[HN Gopher] The Death of the Magazine
___________________________________________________________________
The Death of the Magazine
Author : pseudolus
Score : 64 points
Date : 2024-09-15 14:44 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.honest-broker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.honest-broker.com)
| xrd wrote:
| It'll be interesting to see how substack tries to hold these
| authors and avoids fading into the background. Their monetization
| options are the best in the industry right now, but I wonder how
| authors feel about the network effect they receive. I'm surprised
| Chris Hughes didn't find a way to pivot New Republic to a
| substack competitor somehow.
| ghaff wrote:
| There's just so much volume out there I subscribe to some
| newsletters and podcasts but don't pay for any of them. There
| just isn't a lot that is individually must have.
| xrd wrote:
| I subscribe to a ton as well. The production quality isn't
| anything like NYT or Rolling Stone used to be. That's
| probably coming. But it'll be interesting to find a sweet
| spot in between tiktok videos and well written and
| beautifully presented information. That's a hard place to be
| consistently.
| ghaff wrote:
| NYT (and The Economist) are IMO pretty good but they're
| expensive--especially relative to free. If I were in school
| or just out of it, I probably wouldn't pay for them like I
| did for Time and Newsweek when that was more or less your
| source of news other than subscribing to the big city
| newspaper or watching the evening news.
|
| There are good magazines out there but overall there's been
| a decline in quality and, at least in the
| political/cultural arena, they're mostly some rich person's
| pet project--though that was historically also the case to
| some degree.
| Apreche wrote:
| A few years back I thought to myself hey, I used to love
| magazines when I was younger. I've basically completely stopped
| reading them or thinking about them. There are some with digital
| editions that are very inexpensive to subscribe to. Maybe they've
| got some high quality content really targeted to specific
| interests that I'm not finding on the web.
|
| So I went out to take a look at some magazines both digital and
| print. It was immediately apparent why they are dying, and it's
| not just because people read everything on the web for free these
| days.
|
| Every magazine I checked out was MOSTLY ads. Even during the
| Super Bowl, the commercials will be less than 1/3 of the total
| broadcast time. In the magazines the ads took up well over half
| of the available pages. Who in their right mind would pay money
| for that?
|
| Magazines back in the day where nothing less than lavish.
| Elaborate foldouts of maps and photos in NatGeo. In depth
| strategy guides and customized demo discs on a monthly basis in
| video game magazines. All that is gone. The modern day magazine
| is a stack of ads with a few blog posts scattered throughout.
|
| I'm going to guess it's some sort of death spiral. They lose
| money to the web, so they had less to invest in content and had
| to take more ads. That resulted in further loss of readership,
| and so on.
|
| I do believe that a highly targeted and extremely high quality
| magazine can succeed in the present day. Of course the definition
| of success won't mean selling millions of copies on newsstands
| everywhere. It will mean having a loyal subscriber base that
| provides a largely flat, but sustainable, flow of revenue.
| ghaff wrote:
| Magazines, especially trade press, always had a huge volume of
| ads. We used to joke when I was a full-time industry analyst
| that the computer trade press mostly formulaically (including
| getting quotes from some analyst or other) was about filling
| the "ad hole."
|
| I do pay for a couple of expensive magazine/newspaper
| subscriptions but mostly I just have so many other options that
| I'm mostly not even going to skim a magazine cover to cover.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| > Every magazine I checked out was MOSTLY ads
|
| I think you might be looking at this situation through rose-
| colored glasses. When I was a kid in the 2000s, I loved reading
| PopSci and I distinctly remember at least 30-40% of it being
| ads throughout most of the magazine. And then, the last 20+
| pages were _all_ ads.
|
| Looking even further back, I've had to do some research on 90s
| vintage computers lately, and every edition of PCMag I've dug
| through has been _laden_ with ads. It 's even more packed with
| ads than I remember PopSci being 10-15 years later.
