2009 Hot Markets -- Thawing In a Frigid Economy

Every major magazine publisher is down except for Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions (+12%). More than a hundred full-web printers will disappear in 2009 as periodical publishers dissipate. No salutations are in the mail for greeting cards ($0.9B to print, -10%) as spending (and manners) recede. There’s more red ink: Once-promising other/non-traditional publishing ($0.6B to print, -63%), made up of FSIs, marriage mail and ethnic upstarts, is half of its former self. The imminent closing of the Borders chain speaks (not reads) “volumes” about the new disease of illiteracy in America.