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Magazine Nostalgia, and Factory Media Exits the Print Market 1

As a kid, I remember spending endless hours poring over magazines. Whether it was staring at the photos of the riders, reading (and rereading) the articles, or keeping them around for reference, they were THE source for info.

Fast forward a few years, and I'd worked on a few different magazine titles, including TransWorld MX. During that time, Brad McDonald (the owner of Vital Media Network) was the Group Publisher. He'd started a couple magazines of his own, had sold them to Time Warner, and had stayed on as Publisher for those titles. He then moved up the ladder to oversee the whole batch of titles, including Surf, Snow, Skate, BMX, and TWMX.

During the last company meeting I attended while working there, Brad went through the performance of each individual title, and while the exact numbers for each were varied, they sounded something like this. "On (insert title here), circulation numbers are down, newsstand numbers are down, and subscriptions are down. Ad revenue is down, and it's a tough ad market. Oh, and the web site is up by triple digits."

It was like that for nearly every magazine in the lineup. Things weren't exactly great for the magazine market, but you could almost see the light bulb blink on over his head regarding web publishing. It wasn't much longer afterward that he'd left TransWorld to step out on his own. That was about nine years ago.

Now fast-forward to some news from last week, where Factory Media (Europe's largest action sport publishers) are closing down all their print magazines, and will make the transition to online publishing. Those include a full slate of bike and board sport titles, and MX titles that included Moto (UK), and MotoX (Germany). As an even bigger hit, they're also completely exiting the moto market.

It's definitely a changing climate for print media, and the way content is consumed on computers, phones, tablets...and yes, in magazines.

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