|
| Maybe it wasn't _mostly_ ads, but it wasn 't far off.
|
| What _has_ changed is the annoyances ads cause. Online ads load
| slowly, screw with the layout while you 're reading, and are
| overall much more disruptive to the reading experience than a
| print ad could ever be.
| Kye wrote:
| Yep. And the ads were often _good_. I read Popular Science
| and Popular Mechanics growing up. The ads weren 't just some
| bland spec sheet, they went into the technology or
| engineering behind whatever it was advertising. The ads could
| be as good as the articles. Simpler ads would at least try to
| be clever.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I do recall a handful of the full-page PopSci "back of the
| mag" ads being articles in their own right, and sometimes
| they were as well-written as the actual articles written by
| PopSci. Although those were always the exception, rather
| than the norm, I feel like that kind of thing is just gone.
|
| That said, I wonder if it's caused by limits in the ad
| delivery methods we use today, rather than some industry
| wide lack of interest in making quality ads. I can't
| conceive of how such an ad would be delivered through
| Google, for example. Meta? Maybe.
| ghaff wrote:
| There are a lot of people here who react viscerally to any
| advertising in any form. I'd point that Computer Shopper
| was a huge magazine with some pro-forma often low-rent
| writing that existed as basically a vehicle to deliver ads
| to people who couldn't really get that information any
| other way. PC Mag/Byte/etc. was higher quality editorial
| but still had a _lot_ of advertising.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Indeed. As I recall Computer Shopper's articles were the
| legally minimum percentage of the magazine to make it
| qualify as a periodical rather than a catalog (US postage
| rates between the two differed, with periodicals being
| cheaper). We subscribed for the ads, but some of the
| articles (like Don Lancaster teaching writing Postscript
| manually to create figures) were interesting.
| ghaff wrote:
| You take what you can as a freelancer and I'm sure I know
| a number of folks who wrote for a the magazine at some
| point or other and did a fine job. But you certainly
| didn't subscribe or buy issues for the articles.
| musicale wrote:
| Magazine ads don't bother me, especially if they're on-
| topic (e.g. PC ads in a PC magazine.) I find ads in vintage
| PC magazines to be particularly interesting and fun.
|
| But web ads are typically obnoxious, intrusive, and off-
| topic. Delivery formats such as pop-up windows and auto-
| playing video are so disruptive that there are browser
| settings to block them - settings which web advertisers
| work tirelessly to subvert. The commercial web has become
| unusable without ad blockers.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > I think you might be looking at this situation through
| rose-colored glasses. When I was a kid in the 2000s, I loved
| reading PopSci and I distinctly remember at least 30-40% of
| it being ads throughout most of the magazine. And then, the
| last 20+ pages were all ads.
|
| I was a nerdy kid in the early 80s, and when I wasn't hanging
| out in computer shops and electronics junk shops, I was often
| in WH Smith [1] browsing the sci/tech magazines. My
| recollection is that they were pretty good in terms of
| articles, and even many of the adverts were interesting. I
| suspect this was because (before the net) it was hard to find
| out about stuff that wasn't mainstream: so ads for telescopes
| or chem kits or single-board computers seemed kind of exotic.
| Electronics mags with pages of ads listing components were
| _information_. And you could actually buy the RS Catalogue
| there - which, while not a magazine, had so much interesting
| stuff in it.
|
| And a bit later, Computer Shopper with endless pages of
| densely-packed ads listing ram chips and cpus and cmos logic
| chips, and the ink that came off on your fingers...
|
| So the ads were often an important learning resource back
| then. At least for kids with limited resources like I was.
|
| [1] National chain of newsagents here in the UK.
| buggeryorkshire wrote:
| Ha, I used to work at WH Smith HQ in Swindon. The warehouse
| people used to nick the cover disks from the magazines and
| sell them. And each loo on each floor had a fresh new porn
| mag in the cistern!
