Financially speaking, this seems to have been a mixed week for the LA Times. On the one hand, Fishbowl LA reported on Tuesday that the LA Times Magazine, which has been running for almost three years in its current form, will shut down next month due to a tough market. On the other, the LA Times announced this Thursday that it has received $1m of funding from the Ford Foundation to strengthen its reporting of beats including immigration, minority communities and Brazil.

First to the bad news. Fishbowl LA quotes the editor of the LA Times Magazine, Nancie Clare, who attributes the closure to a lack of funds. “I think it’s fair to say there were revenue issues,” says Clare, “it’s still a tough economic climate, especially for print. I don’t think they got rid of us because they don’t like us.” Fishbowl LA writes that the monthly magazine’s seven staff will be laid off, and there’s “no indication” that jobs in other parts of the newsroom will be made available to them. “They’re contracting in the newsroom too. There’s nowhere to absorb us,” says Clare, quoted in the article.

In mid December last year, 10% of adults in the US owned a tablet computer and 10% owned an ebook reader. According to a report published by PEW today, by early January this year both of these figures had jumped to 19%.

The same report estimated that the number of American adults who owned at least one tablet or eReader leapt from 18% in December to 29% in January.

Father Christmas's generosity seems likely to have a big impact on publishers. According to a poll by IDG Connect, 72% of 210 surveyed worldwide professionals say that they bought fewer newspapers after getting an iPad. According to the same research, as Paid Content reports, 70% of participants also said that they bought fewer books.

Although the sample data is small, the trends are obvious: tablet sales are booming, print is losing out.

The numbers are worrying for news organisations that still rely on print as their main source of revenue. The IDG Connect report notes that "for advertising- funded media (newspapers and magazines), the challenges are particularly substantial. Readers who can afford iPads tend to be more demographically desirable than those who cannot."

After an initial wave of excitement about iPad magazines, some publishers have dialed back their enthusiasm. But the readers who have actually downloaded them like them quite a bit.

So says a survey commissioned by a publishers' trade group: It finds that two-thirds of people who read magazines on tablets and e-readers think they'll be spending more time with digital issues over the next year.

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Instead of limiting its next app to one device like the iPad, Fortune magazine has built a new app to run inside web browsers on a variety of platforms. And although the app, called Fortune500+, will only run only on desktop and laptop browsers at first, it will soon run on tablet browsers too.

As a web app, Fortune500+ joins what seems to be a slowly rising tide of apps that run in web browsers instead of the operating systems of particular devices.

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