The publishing arm of Rogers Communications Inc. is beating a retreat from print with a radical overhaul that will mean far more of its magazine stories appear only online.

Starting in January, four titles will stop publishing print editions. Canadian Business, Flare, MoneySense and Sportsnet magazine will continue as "content brands," publishing daily to websites and dedicated apps, but no longer craft separate issues.

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Four other magazines will still appear in print, as well as through websites, apps and standalone digital editions, but three of them will slash their print schedules. Maclean's, the country's only weekly news magazine, will shift to monthly, while maintaining a weekly digital edition. Chatelaine and Today's Parent will halve their publishing schedule to six issues a year, in print and online. Hello! Canada magazine will still be printed weekly.

For months, Rogers has also been quietly shopping its 34 trade publications, such as Advisor's Edge and Marketing, as well as its French-language magazines – the French edition of Châtelaine, L'actualité, and Lou Lou. They're now openly for sale, and Rogers expects to seal deals before the end of the year.

That Canada's largest English-language magazine publisher is taking such drastic steps signals that a long-expected tipping point has arrived for the industry. Declining print revenue is now commonplace among magazines and newspapers, mostly because advertisers are moving in droves to buy cheaper digital ads that more accurately measure the audience they reach. Even so, Rogers stands out: Its print revenue plunged more than 30 per cent, year over year.

Where Rogers has been pouring millions of dollars into holding the line with print subscribers, it is now willing to walk away from significant revenue to shed the accompanying costs of printing and distributing magazines, and to spend more of its energy trying to tap an emerging audience of digital natives.

The short-term pain could be considerable. Some 55 per cent of Canadian magazine readers choose only print editions, compared with 8 per cent who read solely digitally, according to audience measurement firm Vividata. But as subscribers change their habits, they are driving an inevitable shift.

Canadian Business, for example, circulated 63,198 paid print copies and only 1,605 digital replica editions as of mid-2013, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. Three years later, it circulated only 28,692 paid print copies while digital replica editions increased to 25,918. An average issue had a total online readership of about 537,000 people for the year ended March 31, according to figures from Vividata.

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"This isn't something that we're trying to drive. It's the market driving us," Rick Brace, president of Rogers Media, said in an interview. "We can't remain status quo."

The road map to reinvent Rogers Publishing for a mostly digital audience has been in the works since early 2016. Mr. Brace sought counsel, in particular, from Time Inc. executive chairman Joe Ripp, whose publishing business is attempting its own digital leap.

Around the world, magazines have proven a punishing business of la