At the magazine itself, the finger of blame has been pointed squarely at advertising.
"No one could have predicted the downturn in the advertising market would be this brutal," Norman Pearlstine, editor-in-chief of media AOL Time Warner Inc's magazine publishing arm, Time Inc, said in a statement.
As if to emphasize the point, Pearlstine's message was carried on an Asiaweek Web page upon which the only banner advertisement was a plaintive offer of three months' free subscription to the magazine.
While many point to the recession and even the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the US as key factors in hastening the demise of traditional media, others blame the burgeoning Chinese market.
Rowan Simons, head of Beijing-based media monitors RSA, said China's current resilience in the face of the economic downturn is enabling its heavily restricted media to flourish, drawing greater interest in Chinese-language publications and broadcasts.
"The situation in both Hong Kong and China has been pretty bad, with the traditional English-language media losing its dominance, but there are positive points and analysts in advertising are becoming very upbeat about the situation here."
According to Simons, China's state-run CCTV television network has reported a 22 percent leap in profits -- a situation likely to further improve as regulations are adjusted, permitting firms to increase the amount of their annual turnover spent on advertising from 2 percent to 8 percent.
And with more advertising dollars fuelling the communist giant's peculiar blend of officially sanctioned news and showbiz gossip, market forces look likely to be far more successful at stopping the presses than the numerous regimes throughout Asia which have tried and failed.
RSS