I feel like the author either has an enormous blind spot or is intentionally failing to observe the fact that magazines exist in a completely different landscape today than they did even a decade ago, much less nearly 100 years ago (in the example cited from "It's a Wonderful Life").

The cycle didn't start with publishers shrinking page count and cutting back on long-form content - publishers started shrinking page count and cutting back on content after they started losing money (at least in many cases).

Print publishers were/are competing for attention as much as dollars, and there's so many other things that grab people's attention. There's so many other sources of information. Advertisers have many, many more venues and -- sadly -- they tend to choose the venues that they can track over the ones they can't.

I used to write for several print magazines in the tech space -- and I watched their ad budgets get hollowed out by online options because (generally) buying ad space in a magazine is an act of faith vs. "we ran this online campaign and we see we have this conversion rate and can track that 1,023 people downloaded our ebook and that this marketing 'touched' 75 accounts that closed or renewed deals for more than $1m."

I love print. Love it. But I also have realized that, honestly, I have very little time for reading the print magazines I subscribe to. I subscribe to a few sci-fi print publications and they just gather dust. I have a Mother Jones print/online subscription. Usually the print version goes into recycling without ever looking at it.

What is lacking here is any suggestion of a solution. He gestures at the problem being cutting content, but then closes with a "we need to work on building something else" without actually describing the something else worth a damn.