« ABC News Finds Ft. Hood KillerCaptivating
Ruth Seymour Retiring fromKCRW »
Magazine Death List from AdAge
By encinoman
Ad Age recently updated its magazine death list, and from the point of view of a reader, freelance writer and technologist, it&;s pretty sobering.
As a continuing trend, it&;s not a surprise, but the casualties are adding up, as Gourmet joins Vibe, PC Magazine, (which once sent my old publication, PC LapTop, a threatening letter for putting &;PC&; in a red box on the cover) Portfolio, Blender, Electronic Gaming, even Nickelodeon&;which I subscribed to for my son.
Doesn&;t anyone read anymore? Or at least look at the pretty pictures?
I used to envy people like Rich Stengel, who I knew a little at Princeton, with high-powered publishing careers. This is why I no longer envy Rich.
I had to laugh when I saw Forbes current cover story on AT&T and Verizon quaking in their boots about free phone calls. Meanwhile Forbes can&;t admit how scared it is about free content on the Internet, that means no one has to buy a magazine.
Business magazines in general are dying, not just because of the economy and the &;secular decline&; of publishing and journalism, but because the hero worship of those with feet of clay has gone away. As David Carr puts it, it&;s no longer about &;the shiny, happy people striding boldly across the pages of magazines with names like Fortune, Money, Fast Company and Wired&;nobody is going to read, let alone aspire to, magazines called Middled, Outsourced, Left Behind and Clobbered.&;
For writers (and others) as my friend Cliff Roth says, as long as what you do can&;t be replaced by user-generated content (UGCX) on the Internet, you&;re golden.
Tags: Cliff-Roth, death-of-magazines, Forbes, PC-Magazine, UGX, Vibe
This entry was posted on November 10, 2009 at 7:22 pm and is filed under death-of-magazines.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
LikeBe the first to like this post.
Leave a Reply
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
Name *
Email *
Website
Comment
You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <pre> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Notify me of follow-up comments via email. Notify me of site updates