|
| Don't even get me on Tales of Farthing Wood which caused a
| national shitstorm...
| jll29 wrote:
| Yes, paper catalogs had high information and education
| content e.g. the Whole Earth Catalog in the US or the IKEA
| catalog in Europe are cult items.
|
| There are also different national prior probabilities for
| reading magazines as a habit in different cultures: for
| example, both the UK and Germany had a strong computer
| magazine culture, whereas in the US there was less of it
| (Byte and Dr Dobb's Journal being notable exceptions). The
| German "c't - magazin fur computer technik" is still
| Europe's largest computer magazine
| (https://www.heise.de/ct). Europe also has comic magazines
| by Disney (featuring Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse. & co.),
| which never existed in the US, unlike the animation films.
| timthorn wrote:
| > Every magazine I checked out was MOSTLY ads
|
| Ads were always a big part of it, and indeed pre-internet were
| a reason to buy a hobby magazine. They carried value in a way
| they perhaps don't any longer - not because the print ads are
| different but because access to supplier websites + search
| engines is more useful.
| eszed wrote:
| > a highly targeted and extremely high quality magazine can
| succeed in the present day. Of course the definition of success
| won't mean selling millions of copies on newsstands everywhere.
| It will mean having a loyal subscriber base that provides a
| largely flat, but sustainable, flow of revenue.
|
| You've just described _The New Yorker_. (Full disclosure: I 'm
| a loyal subscriber, even though I no longer manage to read
| every word of every issue.)
| wrp wrote:
| I subscribed to magazines in the 1970s-80s and really felt I
| was getting my money's worth. Sure, there was lots of ads, but
| there was also lots of great stuff. I remember magazines
| getting thinner, glossier, and more ad-laden in the 1990s so
| that I just gave up on them. This happened mostly before the
| Internet.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Every magazine I checked out was MOSTLY ads. Even during the
| Super Bowl, the commercials will be less than 1/3 of the total
| broadcast time. In the magazines the ads took up well over half
| of the available pages. Who in their right mind would pay money
| for that?
|
| The purpose of a lot of the trade press and hobby press is to
| be an interesting carrier for ads. Literally a list of names
| and addresses where you can buy things to improve your business
| or improve the passing of your free time, a bunch of articles
| talking about new ways to maximize your usage of the things in
| the ads, and a bunch of articles joking about how goofy the job
| or hobby and the people involved in it are.
|
| Also important to mention that these are the magazines that are
| doing the best. They're probably the only thing that people
| will pay for. And they have to pay less for them, because of
| all the ads and how well they deliver.
|
| _I want to see ads for oscilloscopes in my electronics
| magazine._ I 'm also not so dumb that I think the ones
| advertised will always reflect the best of the market, and to
| think that the magazines don't have relationships with their
| advertisers that affect them editorially. Because on the other
| hand I know that a hobby or trade magazine knows that they're
| risking their own reputation if they recommend stuff that
| doesn't work or allow that stuff to advertise. Not like online,
| where people have no idea what they're being paid to propagate;
| it's being pulled from some algorithmic ad market _that no one
| claims responsibility for._
| timthorn wrote:
| > Is there a single web magazine making big bucks?
|
| The Spectator has been growing both in print and online. The
| editor wrote about this, in the wake of the title's sale, this
| week:
|
| https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-spectators-new-owner...
|
| > In this trade, there is always pressure to go for the digital
| 'quick wins' (clickbait articles, advertorials, etc.) but we
| rejected this as a false economy - so commercial that it's
| uncommercial. It would take us downmarket, deform our character
| and, ergo, reduce the company's value. So we went the other way,
| using our success to double down on the magazine's finest
| traditions in the belief that quality of writing matters above
| all. We did a lot that went against the conventional digital
| wisdom. We put together a different business model and a unique
| way of working, based on close collaboration between all
| departments and journalists equally comfortable with print,
| digital and broadcast.
