The closure of some of the country's prominent magazine groups should be a wake up call for government to intervene.

These comments were made by Communications Workers Union, the country's biggest labour union by membership numbers, after the board of Caxton and CTP Publishers and Printers on Tuesday announced plans to close its magazines division.

The company, which publishes titles such as Bona, Farmer's Weekly, Food & Home Entertaining, Garden and Home, Living and Loving, said it was willing to consider offers from people with financial resources to buy its ailing magazine business division.

The news from Caxton comes on the heels of a similar announcement fromAssociated Media Publishers. AMP, which owned Cosmopolitan, among other magazine titles, announced last week that it was closing doors after 38 years of operation due to cancellations of advertising in the period leading up and over the lockdown period.

CWU secretary general Aubrey Tshabalala told SowetanLIVE there were many ways in which the state could assist the print media industry, which has been beset by declining advertising revenue and low circulation numbers due to the coronavirus lockdown.

Tshabalala said, among many options, the state could increase its print media advertising spend, bail out financially distressed firms as well as help to re-skill workers for the digital news environment."When these companies fail they are forced to retrench workers, which becomes a death sentence for employees because it might take them up to 10 years to find another job," he said.

Caxton's board, in a statement, bemoaned the continuous decline in advertising revenue as well as falling circulation figures were adversely impacting the division.

“The steady and  continuous reduction in the overall amount of adspend being allocated by advertisers to the magazine media sector as well as the decline in circulation revenues has, over a number of years, significantly reduced the viability of the magazine business.

“Further, the negative impact of the recent Covid-19 lockdown on general economic activity and, as a consequence, on the ability of the business to trade normally in what were already difficult trading conditions for magazine publishers has made this decision unavoidable.”

The writing has for some time be​en on the wall for the group's magazine division, which saw the company posting on its 2019 financial report that its newspaper printing facility in Gauteng and the bulk of the packaging operations had performed well, while the book and magazine printing operations were facing challenges and posted a decline in earnings.

According to the latest ABC figures published in February, the total circulation of magazines declined by 14.5% in the fourth quarter of 2019 compared to the same period in 2018.

The decline in print sales has also affected newspapers.

The country's biggest selling daily newspaper Daily Sun announced on Monday that it would stop publishing issues in the Western Cape, Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Northern Cape and Eastern Cape and be available online only for those provinces.