Future Of News Magazines
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-10-24/future-news-magazines
Over the past decade, the number of Americans subscribing to news magazines has greatly declined as more and more readers are getting their news from Internet sources. The online migration has led to a steep drop in advertising revenues, threatening the viability of some old media giants. The latest of these is Newsweek, which announced last week that it would print its last issue at the end of 2012. But other publications, such as The Economist, have weathered the storm by charging for content and creating opportunities for targeted advertising. Guest host Steve Roberts and guests discuss the future of news magazines in the digital age.
Guests
Stephen Shepard
dean of the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate School of Journalism and former senior editor at Newsweek and BusinessWeek.
John Micklethwait
editor-in-chief at The Economist.
Comments
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The form is nothing compared to the content which will probably as tepid and insipid as always.
"As for the herd of newspapers and magazines, I do not chance to know an editor in the country who will deliberately print anything which he knows will ultimately and permanently reduce the number of his subscribers. They do not believe that it would be expedient. How then can they print truth?" ~~ Henry David Thoreau
Newsweek is/was a liberal rag, (interesting cover choice by the way) that decided to turn it's back on the majority of news consumers with it's overt liberal ideology. In this day and age of digital competition they didn't have a chance. It has not gone unnoticed that all ideologically liberal news organizations, digital, print and broadcast are suffering from very low consumer participation for this very reason.
partisan politics wrote:
Newsweek is/was a liberal rag, (interesting cover choice by the way) that decided to turn it's back on the majority of news consumers with it's overt liberal ideology. In this day and age of digital competition they didn't have a chance. It has not gone unnoticed that all ideologically liberal news organizations, digital, print and broadcast are suffering from very low consumer participation for this very reason.
Obviously you are assuming that Newsweek is a liberal rag, in fact it's right wing. I have not read Newsweek since they began using Karl Rove as a contributor. Darn if I'm gonna help pay for him to spew his vitriol.
The Economist can charge for content because the content is worth paying for. The same can't be said for Time or Newsweek in their current forms.
NY Times gives you some free articles but then you have to pay if you want your daily Krugman or Friedman. i always get to the 11th story and get cut off.
Although creating a subscription system for different types of news media may be helping the Economist and others, I wonder, as information becomes more costly, if good quality information will become less and less available to folks who cannot afford to subscribe. I make a decent living but already find myself picking and choosing what information I can access. I find even as the number of news choices increase, my information world, feels like it has been diminished.
Dawn: pp just likes to shoot despite the danger of collateral damage from friendly fire. I laughed about Karl Rove being in pp's crosshairs. It's Sarejevo all over again.
Online mags like Truthout, Truthdig, Alternet, Salon and so on mean that I never open Publisher's Clearinghouse envelopes anymore. My mom was just showing me that sweepstakes scammers are now selling snuggies and trinkets more than reading matter anyway. We examined their printed magazine stamps (fewer and fewer) and the selection was pitiful, just pitiful.
Maybe illiteracy saved a tree.
Maybe I didn't hear it mentioned earlier but Al Jazeera English has great magazine/on-demand content digitally and as far as I know is free content.
How do they manage to provide content in this manor while maintaining effective journalistic practices? I don't know a lot about them but, based upon what I've seen I like the product.
Jonathan
Al Jazeera is owned by Qatar Media, a govt. corporation.
I have to laugh when people call the media liberal. How can a one way forum of communication be liberal? I talk, you listen. I write, you read. It doesn't matter what is being said, it's a conservative form of sharing thought.
It's not quite here, but it's coming soon. Concerned citizens are worrying about loosing their heritage. You can't count on Newsweek or Fox News capturing history. In Wood River Illinois a group of women in their 70s are capturing the stories of the community before it disappears. Several from the group are video recording words of the elders in the community.
True liberalism engages the public to share perception. Historical eye witness more accurately portrays the truth versus the slanted view of a magazine driven by advertising dollars. Local newspapers lost focus of the community years ago. The conservative publication system restricts the sharing of thought by enforcing copyright regulation. It is difficult to share history when a few take a 2 cent claim on the commonwealth. The conservative form of media is a profit oriented system which capitalizes on each word it acquires while having little regard for the community it steals the words from. Liberal journalism relinquishes the ownership of public words. A liberal media will make public thought public domain.
The Do Good Gauge is a new technology facilitating citizens journalism. Public association to the chapters of a research essay provides the motivation and material for community editors to document historical evidence. Associations comes in the form of personal stories, photographs, audio, and video recordings. Public association provides the content to community editors to capture what is truly going on in the community.
The failure of magazines and newsprint will be replaced with the voice of all citizens. The perception of a future generation will generously be stimulated by a truth acquired closer to home.
So how come ALL the cookie cutter conservative bird cage liners are also losing readership??
The local Rupert Murdoch owned fish wrapper is struggling and recently added a digital version (while adding five bucks to the monthly price). The editorials rotate amoung Krauthammer, Rove, Coulter, and the blame stream ilk. Gary Varvel does the political "cartoons" while Mallard Fillmore appears daily in the "comics" (a recent strip depicts Bob Schieffer considering how to tilt the last debate toward the Prez). The paper version if stripped of ads and sports could be printed on both sides of one sheet.
Maybe it is a sign that the market goes toward the mobs of illiterate dropouts who no longer like to read, preferring pretty, violent flix on the 'Net rather than doing analysis and thought.
Well, back to Springer!
Once again we hear the ramblings of a few egocentric journalists as they step onto the life boat taking them to a continuation of their puffed up careers, concerned only with their own comfort, leaving behind thousands of workers who's efforts as printers, paper makers, delivery drivers, etc. are in the toilet. All of these worker were essential to the process of producing a news magazine. Never once did these talking heads openly lament the loss of a single one of their “downstairs” co-workers. They even had the hubris to say that those who cannot change will be lost. The current changes in the media industry only highlights the fact that many in the media feel themselves to be above the masses, and are part of the aristocracy
I worked for USN&WR for nearly 30 years and Time magazine for six years and have written about newsmagazines in my memoir "A Road Less Travelled" published last year and now available at
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/205395