Andrew Douglas B2B journalist, turned PR man, specializing in new media.

It’s not print vs. web. It’s good content vs. bad.

I tend to emphasize the medium over the message -- saying that the web is killing print. Maybe I'm wrong.

I spoke at the Canadian chapter of the Agricultural Communicators of Tomorrow group, CanACT, at the University of Guelph last night. My topic was Twitter but another theme came to the fore -- that with the web tearing down all the barriers to entry in publishing, good content trumps everything.

I was thinking of my favourite "journalists" of course. People like Gary Vaynerchuk, with his 852,000 followers on Twitter, and Shaun Haney, the farmer/retailer in Alberta who is building community on the web outside of a traditional publishing model of subscriptions and ad sales.

We talked about how that is exciting for students wanting to build a personal brand and how passion on the web can go a long way. But I also shared how scary it is for traditional journalists. Suddenly, everyone can be a competitor.

But when I slipped into bed last night, my bed-time reading was an old-fashioned magazine, Maclean's. And it was great.

I just bought a subscription to the national newsweekly a couple of weeks ago. It's one of the few magazines that is actually growing in circulation. Others, like Time and Newsweek, are crumbling. I love Maclean's for it's snappy writing, great story choices and smart columnists.

This from Masthead online:

"If for nothing else, you gotta love Ken Whyte’s Maclean’s for its covers. Sometimes they’re sensationalistic, sometimes they’re surprising, sometimes they’re just plain silly. And usually—and most importantly—they sell really well. In 2004, the year before Whyte came on, the newsweekly was averaging weekly single copy sales of 8,874 for the July-December period; last year, the average was 13,5531, a figure that’s even more astounding when you consider that the cover price has steadily increased, from an average of $4.99 in 2006 to $6.33 last year."

And then there's The Economist. One of my bosses, Len Kahn, drops a copy of the venerable UK-based pub on my desk every week. I must admit I find it hard to tackle, no matter how much I want to impress my boss. But I make sure that it sits on the top of my inbox so everyone knows how smart I could be, if I only tried harder.

The Economist, with it's unfriendly layout and distinctive writing style, has been charting big circulation gains over the past few years, according to Vanity Fair:

The Economist's circulation has doubled in the past seven years and its ad pages have steadily increased, even as it remains unusually expensive to both readers and advertisers.

They're two newsweekly magazines that are bucking the trend and proving that good content can beat back the dropping circulation plaguing almost every other publication in North America. And they're proof that maybe it's not print that's dying but rather good content that's winning.