TIME pushed out into the cold to die

[britwrit]

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

 

[BTExpress]

Tribune Company doing the same with its print products.

 

[Joe Williams]

Buh-bye.

 

[WriteThinking]

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.

 

[AD]

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?

 

[Mizzougrad96]

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...

 

[Michael_ Gee]

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.

 

[Mizzougrad96]

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.

 

[daemon]

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?

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.

 

[AD]

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...

 

[Mizzougrad96]

Does SI survive just because of the website?

I'm wondering what other magazines are next.

 

[Alma]

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...

Good post.

 

[Joe Williams]

Time needs to have its own swimsuit issue. The $ haul from that funds much of SI's annual budget.

Time's political bias might or might not have bought it more, ahem, time than it otherwise might have had. But that makes its impending disappearance a much more trivial event for me. Editors there marginalized the product as a legit news mag before it began to lose its audience and voice.

 

[BTExpress]

Time needs to have its own swimsuit issue. The $ haul from that funds much of SI's annual budget.

And to me, that makes zero sense at all.

The swimsuit issue is the one issue per year I probably spend the LEAST time with.

I mean, if you want to talk about "I can go somewhere else to find . . . ", well, pretty women wearing nothing are a lot easier to find on the web than good long-form writing. So what's the attraction to advertisers in this issue? Unless it happens to be, as it once was, an issue you tend to keep around all year. But for the past decade it's gone into the trash less than an hour after I take it out of the mailbox.

Seems that the issue accounts for 7 percent of SI's annual revenue. Which is a great deal. But how much does it cost to produce? What other issue involves flying dozens of people all over the world for weeks at a time?

 

[britwrit]

Back in J-School, everybody always laughed at Al Neuharth and his idea for USA Today. Imagine! A newspaper that aimed to comprehensively cover the world and only take a half-hour to read. What an idiot!

Well, flash forward a couple of decades and I have so little time to spend on the news. Skim through the Times, skim through the Guardian, read the most interesting articles in the New Yorker. I could really go for a weekly magazine that caught me up, putting events in context, with lively writing, and only took me a couple hours to read.

TIME could well be that answer. Heck, it might be that answer. It simply needs to refurbish its brand (or refurbish it a little more, so dullards like me took notice.) Right now, when I think of the magazine, I think about my grandparents and dentists' waiting rooms. An absolutely cliché but it needs to change if it's going to survive.

 

[JayFarrar]

I got a subscription offer for Time a few months back.

It was insanely cheap, like $10 for a year plus they were throwing in a digital weather radio, as I recall.

I still didn't subscribe mostly because if I did, I wouldn't read it and it would just end up in the recycle bin.

And I love print and always will. I just don't have the time to sit down and read.

 

[silent_h]

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...

Good post.

Completely agree. Excellent insight on all counts.