[Note: This column originally misquoted Game Informer's circulation as slightly more than one million. The correct value is slightly more than two million.]

When I insinuated that print gaming journalism was dying a couple of months ago, not everyone was happy with my conclusions. Apparently, there are some people out there who are still committed to distributing their gaming news and views through a slow, costly, space-limited format printed on dead trees and shipped out through snail mail. Who knew?

In all seriousness, though, the bulk of buzz for journalism in general and gaming journalism in particular has been focused on online for a while now. Subscriptions for print publications are stagnant or falling across the board, and advertisers are increasingly moving their money from print to online. Gamers, for their part, are increasingly going online to get the news and reviews weeks or months before a magazine can compete. Given these problems, can print still be relevant to the gaming conversation?

"The relevance of journalism has very little to do with the delivery method," said John Davison, Senior Vice President and Editorial Director for Ziff Davis' 1UP Network. "Print has both strengths and weaknesses, just as online does, just as TV, or online video, or radio, or podcasts. The key is stuffing the right stuff through the right tube." While the gaming discussion is moving online, Davison said, magazines are still helping drive what the discussion is about. "Communities express themselves online, but often the lead for the 'narrative' comes from elsewhere. Often it comes from print, because editors on a monthly print product have the time and the space to develop and research an idea."

That may be true, but the battle for attention seems to be titling decisively towards online. For evidence, just compare Game Informer's two million or so in monthly circulation to Gamespot's 4.7 million unique monthly visitors. How can print be relevant when it's so much less visible?

"It's senseless to condemn magazines for having smaller audiences than websites," says Dan Morris, publisher of Future's Official Xbox Magazine. "To suggest a metaphor: the web is our daily bread...we all need to eat every day. Luckily for everyone in this metaphor, daily bread is free. But at least once a month, you really do want to splurge and treat yourself to a nice steakhouse dinner. Magazines need to be enticing steakhouses. They need to be Ruth's Chris to the web's McDonald's."
Indeed, being freed from the burden of posting up-to-the-minute news allows a magazine to cater to the higher-end consumer of gaming news. "Instead of trying to compete on timeliness, we went for accuracy, better-informed views, and hopefully more context," said Steve Bauman, who worked at Computer Games Magazine for 12 years before it was shut down earlier this year. "The way it should work is that print is more readable than online. A multi-page web article is a chore to slog through; in print, it's relatively easy."

Bauman also sees print features as an ideal way to highlight games that are important and fresh. "Not everything is news, and not every game deserves coverage," he said. "Because websites cover everything in such detail, nothing really stands out. Nothing lasts. Nothing lingers."

But in practically the same breath, Bauman expressed skepticism that readers were really interested in these magazine-specialty features. "While [readers] may devour some lengthy previews of certain specific games, my own anecdotal impression... is that no one really cares about or reads features," he said. "Oh, they may say they want them, over and over again, but they won't buy a magazine for an amazing feature."

Morris argues that there are obviously some readers who want this content, and they're voting with their wallets. "Clearly print is delivering something of unique value," he said. "The best evidence for this is the fact that millions of people continue to pay money for subscriptions and newsstand copies of games magazines, despite there being so much freely-available content online."

It's true, gaming websites haven't yet managed to kill off the gaming magazine, despite a deep (read: total) pricing premium on online content. But there have been victims -- this year alone has seen the shuttering of Computer Games, the Official PlayStation Magazine and, most recently Tips & Tricks. Is there enough interest to sustain all the magazines currently on the market?
"There are maybe too many magazines trying to be the high-end steakhouse currently," Davison said. "I think that a print reader is a more agnostic customer, with a different set of tolerances and expectations. We will see a shakeout over the next two years."

Part of the problem with the magazine business, Davison says, has nothing to do with the content or the readers and everything to do with the business itself. "The business of print is a real pain in the ass," he said. "The distribution infrastructure is prehistoric, and the processes for reporting sales data are inconsistent, and painfully slow. Printing, and distributing magazines is expensive, and the business model has a number of ridiculous qualities."

And despite the increased focus on features and in-depth content, Davison says magazines are sometimes hurt by their lack of timeliness. "Just looking at the most recent issues of all the print pubs this month, at a really rough guess I'd say you're looking at more than half of the games reviewed being pretty late," he said. "Research shows that you have about four seconds to snag a newsstand customer when he's scanning the shelves. If he thinks 'I know that already' when he sees your cover, you're f***ed."

But, again, this disadvantage can be a blessing in disguise for magazines. "We can all get opinions online the day a game ships, but print needs to be following up later and tackling criticism with the benefit of time, and some more ponderous consideration," Davison said. "If a review is late, we can take advantage of that, and look at how the community received the game as well as the qualitative stuff about the experience. We're in a transitional phase right now, but I've got to think that this is where we're all headed."

And where print is headed may be even more "nichey" and upscale than it is currently. Future's Morris sees the possibility of premium magazines with "circulations below 100,000 and subscription prices north of $40," making an appearance on the market. Davison, for his part, sees print sustaining itself on its reputation. "People see something in print, and believe it a little bit more," he said. "This may be a generational thing that will disappear over time, but it's also connected to the vanity of print. On the games publisher side, there's still a very compelling reason to get a game featured in print, and an especially compelling reason to try and get a cover."

Clarification: Last week, I noted that the cover image of a scantily-clad woman "might turn off the portion of the potential audience that has a Y chromosome." I meant to write about the portion that did NOT have a Y chromosome, although now that I think about it there are at least some women who would probably be interested in that kind of picture.

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Media Coverage is an opinion column. The opinions expressed in this column are solely the opinions of the columnist and are not necessarily the opinions of GameDaily.com.