It's not all bad news for magazines

Newspaper circulations might be slipping but, as Stephen Glover, points out in The Independent, print journalism is not dead yet in the UK. He writes

Whereas in the newspaper world there is structural decline, with nearly the whole market heading gently southwards, in the magazine world there are titles performing well and titles performing badly. Given all that has been said and written about the decline of the printed word, who can resist a flutter of pleasure that some grown-up magazines should be flourishing?

What are these "grown-up magazines"? Well, they include the satirical/investigative fortnightly Private Eye and its monthly cousin The Oldie, news digest The Week and The Economist. Here in Australia, magazine sales are generally on the slide - with a 3.5 per cent average fall across weekly titles. (Mumbrella has the figures for the three months to the end of December 2009 here.) Without naming names, I take "a flutter of pleasure" that the losers include some titles that routinely make up and publish sensational celebrity stories. If they wonder why things are so dire, their editors should grab a dictionary and look up the meaning of "credibility".