EXTRA! EXTRA! Print Not Dead!

At least not Down Under. Today’s post comes to us from John Seng, Founder and CEO of GLOBALHealthPR US Partner and Chair, Spectrum.

Traveling down the south coast of Australia following our GLOBALHealthPR annual meeting several weeks ago, I stopped in at a NewsPower store in Bateman’s Bay to look for a souvenir or two for family members, plus to satisfy a little curiosity about what Aussies read today.

On entering, what immediately struck me were wall after wall of consumer magazines, arranged like so many modern art mosaics.

With the manager’s permission, below is a series of photos I took with my Samsung Galaxy 4. One photo per magazine rack, with no duplicates; although the consumer health magazine section (middle left) wasn’t as large as I would have imagined.

News that print is dead or dying has not reached New South Wales in Australia quite yet. The store’s proprietor informed me that his chain stocks no less than 95 percent of the more than 2,000 magazine titles available from the distributor.

Fellow PR agency principal John P. David reported in a December 2013 Huffington Post blog titled “Is Print Really Dead,” that “Australian publisher Morry Schwartz recently announced the creation of a new, weekly newspaper to be called The Saturday Paper.

In a recent column announcing the publication, the editor Erik Jensen was practically indignant:

There is no question in my mind that newsprint remains the best place to read long-form journalism… Nothing has effectively replaced the beauty of holding a paper at the weekend, or of reading a long story in one. When it comes to forming habits, nothing competes with the predictability of a print cycle and the physical act of turning pages. Even in their weakened state, stories in newspapers have greater impact than stories that appear only online.”

Looks like The Saturday Paper will join the ranks of the very much alive walls of other print in Australia’s leading news agencies.

Though daily newspapers continue their decline, in some places in the world, hybrid newspaper-style magazines may be making an interesting debut. It appears many magazines are here to stay in one form or another.