I have a print subscription to Time Magazine. The terms and conditions say that a one-year subscription buys you 52 issues. They also say that the magazine publishes 17 double issues per year, each of which covers two weeks and counts as two for the purposes of a subscription.
Think about that: This means that 34 out of the 52 weeks of a year are covered by a double issue. In other words, an annual subscription will comprise 34 double issues and only 18 “normal” single issues. And that is only the minimum, as the publishers reserve the right to do additional double issues. The one-week single issue has become the exception rather than the norm. And on top of it all, I don’t really think the double issues are twice the size of a single issue; they’re slightly thicker, but not by a factor of two. They’re more like what an ordinary single issue would have been a couple of years ago.
In a way I shouldn’t be complaining, as this gives me more time to read each issue. But in a way I find it a bit hypocritical to do it that way just to maintain the illusion that the magazine is still a weekly publication. As a matter of fact, it has turned into a fortnightly* one, so just be honest enough to say so if the media world has developed in such a way as to make a weekly print publication unviable.
*): I was tempted to say “biweekly” here, which I understand is a more common word than “fortnightly”, but I am never quite sure if “biweekly” means “twice a week” or “once in two weeks”.
This seems like a case where you have to ignore what the T&C says and just think of it in real-world terms. You’re not paying $40 for 52 issues, you’re paying $40 for 35 issues. The sooner you get on board with that, the less frustrated you’ll be with something you not only have zero control over, but is just going to get worse. If that’s the direction they’re heading in, I think it’s safe to say the move to bi-weekly or monthly is inevitable.
Since you still pay for the print edition, you’re understandably not likely to go this route, but you could cancel and just read it online.
If it’s any consolation, many periodicals are doing the same thing.
One of my industry-specific mags has long been the flagship weekly of the industry. Subscriptions run ~US$150 per year; it’s not casual reading.
About 3-4 years ago they announced the are going to a fortnightly format, plus a website and a host of targeted daily e-newsletters you can opt into at no extra charge.
Their argument was that a weekly was too slow / delayed for business decision makers and too frequent for the logistics (read “costs”) of physical distribution.
So now they publish 26 mags per year, each no larger than the old weeklies. They’re available as dead trees or a PDF of the identical content. The website has about 3x the material versus what gets into the print/pdf. Many of the additional web articles are quickie 3-5 paragraph tidbits while their stock in trade in Ye Olden Tymes was in-depth coverage with good background.
Color me less satisfied than ever with the content. But I do like the pdf over paper (I get both) since I can expand it on the screen to larger print. I find the website more irritating than useful.
Then again, I’m not a harried business decision-maker needing this continuous news feed to have my finger on the moment-to-moment pulse of the industry. [/sarcasm].
Bottom line:
ISTM the only way to look at mag subscriptions (including online ones) nowadays is “total annual quantity+quality of info versus total annual price”. Just like continuous scroll eliminates the idea of “pages”, continuous output delivered via website eliminates the idea of “issues”. Or at the very least renders the idea quaint.
I think you need to check your math. The year might have 34 weeks covered by double issues and 18 weeks covered by single issues. But the resulting annual subscription would consist of 17 double issues and 18 single issues. So the publisher can still argue that single issues are the standard and double issues are the exception.
I have had subscriptions to Analog, Asimov;s, and Ellery Queen’s for years (all of them now published by Dell). Each of them used to be monthly, but over the years each of them have changed their publication schedules, first to ten single and two double issues per year, and now to six double issues per year. A quick random check of my back issues shows that the single issues were about 110 pages each, while the current double issues are about 210 pages each. So a slight decrease in total page count, but to my mind not a significant one.
I forgot what magazine it was but I was subscribed to a typical video game magazine in the mid-00s that had 12 issues a year once a month. What they didn’t tell you was that one of those issues was a “Special Issue” that was a compilation issue released near the end of the year that was all recycled material, and if you bought the normal “12 issue subscription” you actually wouldn’t get the whole year of magazines. You had to get the “24 Issue + 2 Bonus Issue” subscription.