TIME pushed out into the cold to die

Or, if you're feeling more optimistic, Time Inc. - and the magazines it own - have been set free from Time Warner to follow their own path. After, of course, being loaded down with $1.3 billion in debt, which includes a one-time payment of $600 million to Time Warner shareholders.

Article in the Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/business/media/time-inc-to-set-a-lonely-course-after-a-spinoff.html?hp

 

Tribune Company doing the same with its print products.

 

Buh-bye.

 

It truly will be everyone's loss if Time goes under.

This situation isn't even just indicative of print being a thing of the past. It's a case of reading itself being old-school, not done, and not cared for to the extent it once was.

Even taking into consideration that print is in trouble and the business is evolving into a more mobile, digital industry, I have to wonder, is, say, Time magazine, or even People magazine -- always a popular, easy read, and, according to this link, a highly important part of Time, Inc.'s profits -- really being read that much in digital form?

I kind of doubt it.

And the thing about magazines is that they really are better read, seen and experienced while in-hand.

 

the i-pad was supposed to save magazines -- the photos pop more, and there are so many add-on, links, etc. that you can't get in the print product. hasn't done that, clearly. so what is THE problem? aside from young journalists, my suspicion/fear is that the 35-and-unders don't have the patience for the long-form narratives that make magazines distinct. once high school teachers stop harping on the classics, do the masses graduate and go on reading long? or does it all become movies, tv and short bites on the web? has technology altered the mass appetite forever?

 

Wow.

If you had told me to list five non-tabloid magazines that would be around forever, Time would have been at the top of that list. Newsweek is still barely alive isn't it?

Maybe they'll just start putting Kardashians on the cover every other week and start tracking pregnancies of D-list celebrities...

 

Mizzou, who the hell reads Time anymore? Are that many people waiting in dentists' offices in this country? Don't blame just economics for its problems. There are quality issues.

 

Yeah, it's probably been awhile since I read it unless I was in a waiting room. It's just such an iconic magazine that it will be strange to see it gone. I tend to doubt they have much online readership as well.

 

I don't know that our reading tastes have changed. The quantity of in-depth writing and reporting that I consume now is much greater than it was 15 years ago, yet the quantity of magazines I consume is much lower. The problem faced by general interest mags like Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, etc. is the explosion in supply of the kinds of stories that used to make them must-reads. A copy of SI does not have the value it did when it was one of the only places I could get in-depth, narrative-driven sports profiles. Now, I have access to all such stories written anywhere in the world. No magazine can put together a six or seven-story weekly issue that is a better reading experience than the six or seven stories that I myself can put together by picking from all of the great journalism done across the planet on a weekly basis.

General interest is dead. All of these publications will be nostalgia within 10 years.

 

great point, daemon, and thanks. the mags used to be the great aggregator; now it's the web, twitter, etc. the problem, of course, is that no one on the web has figured out how to consistently pay for all the time and travel needed to produce the great journalism you talk about.

i think that's one big reason for the increase of the first-person perspective. it's there, supposedly, to add a swinging, new-journalism third-dimension, but is actually being used to fill the hole in pieces left by a lack of access or reporting. the access is one issue: people are more wary of journalists. but the reporting costs money, and too often cash-strapped sites/mags are asking people to produce "long-form" without being able to pay for it...

 

Does SI survive just because of the website?

I'm wondering what other magazines are next.

 

Good post.