Fortune not dead, but bleeding heavily

“Business magazines enjoyed unusually high advertising page levels during most of the years from the mid-1970s through the early part of this century. But in the last few years, readers have turned more and more to the internet. Business sites like TheStreet.com and MarketWatch are only ten years old and Reuters and CNN Money have built extensive audiences online. Fortune has found itself in a sea of competition that did not exist a decade ago.

“Fortune’s problems will not be solved by cutting its publishing frequency. Print advertising will almost certainly never come back to the levels it reached in the 1990s. Like other print publications, Fortune will have to find significant success online to bring in new revenue and remain relevant to readers who are now accustomed to getting business information moment-by-moment.

“Fortune is not dead, but it is bleeding, and it probably has very few years to regain some measure of health to compete in the increasingly crowded field of business media.”

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