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
