As I caught up on my reading over the last few weeks, burning through issues of the Economist, the New Yorker, Wired, Fortune, Forbes, Rolling Stone, Portfolio, BusinessWeek etc. and so on, I discovered the single biggest threat to the future of business journalism -- and it's not blogs, it's not wireless internet on airplanes, it's not the collapse of the subprime market, it's not Rupert Murdoch -- it is the potential collapse of the luxury watch market.
Think I'm joking? Find a magazine and thumb through -- I bet you will find eight to 10 close to full page ads for luxury watches in the first quarter of the book -- the ads that sell for the most money. My casual view is that about 15 percent of the full paying ads come from watch companies.
Why is that a threat? Here is what Portfolio had to say about the watch business, and here is an even more in-depth story by the Journal a few months back. Match this with the for sure demographic trend that fewer people are buying/wearing watches (why wear a watch when you have an ipod/cell phone), and things look grim.
On the plus side, there is nothing that delivers brand like glossy print, even if it is for watches. ;)