I was upset today when I heard that the American Medical Association (AMA) is shutting down it’s newsmagazine. Crain’s Chicago Business has an article discussing this over at http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20130812/NEWS03/130819977/ama-to-close-news-magazine titled “AMA to close news magazine,” written by Andrew L. Wang on August 12, 2013.
Now not only is the AMA shutting down the print circulation, but it is also shutting down AmedNews.com which is the website for the publication. In recent years, I have enjoyed reading amednews.com and keeping up to date on the many informative articles published. I have always thought the domain name choice was a bit poor, but the current Alexa traffic rankings shows a 167,229 in the World and 46,097 in the United States which is quite good.
The article by Chicago Business discusses that the print circulation has been going strong for 55 years and currently has 230,000 copies circulated. However, the article cites declining ad revenue from drug companies, increased competition from other news sources, and a migration of readers to the internet. The article describes the current path of the print circulation as unsustainable from a business standpoint. The publication will be shutdown on September 9, which is a few weeks away. In addition, the online website will also be shutdown but the content will remain until the end of the calendar year.
The Chicago Business article mentions that most of the revenue from the AMA magazine came from pharmaceutical advertising which has been down in recent years due to patent expirations and few new blockbuster drugs. The article mentions that this shutdown will not affect the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) as their primarily revenue source is institutional subscriptions with pharmaceutical advertising as second.
Now I personally found amednews.com to be some of the highest quality and informative medical and health news on the web. However, I did feel like some of the articles were sometimes a bit biased and merely propaganda. Now I can understand closing the print circulation down but am not sure why they also decided to close down the online site. I would think that scaling back and adopting new strategies could be effective to take back marketshare online and turn a profit.