Playing to Their Weakness
Common wisdom is that magazines are suffering. Sales are down, relevance is decreased. Instead, people have turned to the internet for the type of information and entertainment once reserved for magazine. To combat this, many magazines are changing their formatting to resemble blogs and websites. In so doing, they play to their weaknesses, a lack of speed.
Magazines, even weeklies, are hopelessly out of date. The breaking news they report on is no longer breaking by the time they hit the newsstands. The snippets and margin notes that many magazines are featuring are out of date long before they hit the page. Wired, Tired, Expired itself is sadly expired.
In making magazines less substantial and more transient, publishers destroy the one advantage they have, hindsight. And in so doing, they will surely continue their long decline.