The main clue to the problem that Arthur draws
our attention to is revealed in the last sentence
of the last paragraph of the NYT article:
<<<<
Ultimately, it doesnt matter what you put on the
cover of your magazine if no one will look at
you. A few weeks ago, I was in a busy doctors
office with a dozen others, absently paging
through the magazines on the table. The table in
front of us was stacked with the pride of
American publishing, all manner of topics and
fancy covers yelling for attention. Ever the
intrepid media reporter, I looked up from
scanning Bon Appétit to see what other people
were interested in. A mother and a daughter were
locked in conversation, but everyone else was busy reading - their phones.
>>>>
The migration of newspapers and news magazines
onto the Internet is a trend that owners, editors
and journalists have been fully aware of for a
long time. But they're not taking much notice of
an even more important trend, or in denial about
the full significance of it. This is obscured in
the writer's (David Carr) third sentence above.
The typical table in a doctor's or dentist's
waiting room would not contain magazines covering
"all manner of topics", only a very small
selection of them. There has been such an
explosion in glossy hobby and specialist
magazines in the last 30 years that the table
would need to be 20 or 30 times the size. In
nearby Bath, the central newsagent's shop
contains a magazine rack several ranks deep that
goes on forever -- and then doubles back in another parallel row!
The loss of sales of newspapers and news
magazines is perilous in the extreme. As viable
propositions in their present form, they cannot
have more than a year or two ahead of them
now. I can understand why owners, editors and
journalists are so apprehensive. The solution is
obvious, even though it will inevitably wrench
the whole news industry into pieces during the
process of adaptation. This is that the newspaper
or news magazine must divide into several more
specialized issues -- at least a dozen I would
suggest. And all on the Internet. Thus The Times
could become Times Financial, Times Society,
Times Obituaries, Times Politics, Times
International, Times Sports, Times Cars, Times
Home Interiors, Times Fashions, Times Health, Times Holidays, and so on.
Some would be daily, others weekly, monthly or
even quarterly. Being specialized, they could
then carry short adverts of precise products that
are directly relevant to the content -- of the
sort that Google has so far largely monopolized.
Website newspapers and magazines would then have
a chance of paying for themselves and not having
to consider the silly subscription experiments which some are now trying.
The Financial Times (which itself ought to be
published in at least three different issues) is
one of the silliest experiments at the present
time. Pearsons still hasn't grasped that the
essential nature of the Internet is totally
different from print. Until three years ago when
I moved house, I used to have the FT delivered to
my home (along with another quality newspaper
bought mainly for its crossword) but I only read
a quarter of it, if that. I now go to its website
and read the headlines of what it considers to be
the dozen or so of the more important stories of
the day. It helps me to get my bearings. I don't
subscribe because I will come across several more
free accounts on the Internet. What Pearsons,
Murdoch and other media owners don't realize is
that putting a price on their stories doesn't
necessarily make them accurate. They could get
away with implying this when they had the
monopoly of printing or broadcasting. They've got
to realize that the nature of the Internet means
that unless their products are free then they'll
have even less readership. If they want to sell
extended or more detailed versions of the news
items then they can be advertised separately
along with other products. In the case of the FT
what makes the present policy even more absurd is
that the website's most interesting features --
the interview videos -- are still free! I think
Pearsons must realize intuitively that if they
charged fees for these then they'd be cutting
their last links with people like me. I wouldn't
bother to go to its website at all.
Keith
At 02:42 14/08/2012, Arthur wrote:
Making a weekly newsmagazine has always been a tough racket. It takes a big
staff working on punishing deadlines to aggregate the flurry of news, put
some learned topspin on it and package it for readers. But that job now
belongs to the Web and takes place in real time, not a week later.
.....
Like newspapers, magazines have been in a steady slide, but now, like
newspapers, they seem to have reached the edge of the cliff. Last week, the
Audit Bureau of Circulationsreported that newsstand circulation in the first
half of the year was down almost 10 percent. When 10 percent of your retail
buyers depart over the course of a year, something fundamental is at work.
......
Historically, certain categories of magazine will encounter turbulence, but
this time all categories were punished in the pileup. People was down 18.6
percent, and The New Yorker had a similar drop, declining by 17.4 percent.
Vogue and Cosmopolitan were down in the midteens, and Time fell 31 percent.
When Cat Fancy is down 23 percent at the newsstand, it seems that there's
little place to hide. Newsweek, it should be mentioned, was off only 9.7
percent at the newsstand, but that's cold comfort.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/business/media/wondering-how-far-magazines
-must-fall.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120813
http://tinyurl.com/8o9ersr
Sent from my iPad
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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