• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, April 2, 2010

For its recent issue focusing on what it says are the "hottest" magazines (if that is not, in itself, an oxymoron) Adweek asked Graydon Carter "What does the future hold for magazines?" claiming he "offers evidence" that print is not dying.

But the poster boy for magazine editorial notoriety manages to expend 953 words without making a convincing argument that print is not dying. Says he...."technological innovation is nothing new... E-mail is hurting snail mail. But not every media revolution ends with one combatant lifeless on the ground... Television forced the movies studios to save their core business by making great films..."blah, blah blah after which he comes to an abrupt stop and descends in to a 500 word commercial for his Vanity Fair gushing about its "gripping, satisfying narrative; visually arresting, world-class photography." He lauds his website. He argues: " the art of storytelling is millennia older" than commercial television, the magazine and the printing press and so will survive the encroachment of any new technology. Graydon ends with the notion that readers want "compelling stories and iconic photographs. And it won't matter if they're read on a laptop, a cell phone, or on paper."

This to me is a convincing argument that story telling will survive but not print. And it underscores the widespread delusion in the magazine industry that they will somehow still be selling dead tree products for decades to come. But here are some numbers Graydon conveniently left on the cutting room floor of his narrative:

Newsstand sales for the almost 500 consumer magazines in the United States measured by the Audit Bureau of Circulations declined 9.1 percent, in the last half of 2009 versus the same period a year earlier. That follows a 12.36 percent decline for the first half of 2009 compared with the same period a year earlier and an 11.12 percent decline for July through December 2008 compared with the same period in 2007. So it was no surprise when in January, Publishers Information Bureau reported total magazine rate-card-reported advertising revenue for full-year 2009 posted a 18.1% decline against the previous year while advertising pages dropped 25.6% compared to 2008.

But you don't need reporting bureaus to tell you what you already know from your own experience. Thanks to advances in technology, information that once made magazines a must buy is now a few clicks away. The newsweeklies starting dying the day CNN introduced 24/7 news coverage. Last year Businessweek sold for about $1. With recorded TV shows backup on hard drives waiting to be watched during the time when "nothing good" used to be on, the time to read magazines has essentially evaporated. The iPad could really be the death knell of dead tree magazines.

A considerable part of any magazine's budget is spent on manufacturing and distribution (although digital has surely brought those costs down) but why not eliminate them all together? There will still be costs in assembling the first issue, but to replicate it digitally and distribute it to hundreds, if not thousands of "subscribers" is next to nothing. But this does not solve the time problem.

I used to subscribe to dozens of general interest magazines, but am down to one or two and those as often as not go into the trash unread. Skimmed maybe, but essentially unread. And the only reason I still find them in my mail box is that the publishers are desperately offering them for an unsustainable $5 a year. Every time I set aside time to read those magazine, I find something on 300 channels of cable TV, on the DVR or in the endless vault of the internet to otherwise occupy my time. Booking reading is still sacred, but the time allocated for it is also slowly disappearing.

Having been in the magazine business for about half my career, I don't take any joy in all of this. In fact I find it distressing that one of the alleged brighter minds of that crumbling business can't come up with a more compelling arguement that magazines will survive other than they are pretty good "story tellers." Magazines now compete with millions of individuals who can also story tell; perhaps not as professionally as Vanity Fair writers, but certainly enough to suck the air out of the room where magazine live.