|
| > When other publications were shedding sub-editors, we poached
| the best ones we could find. When newspapers shrank their books
| sections, we proudly kept Sam Leith's at ten-plus pages and gave
| him a podcast. We created a research team who apply perhaps the
| most robust pre-publication scrutiny on Fleet Street (mindful
| that it matters more than ever that readers can trust the facts
| they read). When other weeklies started cutting costs by not
| printing over Easter and the summer, we put more effort than ever
| into the issues released in those holiday periods.
|
| > The digital temptations that can lure publications to their
| grave ('The world has changed! Look at the clicks! Drop the opera
| review!') are dangerous as they come dripping in what looks like
| supportive data. You can end up not just being edited by
| algorithm but stripping a publication of nuance, variety and
| soul. Our belief was that if we innovated, and used the proceeds
| to double or treble down on what makes The Spectator different,
| we would maximise the value of the company as well as serve our
| readers. Much of what we did could be seen as uneconomic on an
| individual basis - but put it all together and you get a five
| times valuation uplift.
| agumonkey wrote:
| This is an important piece. In the last decade a lot of what was
| considered valuable has been thrown out. I saw them on streets on
| monthly furniture disposal. Encyclopedias, books, tapes,
| magazines, devices of all kinds. None of it seemed to matter
| anymore. Yet I don't feel there's something equivalent that
| replaced it. Wikipedia maybe but .. not really.
|
| And the trend of "replace in-depth well paid work by cheap short
| term attention catching hooks" keeps spreading.
|
| It's very very strange to witness that kind of social waves.
| VancouverMan wrote:
| I don't think it's that surprising that such items are being
| discarded today.
|
| They might have had value at some point in the past, but they
| probably haven't retained that value well at all.
|
| For example, enough of the information in those encyclopedia
| sets, non-fiction books, and magazines is probably now out-of-
| date, invalid, wrong, or incomplete.
|
| Most of the paperback books and magazines I've seen discarded
| in boxes along sidewalks are merely previous generations'
| equivalents of "cheap short term attention catching hooks" from
| when such things inherently required more physical overhead.
|
| A good chunk of those items probably weren't particularly
| wanted to begin with, or are infeasible to keep now. No
| replacements are needed or wanted.
|
| Some of the books, tapes, devices, and other items were
| probably given as birthday, Christmas, graduation, etc., gifts.
| They might not have even been that useful to the recipients to
| begin with. Physical gift-giving like that is less-common these
| days in my experience, with gift cards and even cash replacing
| physical items. A lot of items given as gifts in the past are
| simply no longer offered for sale today, or are so cheap that
| giving them can even be seen as insulting by some people.
|
| Much of the new housing stock in places like Canada, Europe,
| and even the US to a lesser extent are small apartments. A lot
| of people just don't have space for items in general,
| especially when downsizing or moving into a retirement or care
| facility.
|
| Enough of the items I see discarded are also damaged, broken,
| or otherwise unusable, too.
| agumonkey wrote:
| For informational content, maybe, but on a larger level it
| seems that nothing has value anymore. Makes me curious about
| what disappeared in people's mind. I don't think spotify
| replaces a set of LPs even though in terms of sound waves you
| can have the same amount of bits.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| One would hope that all of these hardcopy texts at least get
| digitized to be preserved on Internet Archive (and preferably
| as many more backups as possible).
| AlbertCory wrote:
| mostly they are. newspapers.com has 1000's of papers (in
| image form, not text, unfortunately) going back to the
| 1800's.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Too bad it requires a subscription.
|
| I have scanned old science books that I treasured as a kid
| and uploaded them to archive.org.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| True. Maybe someday, they'll decide "This isn't
| profitable enough!" and sell to Internet Archive.
| ghaff wrote:
| Honestly, a ton of stuff is digitally preserved. Far more
| than happened historically. Sure a lot of things will still
| end up in the bit bucket but we're still never going to
| preserve _everything_ and it 's probably just as well that we
| don't.
