The Death of the Magazine?
Ted Gioia, in his newsletter, The Honest Broker, said that if we listen closely (but without too much strain), we can hear the death rattle of the once-mighty magazine.
Ted Gioia
He uses National Geographic as a case study, and the picture he paints is bleak.
He talked about how popular the magazine had been in its heyday.
Not long ago, 12 million families in the US subscribed to National Geographic, and many held on to every issue. Even in my working class neighborhood, I saw copies displayed on home bookshelves as some kind of iconic repository of the world’s riches.
This rings true to me. I remember the years as a kid when the magazine showed up at my parents’ house. I remember the largely unused front office of my grandfather’s sign shop help decades worth of issues, lined up like encyclopedias, in precise order.
If I’d known where my life would take me back then, it might have occurred to me for National Geographic to be my dream job. But it was already a shadow of its former self by the time I went back to journalism school, and now it’s fallen even further.
He highlights the dilution of the brand and the running away from what had made the magazine great: longform journalism, science writing, and travel writing.
I can’t even imagine the magazine without those key elements. I can’t imagine the disappointment of those who were laid off thinking they’d landed a dream job.
Gioia points to a pretty simply (yet devastating) cause:
Legacy media’s unwillingness to pay for good writing is the single biggest warning sign that its decline is irreversible. You might think that National Geographic or Sports Illustrated would try to hire the best talent it could find—that’s the obvious way to turnaround a journalism business.
But they don’t see it that way. They lost confidence in writing years ago.
It’s not directly related to the story I shared yesterday about the challenges of teaching writing in college in the age of artificial intelligence, but that reality certainly isn’t going to make things better.
Gioia also points to a future that contains his newsletter and many like it:
So if you see a newsstand filled with magazines, go and enjoy it now. Because in the future, you will only see something like that in a museum of defunct media.
I’ll mourn their passing. But those who work in journalism can’t waste too many tears on these dinosaurs—these disappearing magazines of the past. That’s because we all need to get to work building something solid to take their place.