Folio has the latest magazine circ figures: And Time has taken a beating in paid circulation, down 17.57%. While it’s still the No. 1 newsweekly, Newsweek isn’t that far behind. Its numbers are also down, but by a mere .30%, and if Time continues to sink, the gap in total circ numbers is bound to narrow.

The obituary for print journalism is written (or redacted) daily. Yet AARP’s publications have seen steady increases, due no doubt to a steadily aging population. So, do periodicals geared to an older demographic—more comfortable with paper than with an iPhone, perhaps—have an edge in terms of continued growth? If so, why the near collapse of Reader’s Digest, which has seen its circulation cut almost in half since its high-tide days of the 1970s, when it had 18 million in paid circ? Certainly RD is your father’s (and your father’s father’s and mother’s mother’s) favorite coffee-table magazine.

But RD has been trying to “remake” its image over the past few years—and I wouldn’t be surprised if it has succeeded only in alienating its most loyal subscribers. The muckety-mucks over at Pleasantville (actually, Chappaqua—Pleasantville’s just a mailing address) probably saw only that its reader base was dying off—rather than that it was being replaced with yet another generation for whom RD might have proved appealing if the magazine weren’t so busy trying to situate itself as Oprah lite. But why settle for a knock-off when the real thing is sitting on the same shelf? (I used to make a similar argument when I worked at RD several years ago, as the humor editor. They wanted more “contemporary” humor—Letterman–style copy—but didn’t want to pay for it. They expected late-night snark from the Midwestern housewives who regularly submitted the material from which the humor columns mostly are culled. I, foolishly, assumed that readers of Reader’s Digest expected the humor associated with Reader’s Digest—not The Daily Show.)

I imagine institutional mags such as National Geographic enjoy a built-in hedge against digital-journal inflation: When libraries across the country have been subscribing to your book since Millard Fillmore was president, it’s a lot easier to keep your numbers up. The problem is trying to get into those institutions now. (If you wonder how some tiny journals you may be familiar with are able to keep their pages open, check to see how long they’ve been around. Guaranteed they’re sustained primarily by decades-old relationships with libraries, colleges, and seminaries that wouldn’t think of cutting them off when their stacks can boast a jaundice-yellow copy of Volume 1, Issue 1, with cover lines like “British Burn Capitol: Is It Worth Rebuilding?”)

The celebrity rags are up and down, depending. But when you can get the latest Brangelina sighting sent directly to your iPod, how much longer will those super-disposable glossies last?

First Things’ numbers, by the way, are just below the fold . . .

Update: Traffic to magazine websites is up 8.1%. A coincidence? The question is whether traffic is up on those magazines whose paid circ is down—and if so, is that Web audience younger than the readers they’re losing on the newsstands . . .

Friday, February 29
Church of Our Saviour
59 Park Avenue
New York City
6:00-8:00 PM

There will be a lecture by Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse on her book Smart Sex. The lecture serves as a sort of prelude to the Archdiocese’s annual Respect Life Conference, which will be held the next day. For more information, click here. For more information on Dr. Roback Morse, visit her website.

Many years ago, well before Roe v. Wade, this young man was asked to serve on the board of Americans United for Life, a Chicago-based organization, at the urging of such honored seniors as Henry Hyde and Paul Ramsey. AUL continues to be on the leading edge of campaigns for the culture of life, providing research and strategy planning for incremental pro-life measures in dozens of states, and laying the groundwork, legal and political, for the reversal of Roe v. Wade.

AUL is in the process of looking for a new president. If you or someone you know might be the person they’re looking for, write AUL Search, P.O. Box 436987, Chicago, IL 60643, addressed to the attention of Iris Gordon. If you have questions about AUL, you might contact Prof. Richard Stith at Valparaiso Law School.

And they’re not embryonic.

“Scientists say they have replaced a 65-year-old patient’s upper jaw with a bone transplant cultivated from stem cells isolated from his own fatty tissue and grown inside his abdomen.” Article here.

Ruth Gledhill on what distinguishes the current Archbishop of Canterbury from his predecessor. In a phrase, “intellectual arrogance.” Or, perhaps as the current ABC said himself when addressing the Synod, he is simply prone to a “misleading choice of words” “clumsily deployed.”

Well, if the archbishop is in fact both an “iconoclast” and a “mystic,” as Kendall Harmon describes him, then no doubt his choice of words, however deployed, make a good deal of sense to himself, if to few others.

I look forward to his book on Dostoyevsky. We’ve had from him books on Teresa of Avila and Arius. I would much prefer a book on Thomas Cranmer or Richard Hooker. But out of sight, out of mind, I guess . . .

“Dutch Catholics have re-branded the Lent fast as the ‘Christian Ramadan’ in an attempt to appeal to young people who are more likely to know about Islam than Christianity.” The story is here.

Stephen Webb amusingly asks whether or not the High Church of Obama is a cult. At least Paul Krugman thinks so. Yesterday he said that the Obama campaign “seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.”

Mind you, almost all presidential campaigns are, to some degree, cults of personality. Especially among staff, but also among (at least) their primary-election supporters. But having spent an awful lot of time following Obama around, I’d submit that his campaign is a bit more so than the average. Nothing wrong with that; it’s just an observation, not a value judgment.

However I do wonder, from an electoral standpoint, what that means for Obama’s future. Is this sort of cult of personality sustainable? Certainly, if the media have anything to say about it, it will be. Bill Clinton was right that Obama’s press is at least fawning and perhaps bordering on the porno-hagiographic. And from time to time, giant figures really are able to dominate politics by the sheer force of their personalities. Perhaps Obama is one of those rising giants.

However it seems equally possible that the High Church of Obama is a bubble, a craze, or a fad that at some point will become outmoded. All of which is to say, that as he is pushed further along, I wonder how well his personality will wear.