| jll29 wrote:
| My print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is one of the
| best gifts I ever purchased for myself upon graduating from
| high school.
|
| The social pressure that makes youngsters watch TikTok cat
| videos instead, mixed with instant gratification effects from
| online media consumption (in contrast with the active reading
| of a 150 page in-depth encyclopedia article on a topic) leads
| to generations that are unwilling - and for lack of exercise
| then also unable - to put much effort into anything, and to
| value knowledge/expertise.
| musicale wrote:
| > Encyclopedias, books, tapes, magazines, devices of all kinds.
| None of it seemed to matter anymore. Yet I don't feel there's
| something equivalent that replaced it. Wikipedia maybe but ..
| not really.
|
| They were replaced with (sometimes inferior, but often cheaper
| and more convenient) substitutes delivered via the web or
| internet, often to smartphones, whose usage patterns tend
| toward short-form, bite-sized "content" (as per TFA). Playback
| devices (CD players, DVD players, radios, hi-fi audio
| systems...) have been replaced by mobile devices and/or smart
| TVs/streaming devices.
|
| The brick and mortar stores that used to sell physical media
| (bookstores, music stores, magazine stands, video stores,
| software stores, etc.) are mostly gone as well.
|
| Libraries are still around, but digital collections are
| hamstrung by copyright law.
| GlibMonkeyDeath wrote:
| This is a great example of creative destruction. Back before the
| internet took over distribution, it took a small army of
| typesetters, graphic designers, printers, delivery services, etc.
| to publish and distribute magazines. There was simply no way an
| individual, or even a small group, could scale production and
| distribution. The logical extension of the old model would be for
| Google or Meta (who now own distribution) to hire staff writers
| in order to improve ad revenue. So far, they don't think they
| need it - turns out they can sell ads just fine with the low-cost
| garbage spewed by your crazy uncle. We will see if the direct-pay
| model of Substack has staying power before enshittification takes
| over. I haven't found anything on Substack compelling enough
| justify spending sometimes ~$10/month on a single writer.
| jll29 wrote:
| That's because the asymmetry of the one-way publication funnel
| where we can only consume has been replaced by a more symmetric
| ecosystem where users contribute content. Because they donate
| their content to platforms, they make the platform owners rich
| - they get the attention, so they also get the ad revenue, but
| they don't need to pay for quality content because users are
| just fine with (other) users' contributed content.
|
| If there had been zero-install tools for self-publishing early
| on instead of the centralized Facebooks and Mediums, perhaps
| things could have gone differently.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > I haven't found anything on Substack compelling enough
| justify spending sometimes ~$10/month on a single writer.
|
| Exactly. I might go for some package of 100 or so writers, with
| only their best stuff that week/month. But the reality is, the
| writers still wouldn't be making all that much money; not as
| much as Ted is.
|
| It would be similar to being in the chorus for a Broadway show
| with Patti Lupone: she's making a whole bunch; you're at least
| getting paid.
| jzb wrote:
| I feel like the author either has an enormous blind spot or is
| intentionally failing to observe the fact that magazines exist in
| a completely different landscape today than they did even a
| decade ago, much less nearly 100 years ago (in the example cited
| from "It's a Wonderful Life").
|
| The cycle didn't start with publishers shrinking page count and
| cutting back on long-form content - publishers started shrinking
| page count and cutting back on content _after_ they started
| losing money (at least in many cases).
|
| Print publishers were/are competing for attention as much as
| dollars, and there's so many other things that grab people's
| attention. There's so many other sources of information.
| Advertisers have many, many more venues and -- sadly -- they tend
| to choose the venues that they can track over the ones they
| can't.
