As it turns out, print isn’t dead. According to the magazine industry the medium is doing better than ever! Announced on March 1st of 2010 in a press release, the leaders of the magazine industry have decided to ban together to fight for their legitimacy as an opportunity for advertisers to earn a few bucks.

It is no secret that magazines are flooded with advertisements and inserts, making some of them almost unreadable. The arguments in support of this fact, at least in the past, have been made under the idea that ad revenue supported a large portion of the costs going into producing the other content. This doesn’t even take into consideration the notion that many magazines, to simply survive, have introduced the formula of “mixed content” to promote a product inside of an article. There is a checkered past here.

For the magazine industry to be using its own medium to attempt to justify its relevancy is bold. Yet, at least in my case, it wasn’t and wouldn’t have been through a magazine that I would even have found out about this new “relevancy campaign.” It was through the use of Twitter that I was made aware of it. I understand that using my own experience as testimony for the dismissal of their PR campaign seems trivial, but I am one of an entire generation that will be using digital tools to access their content.

It seems funny to me that magazines would be decrying the “pundits” as saying the sky is falling on print when it in fact is. I cannot stress this enough, print is truly declining as a medium to effectively target an audience. Printing a magazine aint what it used to be.

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