Postcard from... New York

Some of us still have our print reading rituals.

For me here in Gotham, life would seem incomplete without my weekly fixes of The New Yorker and New York magazine. Well, I am going to have to adjust.

The not entirely unexpected news came this week that New York, a publication that is as zippy in pace as The New Yorker is sometimes sedate, will be shifting to once every two weeks starting next March.

They are trying to make us feel better about this.

Though it will now appear only 29 times a year, the magazine itself will be thicker and shinier.

Even so, New York has been honouring its weekly schedule (barring a few double issues around the holidays) for five decades.

That it is abandoning that cycle leaves me with an end-of-era feeling sort of feeling. New York is hardly unique in the world of print in feeling the cold as more and more readers abandon ink in favour of cyber-scrolling. Its print advertising numbers are in a tail-spin, down 9.2 per cent so far this year alone.

In the media world, no one can survive by standing still any more, and if robbing me of my New York every other week means its survival in the long-run then, of course, I will be grateful.

Its pages over the decades have carried the prose from the likes of Nora Ephron, Tom Wolfe and Gloria Steinem (and even little old me).

No one wants to see it vanish completely. Like Newsweek did.