|
| I used to write for several print magazines in the tech space --
| and I watched their ad budgets get hollowed out by online options
| because (generally) buying ad space in a magazine is an act of
| faith vs. "we ran this online campaign and we see we have this
| conversion rate and can track that 1,023 people downloaded our
| ebook and that this marketing 'touched' 75 accounts that closed
| or renewed deals for more than $1m."
|
| I love print. Love it. But I also have realized that, honestly, I
| have very little time for reading the print magazines I subscribe
| to. I subscribe to a few sci-fi print publications and they just
| gather dust. I have a Mother Jones print/online subscription.
| Usually the print version goes into recycling without ever
| looking at it.
|
| What is lacking here is any suggestion of a solution. He gestures
| at the problem being cutting content, but then closes with a "we
| need to work on building something else" without actually
| describing the something else worth a damn.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >publishers started shrinking page count and cutting back on
| content after they started losing money (at least in many
| cases)
|
| I thought this was quite well understood which is why the
| article says something like "you cannot fix sales problems by
| decreasing the quality of your product" (too lazy to go find
| actual quote)
| ghaff wrote:
| I think that's fair. To the degree that someone, somehow, is
| willing and able to foot the bills, lots of people are
| willing and able to work hard to put out a quality product.
| Yes, some have an agenda to push that you may or may not
| agree with, but a lot of the issue is money at the end of the
| day.
| jzb wrote:
| That's overly simplistic, in this case. You're not going to
| sell more buggies by making the quality of your buggy worse,
| true. But you're _also_ not going to sell more buggies,
| period, if everybody is preferring cars.
|
| Likewise - publishers know that cuts aren't going to make
| their magazines more compelling - but it's 1) cut somewhere
| or 2) go out of business faster. You _might_ manage to
| survive by maintaining quality and even adding things _if_
| the audience is large enough and you can pull from competing
| publications. (Although, in some cases, the cuts are things
| readers don 't see -- e.g., allowing advertisers to place
| contributed content, or ensuring you don't publish anything
| that upsets the remaining advertisers...)
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >That's overly simplistic, in this case.
|
| I'm not making an argument, just paraphrasing from the
| article.
|
| on edit: >or ensuring you don't publish anything that
| upsets the remaining advertisers
|
| I think most definitions of journalistic quality would
| argue this is a decrease in quality.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > I have very little time for reading the print magazines
|
| You had me up to there. "I don't have time" just means "I don't
| prefer to." You have time to do whatever you really want to do.
| bluGill wrote:
| Advertisers were good at figurinr out print ads. While online
| gives immeadiat conversion results they dont give the much more
| important gave a feeling oi discomfort resulting in a buy in a
| year
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| I have a bit of a theory on this.
|
| I used to edit a newsstand leisure magazine here in the UK. It
| was founded in the 1970s. We sold about 18,000 copies a month in
| our peak, making us the market leader.
|
| I'm not the editor any more (I went off to do something else) but
| the magazine is still going. It won't surprise you to learn that
| it sells much less than it used to.
|
| But that's not because the magazine has got worse. It hasn't. The
| writing is still as good as ever, the news reporting still pretty
| sharp. It's not because the market has changed. It's not because
| you can get the same information online for free. Much to my
| amazement, in 20+ years, no one has really catered for this
| particular market online - there's a lot of chuntering on forums
| and Facebook groups, but no one really doing compelling content.
| We were turning over PS1m+ a year. I don't think anyone is even
| turning over PS50k writing about this subject online.
|
| So what changed? I think it's ultimately about attention. When I
| edited the magazine (c. 2010), people still chose to spend part
| of their leisure time reading about one of their hobbies. We were
| a fun way to do that. Today, people don't need to spend PS5 to
| happily while away a few hours: they can just scroll through
| their phones. The magazine habit has gone.
|
| Crucially, it's not that the information has gone online. It
| really hasn't. I read all the various forums and groups, and
| still when the magazine plops onto my doormat every month, I read
| it and find a load of stuff I didn't know. It's just that the
| time that was once filled with reading magazines is now filled
| with something else.
