Another blog declares print media dead

[TC] Print Continues To Decline: PC World Australia To Shut:

The Australian version of the well regarded print magazine PC World is to cease publication in an offline form as off January. … Anecdotal reports would suggest that many US magazines, particularly in tech related fields are experiencing similar readership drops to that of PC World Australia. Whilst there will always be a place (for the foreseeable future anyway) for glossy gossip magazines in Doctor surgeries and hairdressers, the market outside of gossip looks grim. And so it should: where exactly is the appeal, particularly in tech, of reading a magazine that reports on news that is 6-8 weeks old, or sometimes even older than that?… I’m betting that 2008 may well turn out to be the year of the dying print magazine.

Does anyone bother with any fact-checking lately? Anyone? Must we really rely on anecdotal evidence to prove a point that can be backed by real data? Yes, when real data does not agree with your point.

If only there was a way to get the magazine circulation numbers for the last decade or two. Luckily this information is compiled by the Magazine Publishers of America and freely available at the Historical Subscriptions/Single Copy Sales page:

So it appears based on the annual magazine circulation from 1970 to 2006, the last year has been pretty good. 2006 shows the numbers exceeded only in 1999 and 2000.

There has been virtually no growth since 1990, so the magazine publishers are not doing as well as they should be. However, the Internet has exploded in the same time frame. I am not going to pretend that it has absolutely no effect on the print magazine, but to say that the magazine industry is being slaughtered is simply ludicrous at this point.

I am still waiting for the flying cars they’ve been promising for 50 years.