It was recently reported that Sporting News is joining the growing list of publications that will cease to exist in print. It’s officially going digital in 2013. Irony alert: I read it with a pang of guilt on Adweek.com. This really isn’t breaking or even surprising news. The writing has been on the wall, er, screen for a long time now. More and more print publications will go 100% digital as ad pages continue their precipitous descent below the Mendoza Line. I recently returned from Curaçao and saw an increasing number of passengers reading with a tablet device as I clung tightly to my paperback. The tragedy in all of this, in addition to the loss of jobs and ad spaces to fill with our creativity, is the loss of ability for publications to promote their popularity through the publications themselves. I shared this lament in a previous post about my beef with e-readers: we’ll come to a point where we’ll have no clue what people are reading, only that they are reading it on a machine. We’ll lose that quick glance around the plane, train or café to see what book, magazine or daily interests people. Sure, publishing will go on and evolve. It’s much cheaper to program pages than it is to print them, much like this blog. But we’ll sure miss the cover story. – Glen