| jll29 wrote:
| Good analysis.
|
| In marketing, a "competitor" is not just somebody else doing a
| similar thing; one form of competition is something entirely
| different that you might spend your money or time instead (a
| "substitute").
|
| Many business plans ignore substitutes and only focus on
| similar competitive offerings.
|
| Smartphones are substitutes for a lot of things: playing
| football with a friend; human ad-hoc conversation at a bus
| stop; playing Candy Crush instead of reading newspapers on your
| morning commute; entertaining yourself and your date at a
| romantic dinner.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah. Speaking for myself, it's not that there are all these
| online novels I can read for free. (OK, there are in the
| public domain but that's not my point.) It's that there is a
| lot of other reading and entertainment/education options out
| there.
| dageshi wrote:
| Oh there's plenty of new online novels as well...
|
| https://www.royalroad.com/fictions/best-rated
| ghaff wrote:
| Some of which are free/donation, some of which are not.
| I'd be pretty surprised if people in general were reading
| as many novels as they did at one point. (I may be wrong
| of course.)
| narrator wrote:
| There is way too much free entertainment these days. That's the
| most underrated difference in the world between now and 40
| years ago. The change is even more dramatic for people who live
| in developing countries where TVs were rare 40 years ago.
|
| I also think this is why traditional opera and the symphony are
| failing. People have too much entertainment.
| musicale wrote:
| Opera and classical music are simply no longer the popular
| form of musical theater or music.
|
| Stage musicals (Hamilton) and film musicals (anything from
| Disney) are still very popular.
|
| Popular music concerts (Taylor Swift) are obviously
| incredibly popular, and they're usually not symphony
| concerts.
|
| While popular tastes have largely diverged from classical art
| music, a good deal of "popular" (and often excellent, in my
| opinion) symphonic music is still being produced and listened
| to as film music and game music.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I recently ran across Treasure Hunting Magazine.
| https://www.treasurehunting.co.uk/ It bills itself as
| "Britain's Best Selling Metal Detecting Magazine." While
| technically this would be true if it was the only one it does
| at least give the impression that there are others.
|
| I find it humorous to think about the second best selling metal
| detecting magazine's staff cursing that Treasure Hunting beat
| them to another big metal detector scoop.
| theendisney4 wrote:
| I see a covid chart in the newspaper one time that had colored
| lines for the infections with different virus versions and
| vacinations with different "vacines" and thought woah! There is
| more information and clarity here than in hundreds of internet
| posts and articles combined.
| ccppurcell wrote:
| I disagree with the notion that publishers "don't know it". Here
| I think malice really is a better explanation than incompetence.
| Or not malice but willful indifference. Investors don't want to
| be in the business of educating and informing people. They want
| to be in the business of renting out things that people need, or
| want so much that it's next door to need. This can't be done with
| long form journalism. The opportunity in investing in magazines
| is pure short term gain. Squeeze money out of the brand
| reputation and recognition, then move on.
| janandonly wrote:
| This hit home hard:
|
| > _Imagine if you owned the Lakers or the Yankees, and put all
| the emphasis on the team brand--but kept reducing the pay to
| actual players. You might continue to sell tickets over the short
| and even medium term. But to survive over the long haul, you
| eventually need to support the team brand with commensurate
| talent at each position--and that talent needs to be nurtured and
| paid more than peanuts._
|
| There was a time people paid for a cable connection and channels.
| You might pay extra for more channels, but that was about it.
| Then we all watched online via Netflix. Then HBo, Hulu,
| Skyshowtime, Disneyplus and AppleTV+ all came along and now we
| just shuffle through these subscriptions to see the stuff we want
| to see, but not whole year round. Most of the people I know will
| have a subscription for one or two month and then shuffle to the
| next.
