Nows and Forevers

A coworker of mine told me about a column in Town & Country about how to beat the crowds at Disneyworld.

“It’s in this month’s issue,” she said.

My coworker subscribes to a lot of magazines, and I say bless her for that. There aren’t enough people who subscribe to magazines or newspapers these days, at least not on the paper side. Seems like every week I hear about a magazine or newspaper either going out of business or reducing its frequency. It’s a big change from when I was covering the magazine industry in the early 2000s, when print media were starting to feel the heat from online but that magazines seemed to be immune.

“It’s an active medium,” one big media planner/buyer told me back in the fall of 2003 for a story I wrote for MediaPost. “For our clients, the appeal of magazines is tapping into, trying to borrow from the reader, that passion for a particular magazine, and transfer it over to the brand.”

Fast forward 20 years and it’s different. There are probably more things to be passionate about than ever before and it’s easier than ever, thanks to social media, to get passionate about them. And you can connect to enthusiasts quicker and deeper than ever before.

I look at my own reading habits. I read most periodicals online. I used to subscribe to Men’s Health, Esquire, Real Simple, The New Yorker, The Economist, and QST (an amateur radio magazine). None come to my house anymore.

The magazine industry is changing and the lines are blurring, just as they have for the newspaper industry where I’ve spent most of my career. In my career, I’ve founded one magazine (a local one) and worked on two others, both in New York and Pennsylvania. All three never made it past 2015, even though one had been going since the 1940s and the other two had at least 15 years’ each. Another magazine I worked at for six years, The Hollywood Reporter, went from a daily magazine (yes, really) to a weekly after I left in 2010.

Magazines, like newspapers, are changing with the times.

I’ve enjoyed the transition to digital that my career has taken over the past more than two decades. I’ve written primarily for an online audience, or at least predominantly online, since 2002. The Hollywood Reporter was in transition when I was there and there was more prestige in writing for the print editions over online, even though even then the online stories tended to have more reach and impact, at least for someone like me on the ground. Where I work now, we have both a print edition and online. We put time into both, although as a journalist I have daily deadlines as well as weekly and monthly ones.

But I think we are missing a lot when it comes to the gradual (and maybe not-so-gradual) decline of the print media. While I’ll admit The New Yorker’s always piled up at my house, I remember a certain thrill in the ’80s and ’90s when a new magazine would come to my mailbox. You don’t get that same thrill in the digital age, when something hits your email box. Magazines were an event. They were also bigger than they are now.

I think my colleague has the right idea.