Douglas McCabe was quoted in an article on the magazine world, where even the most prestigious titles have been challenged by the never-ending penetration of the internet and its abundance of free news and entertainment. With circulation and advertising revenues under pressure on both sides of the Atlantic magazines are facing an increasingly uncertain future. In fact, Magna Global, a media buying agency, expects magazines’ global advertising revenues to fall 13 per cent this year, while Enders Analysis, a media research group, has warned that the consumer magazine market was reaching “an existential threshold”. Douglas said “the industry is shrinking, and the decline seems to be accelerating both in circulation and in advertising — for print and online”. In the longer term, magazine publishers still have to work out what to do about the internet. He added “the way print advertising always worked was advertisers would pay for a magazine’s audience but also for the environment and the context”, but online magazines “have nothing like the same context and resonance” because a reader might stumble across an article on Facebook or Twitter and then immediately go somewhere else. Publishers, he says, have been “chasing a myth about digital advertising. In print they might have 100,000 readers while online they can get 10m. But that’s irrelevant because the 100,000 are the right 100,000 and more valuable”. Online advertising rates continue to lag print rates at their peak so in chasing large online readerships, magazines have “diluted the very essence of their brand . . . they have lost sight of what audience targeting really means”.