The death of print is much predicted and if you look at the numbers – such as the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) figures for the last quarter of 2011 that were released in Cape Town this week – it is a sorry picture of consistent decline for the newspapers.
The fourth-quarter figures that incorporate the all-important Christmas period – which was better than expected last year – showed that, although magazines sales are generally holding up well, newspapers continue to take a beating in almost every aspect and in most categories compared with the fourth quarter of 2010.