The year ahead for ... magazines.

Claudine Collins claims established specialist magazines will flourish as a monthly treat.

Is 2009 going to be challenging for magazines? Yes, of course it is, but we can be certain that the strong are going to survive and will thrive (and certain sectors will even find that these difficult times are good for them) while the weak will inevitably fall.

Press seems to get a bad rap these days but let's put things into perspective. In the decade since the dawn of the internet, consumer expenditure on magazines has increased by 48 per cent. Contrary to popular belief, 15- to 24-year-olds don't just spend all day on Facebook. According to the National Readership Survey, 80 per cent of them read consumer mags and this is a higher penetration than in any other age group.

If you are looking to place your advertising in an environment that exudes trust, relevance, creativity and engagement with scale, then magazines are the place to be.

Magazines are a fantastic medium in terms of brand-building, but in 2009 more clients are going to be looking to their marketing budget to shift product, which in turn means that magazines may well suffer as clients turn to newspapers and their huge scale, late copy deadlines and their ability to be much more reactionary, to produce footfall and sell product.

Competition at newsstand is fierce and covermounts are becoming more and more prevalent to entice consumers to buy a magazine. In the UK, there are certain publishers who have looked to the US and realised that they need to increase their subscription drive and be much more aggressive, as they are in the States. The monthly market in particular is leading this charge and it isn't unheard of to offer a gift with subscription which is worth three times the price of the aforementioned subscription.

There won't be many magazine launches in 2009 but there will be more closures. 2008 sadly saw the demise of Eve, New Woman and First. My 'clairvoyant Claudine' prediction is that one of the weeklies will close. In my opinion, in a time of recession, frequency of purchase for the weeklies will go down. Weekly magazines will still be seen as a luxury and a treat but instead of buying two or three weeklies, consumers may well just buy their one favourite. The established weeklies should be fine, as they have a powerful commercial model, but it could be one of the newer guys on the block that goes out of business.