|
| If magazines where that easy, you just subscribe to a separate
| month or you just buy loose articles from past issues, they could
| still be making money.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| The irony here is that Ted Gioia is at the very top of the power
| law distribution of writers' incomes: he makes a ton of money on
| Substack and is very vocal about it. He deserves it all, too,
| just to be clear.
|
| However, most writers are way out on the long tail of the curve,
| making next to nothing. I subscribe free to 100's of them, but
| "upgrade to Paid"??? Nope, nope.
|
| > Nowadays authors at that level would be on Substack, or some
| other similar platform. That's because their name would be their
| personal brand, and they wouldn't need a periodical--and
| certainly not a magazine in terminal decline.
|
| They ARE on Substack, and a precious few are like you, Ted:
| making the big bucks.
|
| I'd be willing to pay for an aggregate of 100 or so of them,
| where their output this week is omitted if they've got nothing.
| The catch is, I wouldn't pay huge money for that. This isn't
| going to bring back the days of Readers Digest and Esquire.
| There's just too much on the Web that's free to occupy my
| attention.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| What about relatively new publications with longform writing such
| as _Aeon_ , _Atlas Obscura_ , _Nautilus_ , or _Quanta Magazine_?
| jll29 wrote:
| Quanta magazine is fabulous but it's sponsored by a
| philanthropic foundation, so perhaps not a good example when
| discussing the economics of print magazines.
|
| It's currently online only, but I would happily buy a print
| subscription (I assume I'd be a minority, though).
| __0x01 wrote:
| honest-broker is the only Substack publication I have found to
| consistently hold my attention. Reading Gioia's writing feels
| like eating nutritious food.
|
| I am most likely ignorant, however. Are there any other Substack
| publications of the same quality?
| Tarsul wrote:
| Others already chipped in the obvious arguments (onlinereading,
| other hobbies). I want to talk about a successful magazine
| instead: Retro Gamer UK. It's still alive and kicking and well
| worth a read. It started as an "also-ran" between all other
| gaming magazines from the publisher but now it's the best running
| and one of the only ones left. Why is that? Of course because
| retro gamers grew up reading those magazines and love to do it
| again. But also because the articles are really great. Why?
| Because they interview the developers and research the topics
| (games) quite well. And the developers also have no worries to
| talk about stuff that didn't work out (they don't really have to
| sell the game or their extinct studio anymore). And of course
| with these "scopes" (and the retro gaming niche) they make a type
| of content that is quite difficult to find online. Much easier to
| just read the magazine (of course an online/PDF version exists as
| well...).
|
| Another advantage is that the content of an issue of the magazine
| doesn't really get old.
| Finnucane wrote:
| I like that he raises a comparison with the big Hollywood media
| companies, yet fails to remember the recent strikes that reminded
| us that the studios don't want to pay their writers either.
| Animats wrote:
| Just look at all the new magazines at a bookstore. There are at
| least 10 Taylor Swift magazines. Trump has at least two magazines
| about him. There's plenty of growth in the gun and prepper
| department. Food magazines are available in quantity.
|
| Magazines are still around, but they're addressed to niches.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Are magazines still wildly popular in Japan? I have not been
| there in years now but I sense they still are. Maybe someone can
| set me straight.
| GrigoriyMikh wrote:
| https://shuppankagaku.com/statistics/mook/
|
| According to this, magazine sales shrunk a lot from it's peak
| in 1997.
| A_Duck wrote:
| There is a resurgence of small-run print zines which lean into
| the strengths of print as consumed alongside digital content
|
| MagCulture [1] has 600 zines in stock and Printed Matter [2] has
| nearly 8,000
|
| At present I'm enjoying n+1, The Baffler, Granta and The Fence
|
| Counter-intuitively, a zine can be an easier way for writers and
| creators to get niche/unusual content seen than battling the
| algorithm online
|
| [1] https://magculture.com 270 St John Street, London
|
| [2] https://www.printedmatter.org 231 11th Avenue, Manhattan
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-09-15 23:01 UTC)