You stopped buying paper mags when You realized that You could find the same information on the web faster for free. Then came blogs - opinionated, unedited, occasionally lacking in journlistic integrity. You couldn't get enough of them. You even wrote them Yourself. Then You became Time Magazine's Person of the Year. Now thanks to You, Time Warner is revamping its website, publishing a thinner, more expensive paper magazine, hiring opinionmakers like Jeffrey Sachs, and laying off 280 editorial employees with more cuts to come. It is all. Your. fault.
Today's New York Times covers the recent changes in Time Magazine in its article Slimmer Time in the Age of the Internet. The best line comes at the end:
"For a tough-minded, well-written niche magazine, $4.95 is a good deal, but if the magazine becomes a brochure mostly advertising the Time.com Web site, it may seem a bit pricey."
Couldn't this be said about all print magazines? You may wonder what this has to do with science, but the article and this quote in particular makes our post about Seed magazine's coverage of its ScienceBlogs bloggers seem all the more prescient regarding the struggle between paper mags and their online offspring. In contrast, the newest indie science magazine Inkling skipped paper altogether to publish its first edition online just last month. In a very Web 2.0 move, Inkling started out as a blog before becoming a full-fledged webzine.
As the dynamic, networked web steals eyeballs away from paper printed with yesterday's news, how much longer can print publications survive against the rise of web publishing? Sure, you might say this question has been asked before. Watching 280 magazine employees lose their shirts while asking this is like watching ice shelves crumble into the sea while debating global warming. People have seen it coming but only recently have workers in print publications been getting laid off in large numbers. Perhaps the more forward-looking question to ask is, how many of those 280 ex-Time editorial employees will have blogs? [Image credit: gawker.com]
Comments (2)
I'm beginning to rather like this blog... who are you, and why are you so intimately connected to all of my current and former employers?
And by the way, I Inkling would no doubt be paper if there were enough money for it--building traffic online is a tough game. (Whereas the newstand is, if nothing else, a constrained set of choices--bad for the consumer, good for the publisher.)
Posted by Christopher | January 9, 2007 12:56 AM
Posted on January 9, 2007 00:56
Just a guess ... we're both from NYC?
Posted by Jackie | January 9, 2007 2:24 AM
Posted on January 9, 2007 02:24