Nailed It! Forbes Leaves Fortune and Wall Street (Journal) Behind

Townhall ^ | 03/29/2015 | Mark Skousen

[SeekAndFind]

What amazed me about the latest “Billionaire” issue of Forbes magazine was not the stories about the billionaires, but about Forbes itself.

See the amazing graph below. For years we’ve been told the print media is dead, that digital media (like Forbes.com, wsj.com, etc.) was the wave of the future.

As the graph shows, Forbes magazine is not only surviving, but thriving, and now has 7 million readers.



Yet Forbes is an outlier. The rest of the print media is going down, slowly but surely. In the past two years, circulation for Fortune, the Economist and even the mighty Wall Street Journal is in decline.

What is Forbes doing right? Perhaps it is the popularity of its Forbes 400 Richest People in America list, the billionaires list, the top 100 celebrity list, etc., which makes Forbes more like People magazine in enticing the attention of its readers

[Uncle Miltie]

The WSJ is losing readership because its Editorial Page has become some sort of weird corporatist shill for the GOPe, illegal immigrants, and crony capitalists.

They used to be ideologically conservative.

No more.

I don’t read their editorials any more. They make me throw up.

[captain_dave]

The WSJ is also losing because their bread and butter was the daily stock quotes and other market price listings. The internet wiped that out ten years ago. So now, they’re a daily newspaper without content living on air miles subscriptions.

[SamAdams76]

WSJ is still the best all-around paper around, though I agree the Opinion section is not what it used to be.

I read WSJ daily on my iPad on the way to work in the morning. They did an excellent job adapting to the tablet format.

[Jean2]

Me too! I don’t read them either anymore.

[ozzymandus]

Forbes is in every doctor’s office. That explains a lot of sales.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: Forbes is in every doctor’s office. That explains a lot of sales.

So, why do the doctor’s offices not have more FORTUNE?

[apocalypto]

While it is still a good paper, I noticed the shift of WSJ’s opinion section to promoting illegal aliens, who certainly do not constitute a pool of potential subscribers. And more likely will make them lose readers. Maybe WSJ just has an editor in the pocket of foreign interest groups.