   And, "perhaps even worse," he notes, "there is no equivalent brand-billboarding system for magazines in the mobile-app ecosystem" where "they're forced to compete with literally hundreds of thousands of apps."

Read the whole story at Ad Age »