Last week I went on an industry training day at IPC media - we had some very inspirational speakers from the editor of Nuts, to the head of music and men magazines (such like NME). I learnt a lot of stuff throughout the day, in particular - everyone thought print media was far from dead and felt that online materials supported the print as oppose to flushing it out - but is this true? I love having a print in my hand, I am not convinced by technology such as Kindles/iphone book apps etc, but I do use online news websites to get the latest news when I perhaps don't get the chance to pick up a paper. This could be because the technology was not available to us at school, so I got used to reading books/getting newspapers/going to the library. In fact, in my later school years we only managed to get dial-up Internet! It was not until I got to university, where I started to use Internet as a source of my research and online library tools etc... so if children start from a young age where technology is around for them from the beginning - with all the phone apps and computer technology getting vastly cheaper by the minute - won't they just turn to that instead of traditional means? I think print will have a real fight on their hands in the future to keep their audiences keep picking up print.... one spokesperson said print won't vanish until 2050, which maybe a good estimation, but I think the decline will start a lot sooner than that!
At the moment, there are more magazines than ever with 3,130 consumer magazines and 5,142 business magazines. To throw some more stats at you; 112m consumer magazines are read a month, 1.4bn are sold a year (in the UK alone, 43 magazines are sold every second)! In fact, magazines are read by 85% adults - 88% of all women. This suggests that the magazine industry is fiercely competitive, with already lots of competing titles on the shelves - showing a very saturated market with probably little to no room for new entrants. Magazines can be a very good way of specifically targeting your audience - magazines are thought of as a 'friend' of the reader - someone they can trust for their information and companionship. 
Taking Look magazine which competes in one of the most competitive type of mass market magazine; the fashion and celebrity goss mag - we can see who their readers are. Look magazine has a circulation of around 300,000, with 64% of their readers being ABC1 and 26 years of age. The readers have a work hard, play hard attitude and are very sociable people who are very fashion conscious and love to shop! 77% of Look readers trust their beauty advice and recommendations, with 7 out of 10 of them buying something as a result of their editiorial. This shows the type of power a magazine can have over their readers in terms of what they buy and what they do as a result of their specific targeting techniques. Going back to the training day we had, I can soundly say it was one of my best training days yet! At one point we were all spilt into teams and given a brief of a new target audience and we had to come up with a new magazine idea in order to target that gap in the market.
Our team was given teenage boys aged 12-16 - a very tricky demographic as they are boys and a 12 year old boy is very, very different to a 16 year old boy. We decided to go for a mass market idea, where we came up with the name 'Banter'. The launch issue was going to have 'The Inbetweeners' on the front cover, with editorial which covered sections such like; 'The after school club' - focusing on after-school activities; 'Back of the bus' - talking about popular school chitter-chatter and what is going on in their world; 'People you need to know' - people interviewed from the past that are still important (e.g. Paul Gascoigne) to present day people. Some of our promotional techniques were getting a bus called 'Banter Bus' which went round all the schools in the country to try and promote awareness of the new magazine. We also though of creating interactive games within X Box Live etc to help get the viewers engaged with the concept and brand. Baring in mind we only had 40 minutes, we were quite happy with our idea!
We then had to mock sell our advertising space to some of the heads within the company... we sold a total of £23,700 worth of advertising which ended us winning the competition and getting a bottle of wine each - perfect! I have since copy-written our idea and we should hope to launch it in the New Year, any support of this would be greatly appreciated! :-P
Moral of the story; No, print is not dead, for now. They have to adapt to the time of technology but at the moment, print is still number 1 (over the magazines online sources that they offer). They will, however, need to keep adapting to the times and keep up-to date with technological advances - to make sure they do not slip behind their fierce competitors.
Pictures sourced from (in order); ipadarena.com, blogspot.com, magforum.com, fanpop.com
