It’s well known nowadays that newspapers are dying because of the Internet. However, it seems that magazines are doing very, very well. My questions:
Are magazines suffering because of the Internet? If so, are they suffering more or less than newspapers?
What are magazines doing that newspapers aren’t? Why do people still buy magazines but not newspapers?
Are magazines doing something newspapers should be doing? Why aren’t they?
Magazines are suffering; it just hasn’t been as publicized as the issues with newspapers.
Newsweek, for one, is teetering on the brink.
At the same time, the suffering of newspapers is a bit overstated. They’re hurt more by the downturn in the economy and loss of ad sales than by the Internet (as are magazines for that matter).
IMO
Newspapers generally offer information. That information can now be found more quickly, and for free on the net.
Magazines offer a brand experience. You can’t find those columnists, illustrators, and photographers for free on the net.
Many magazines are hurting, too, for a lot of the same reasons – people can go to the Internet for similar content, in many cases, and get it in a more timely fashion.
As a result, many magazines are seeing steep declines in their ad pages and revenues.
This site chronicles dead and dying magazines:
That depends entirely on the magazine. There are undoubtedly some mags out there which are doing fine. But, combine the move online, with the recession, and I suspect those mags are the exception to the rule.
That may be true, but the stuff you can find on the net is very poorly written. It makes my local paper which is so bad we call it the SubStandard Times look like grand high litature. I dunno… I LIKE being able to read well written articles at my lesiure, rather then getting the news teh SECOND it happens! What next? An implant in your brain that transmits poorly texted NEWS stories teh second they happen?
There’s a 2-page ad in this month’s Wired for magazines. It’s not very informational, just a bunch of magazine covers (including Wired - probably all Conde Nast publications) with some sort of tagline about magazines.
But a new generation of people don’t care about that.
I don’t care about that. I watch ABC News and see 10 minutes out of a 22 minute show about people in the Gulf crying because the oil spill ruined their lives and they’re unemployed. Yes it’s sad, but you know what, I have many more people in my Chicago neighborhood, that have been out of work for YEARS, and have had a much worse time. So where are their stories?
The point is people don’t want that drivel. I want to hear about the oil spill and what BP and others are doing to stop it.
If six people are killed in a car wreck, that is all I need to know. Maybe if the traffic is backed up as well. People don’t want that crying and “boo-hoo poor me” type of reporting. Well a few might but not many
By the time you read a newspaper, all the news has been reported by TV and is on the Internet. If I want the up close personal crying jags, I can read a person’s blog.
It’s just that newspapers aren’t willing to adjust. Look at radio, it once featured, mysteries, soap operas, sitcoms, variety. Remember Vaudeville? Of course not 'cause radio killed it. Remember a sitcom on radio? Of course not, because TV killed it.
But radio adjusted and took to playing music and talk/news/sports.
Newspapers and Magazines have to realize their day, like Vaudeville and Radio is over. If you adjust like radio, you survive, if you don’t, like Vaudeville, you become a fond memory
Neither newspapers nor magazines have anything to do with content. They exist to convey advertising. They have padding around the advertising because most people don’t like to admit to themselves that they spend money for advertising, but a look inside the vast majority of magazines makes that nonsense. Vogue used to hit 800 pages for its big fall [del]advertising[/del] fashion issue. It’s still at 500 pages, 90% of which are ads.
Most newspapers and a good number of magazines are dying because advertisers think that they can get better targeted ads read elsewhere. (Better targeted is not the same as having more people read them. It was almost impossible to know exactly who looked at the 500 pages of ads in Vogue and even more impossible to know how that translated into sales.)
Newspapers made most of their ad money from the classifieds, which is why they are disappearing faster. Of the display ads, big ticket items like department stores, furniture stores, and cars probably were the most important categories. The first is dying and the others are industries that are hurting. What can replace them in ad buys? Nothing obvious, which is why newspapers are thin enough to see through.
General interest magazines are the ones being hurt worst by the reduction in ads. Specialty magazines are for the most part improving their ad pages greatly over last year’s dismal totals. Many will survive for quite a while. The Internet isn’t replacing the ad sales because targeted specialty ads are hard to replicate on a web page. If and when they are magazines will disappear.
And content will still not have anything to do with it. As a writer, that’s a horrible and hard truth, but it’s the truth I have to face.
Yes!
Radio, IMHO, only exists now because it transitioned into being an accessory in cars. When does anyone ever listen to the radio anymore except driving around? I know I don’t.
I would argue that radio found a niche market that nobody else could duplicate. I bought an AM radio last year because I needed a way to listen to NFL games in places without power or Internet. People often bring radios to sporting events because they can’t tell what’s going on on the field.
I am forced to buy the Friday newspaper if I want a list of community events in my area. Nobody does it, and the online version sucks.
I would agree with you about general interest magazines, but I’m going to subscribe to ESPN the Magazine because the content is unbelievably excellent.
You couldn’t be more wrong. Just in my aisle at work, there are 12 people. Nine of them are listening to radios through headphones as they work, every single day, at least three different stations. Talk radio is a huge market, and much of their content comes from newspapers and magazines. There are hundreds of radios just on my floor, and this situation exists in offices all over the country. Don’t declare a medium dead just because it’s dead to you.
The content is excellent because they have the ad money to run lots of articles. (And a deep-pocket parent.) Magazines are circular. The better the content the more readers the more ad buys the more ad pages the need for more content to put around the ad pages. But it runs downhill the same way: the fewer the ad pages the smaller the space for content which results is worse articles and fewer readers and less ads. The vast majority of magazines are in the second half of that cycle.
If Newsweek can be close to closing, then people are clearly comfortable getting their analysis from somewhere else. I used to subscribe, but that was a many years ago. So much is online that that kind of thing doesn’t seem appealing enough to bother going out of my way for. I do subscribe to magazines that aren’t just about “news”, though.
New publications like The Week seem to be doing well. Then there are focussed magazines like Private Eye and The Spectator.
I seem to see less and less stores selling magazines and those that do, well the selection seems to be of the less informative. PEOPLE and US are at the checkout stands of the supermarket, TIME and NEWSWEEK are harder to find.
My friends in the magazine publishing industry are getting laid off left and right. They are taking it at least as hard as the newspapers, in my anecdotal experience.
For a long time, newspapers and magazines could at least count on one advantage over the internet: portability. You couldn’t read an on-line column on the train or in the can. But now, with tablets and smart-phones, that last refuge of print is about to fall. I’d be looking to get out if I were in the print bizz.
I dunno if it’s just about quantity. The analysis is better, the writers have better sources, and I always learn something (or many somethings.) To me, ESPN the magazine’s writers seem to be better connected to athletes and people in the industry. They get real information that you just couldn’t find anywhere else.
Can I call “it’s the content, stupid” on magazines and newspapers?
Well, they still have a battery advantage. 