Grant's Blog

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Magazines, even weeklies, are hopelessly out of date.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 The snippets and margin notes that many magazines are featuring are out of date long before they hit the page.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.

In my last post, the first of this new, reimaged blog, I mentioned something about the transient nature of blogs. The internet is interesting, it is both permanent and transient simultaneously. Sure, things get archived and saved, but once something is said it is quickly forgotten. There is not point in bringing back my archives because nobody cares what I had said, I don’t even care. Nobody will read them.

In this world with cable television and constantly updated websites, the news has developed the same transient characteristic. What is said today is forgotten by tomorrow. Errors and omissions are passed over, never to be corrected because the story has changed or gotten old. News no longer builds upon itself, there is no overarching storyline, no reference to what has happened in the past or our trajectory into the future. There is just the now, the sound bite, a point in the abyss without reference to what surrounds.