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Posted by John Lockwood on March 27th, 2008

As an Internet writer, I love hearing about the death of print.  All your newspapers and magazines are going to fold any minute, and then everyone will be online all the time looking for rising young pundits like me.  Well, "pundits like me", anyway.  The main thing is that we won’t have to deal with those inconvenient literary agents and editors whose poor jobs Andrew Keen is so concerned about.   Then we can just hoist up our content and claim our AdSense Money.  I want my MTV.

My Favorite Death of Print Picture

Here is my favorite picture showing how print is dying, a chart of the stock for McClatchy Company over the last few years.  McClatchy is the company that owns several newspapers including my home town paper.

This chart shows print dying on schedule.  If you read what some of the McClatchy papers have to say about their troubled fortunes, however, they’re more likely to put most of the blame on the declining ad revenue caused by the troubled real estate market.

I think they’re just blowing smoke.  Print is dying, I tell you.  Didn’t they hear the rumor?

Other Numbers Tell A Different Tale

I don’t know if print is dying fast enough for my taste, however.  Every time I go to Borders, I find three two-sided shelves, fully loaded with print magazines.  You’d think they’d be down to two shelves or something if print were really in its death throes, but so far they’re still hanging on quite nicely.  There must be at least two dozen magazines dedicated to women’s abdomens alone.  Fortunately they only cover the top 1/10th of 1% of women’s abdomens, too, or they could fill up the entire store.

As if all these magazines weren’t problem enough for the death of print rumor, along comes the web site of the MPA, or Magazine Publishers of America.   This site publishes all sorts of magazine circulation statistics, for both single issue sales and subscriptions.  For example, here are the 2006 subscription figures for the top 100 ABC magazines.  Let’s see how fast print is dying.  The two top magazines are AARP magazines at about 22 million subscribers each.  Of course, AARP circulation has a captive audience of AARP members, so this number is artificially high.  Let’s check out the number three magazine, Reader’s Digest.  About 9.7 million people subscribe to that.   (I guess it really DOES pay to increase your word power). 

Now let’s see how the blogs are doing.  Technorati’s top blog as of today is Engadget, with no subscription numbers available.  Fair enough.  Tech Crunch, the number two blog, boasts some 734,000 subscribers.

As you can see, the number three ABC magazine has twelve times as many subscribers as the number two blog.  Of course, the real readership in each case is harder to measure.  How many of those Readers Digests are sitting in a dentist’s office somewhere?   We don’t know.  Based on my own subscriber and traffic numbers, I would expect TechCrunch’s daily visitor count to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.5 million to 6 million, so Reader’s Digest still wins has a pretty handy lead based on circulation numbers alone.

I’ll leave the rest of the discussion / spin for the comments.

I hope you enjoyed this essay content, and invite you to subscribe for more.  I need big subscription numbers for when I release my blog to Kindle.  Hey, wait a minute, wasn’t Amazon.com the company that was selling us all Segue’s a few years back?  Whatever happened to those…