Back in January of 2016 I made this observation at the end of a post about the merging of the Vancouver Sun and Province news rooms:
The rise of the Internet has not only hit newspapers hard, but other print media, too. A few days ago I walked by Mayfair News on Broadway for the first time in quite awhile. This was once one of my favorite places to buy magazines as they had a huge selection. Today they have what appears to be half of one aisle devoted to magazines, about 1/6th of what they used to have, with the rest of the store converted over to a dollar store model, shelves stuffed with cheap plasticware and other small goods. On the one hand, it makes me sad to see the change, but on the other I admire their resilience and ability to adapt to a changing market.
I was recently in the area of Broadway and Granville and noticed Mayfair News seemed…not busy. I went over and sure enough, it was shuttered, its space sitting empty for perhaps months after I made the comment above. The book store/art shop beside it had also closed. The demise of Mayfair News meant the single best magazine store in Vancouver was gone.
Related, I noticed the current issue of Rolling Stone on Save On Foods’ tiny magazine shelf a few days ago while not shopping for eggnog. Despite having Trump on the cover, I picked it up and was shocked at how thin it was. It was less a magazine than a robust leaflet.
It was kind of depressing.
The Rolling Stone website, on the other hand, is packed full of content and covers events that have happened just today.
It’s hard to imagine why anyone would choose a print magazine now, unless they needed something to read right now and had no access to the internet or had an aversion to reading magazine-style articles on a smartphone/tablet/laptop.
Nothing lasts forever, but if you had told me 20 years ago that the magazine market would be seriously ailing shortly into the 21st century, I would have laughed and gone back to trying to make DOS games work in Windows 95.