Monday 11 February 2013

Analysis of a magazine article

The following link is an article from The Economist about the changes that are being made to the magazine industry over time:
http://www.economist.com/node/21556635

About The Economist

  1. the magazine is 167 years old
  2. In 2011, weekly circulation of the magazine rose by 11% (up to 200,000 people)
  3. Global circulation of 1.5 million per year, with an increase of 3.7% in 2012
  4. There are still more print copies being sold (1.487 million copies) than digital copies (100,000 copies)
-The reason for this maintenance of sales of physical copies is due to the target audience. This is because the target audience for The Economist is businessmen, so they would read this magazine on the tube/train on the way into work. Therefore, as there is no wifi on the underground, businessmen still require a physical copy to read.

Line of argument within article

  1. Magazines are still surviving and will be for the foreseeable future.
  2. the reason for this survival is an increase in the reliance on advertising for funding
  3. niche magazines seem to be doing better than large magazines because there is more loyalty of readers
  4. people still like having a physical magazine and iPad sales have increased more than web because it "feels more like a magazine". 

Key quotation from article
"Making money in news means publishing either the cheap kind that attracts a very large audience, & making money from ads, or the expensive kind that is critical to a small audience, & making money from subscriptions."
-I think that this quotation is mainly an exact and likely way of summing up the current state of the magazine industry. However, I have asked myself the question- "I won't read magazines such as Vogue due to the lack of actual content (i.e. there are too many ads, not enough editing) so why are they the type of magazine that are said to be surviving?" Therefore, this question makes me think that this quotation isn't as exact as I originally thought.

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