Friday, April 3, 2009

Magazine news: Help! I'm Shrinking!

Like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz, the magazine industry is getting smaller and smaller.

Okay, that's an exaggeration, but it is shrinking, and I really wanted to get the Wicked Witch thing in there. (Go ahead, click on the link above; it's worth it.)

Anyway, the New York Post's Keith J. Kelly says the magazine industry is becoming like Germany or other advanced Euro economies, whose populations are declining because births and immigration are outnumbered by deaths. (Okay, he didn't use the Europe-as-magazine-industry analogy, I did. But I'm trying to offer something for the people who didn't climb aboard for the Wicked Witch thing.)

The point is, as Kelly writes, "For the first time in memory, the magazine death rate has surpassed the magazine birth rate." He's referring to the vicious slaughterhouse that was the publishing economy of the first quarter of this year, in which the number of magazines that died just slightly outnumbered the new-birth rate.

It's sort of like ...

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