The magazine ABCs show some alarming declines ? but also some startling rises. If print is dying, why are the likes of the Economist and Slimming World doing so well?
What has the Economist got in common with Good Housekeeping, Hello! and Slimming World? They're all selling comfortably more than they were a year ago. The Economist sold 210,204 in the UK alone (on the latest ABC six-monthly figures) and 1,473,939 worldwide ? up 11% and 3.9% respectively.
Perhaps it's natural to concentrate on the audits of doom when life grows crunchy: there's FHM down 26% and OK! losing 17.4% in 12 months. And there are, indeed, more downs than ups. But there's also a lot of life in the sector as a whole. And when you add in, as you should, the very professional magazines supermarkets give away free ? half a million extra at Asda, 140,000 extra at Morrisons ? the old business of words on paper doesn't look quite so outmoded any longer.
Come to think of it, the January ABCs for quality national dailies respond well to the same treatment. In January 2010, across the British Isles and Ireland, the qualities sold 2,180,480 on an average day. January 2011 made that 2,184,766: a rise, not a fall.
Of course that's only one way of punching the figures around. You can find other, suicide-inducing, ways whenever you like. But hang on to those Economist results, and to a 4% jump in sales of The Week as well. If this is death, there seems a lot of life in it.
? Take a new magazine called Delayed Gratification from an outfit called the Slow Journalism Company and you might expect honed design, relaxed writing and an almanac approach to the passing years (edition one, October-December 2010, is out in February 2011). Congratulations to Marcus Webb and his team for killing deadlines stone dead. There's only one snag with abolishing deadlines: I was going to mention it last week, but something came up.
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