MR

[ezdays]

Every print magazine is getting smaller.  My wife subscribes to Reader's Digest, Time, and National Geographic as well as various nursing magazines.  Since she retired Last December, she has let the nursing mags subscriptions expire.  Of the other magazines that she subscribes to, the only one that has not seemed to get a lot thinner is National Geographic.  It is much less expensive to publish online, but even then advertisers are finding even cheaper platforms to use for marketing.  Print magazines will probably be gone completely in 10 years, and the publishers will either go digital, or go out of business.  The only model railroad mag I read is MRH.  I sent in emails to both the NMRA and Santa Fe Historical & Modeler's Society, asking them to go digital with their magazines.  They have not done it, so I no longer subscribe.  I really don't have time or storage capacity for paper.

I see it heading that way too, but I have a special little reading room where I am able to read a few magazines that I do subscribe to including MR. Balancing a laptop there is difficult and risky, and my eyes don't really appreciate trying to read things on my cell phone. I'm in favor of keeping the paper editions.

Raising advertising rates has a point of diminishing returns as advertisers drop away, another reason why magazines are getting thinner. As for storage, they tend to take up a lot less space now days.