Magazine newsstand sales continue to plunge

It took a recession, but Americans have finally figured it out: Buying magazines at the newsstand is a bad deal. If you have to have them, you can get them more cheaply via subscriptions -- or even for free.

Single-copy sales of magazines were down 12.4 percent in the first half of 2009, according to a Monday report by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the industry body most publishers use to verify their sales claims. That's a far steeper drop than was recorded in the same period a year earlier, when newsstand sales fell 6.3 percent. The fall also marks an acceleration from the second half of 2008, when the rate of decline was 11.1 percent.