The Death of Magazines (Update)

Behold, Playboy… now with advertising on its cover! This was actually a false front cover, one that peeled off. I’m not sure if it was this way on newsstands, but this is the way subscription copies came. (I have been told.) I really can’t blame Playboy. Even in a good climate, porn is a difficult ad buy. In the past, Playboy and a certain class of magazines had the “Vice Advertising” niche all to themselves. Hard Liquor was the mainstay of this segment. Of late that market has headed off to… network television. And television itself isn’t doing all that well, either.

Have you seen TV lately? It’s the other thing with a screen. Lately it’s had an urge to merge with your computer. Every content bit (called “shows”) has appended itself to a web presence. In most cases that web presence emulates or reflects the initial content (runs the show). There are often also fun sized bits of additive promotion to be found at the site on an opt in basis. (Blogs, likes, clicky thingies, email spam, twitter feeds, whatnot.) The functionality has grown to the point that it has become unclear what is driving what to whom. Is the website promoting the “show” or is the show promoting the website? Given the  considerable overlap in stuff provided, it’s hard to distinguish product from packaging, billboard from destination. If the product is moving pictures and sounds, does the vehicle by which it is provided even matter anymore? The  medium is no longer the message in a world where content is king and the king is a whore. We are one breath away from the harmonic convergence between the boob tube and the PC.

And the PC and the Tablet and the Mobile Phone.

That harmonic convergence has already happened in print.  With the exception of fiction magazines, descendents of the pulps we generally cover here, most periodicals are now resident on the web. There are maybe three newspapers that people are willing to pay money to read. The rest of the survivors are now giving it all away on the web. That frilly bastion of actual magazines has not committed itself one way or the other as a whole as yet, but the vast majority are now headed to web focus. All that now distinguishes them from TV Web things is a lack of moving pictures and sound.

So although TV and Magazines and Newspapers are now all certifiably computer things, projected bits of content spewed onto screens, they remain quite different. The division is now essentially binary, between engrossing content and discretionary diversion. Engrossing content is movies, TV “shows”, online quizzes, clips of animation (in the broadest sense) and games. These are not to be engaged with while operating a vehicle or performing what is known in the free world as “work”. You may do these at home or on break to your heart’s content. Discretionary Diversion, by contrast, does not involve flipper action (constant key strokes or mouse movements), doesn’t draw attention to itself with unwanted movement and doesn’t make noise. You may safely goof off with this at work. This is the salvation of what was once periodical content. In my view it’s an actual broadening of the readership base.

We are, however, still printing magazines and still printing newspapers. In most places the physical production of newspapers has been scaled back, massively and dramatically. The industry at this point exists as an alternative junk mail delivery system. In many places it is heading for a two day per week shelf life: the Thursday edition for coupon inserts and the Sunday edition for more coupons and advertising wrapped around content. Being advertising wrapped around content has long been the magazine’s sole gig. And how is that gig going?

Bleak. “In the last five years, the retail magazine business has shrunk 40 percent, to less than US $3 billion.” As we have covered here, a new form of publication, the Neo Pulp has been introduced to fill in the many gaps that are appearing in the newsstand space. But this product may have seen its final days.  All industry quarters report “tremendous financial pressure that both magazine publishers and their distributors have been facing as the Internet has decimated newsstand sales and as retailers hand over prime shelf space to other products like candy and gum.”

I was in my local Walgreens the other month when I noticed the magazine rack was suddenly barren. I feared that my predictions had come true. This was furthered by another adventure in magazine absence that I encountered at my super regional grocer. Both Walgreens and Ultra Foods soon posted Xeroxes stating that they weren’t exiting the magazine field. The current shortage was caused by the demise of Motor Trend.

Motor Trend? Not exactly. The firm that owns Motor Trend and a bunch of other magazines decided to exit the magazine distribution business, rather suddenly. They’re still going to produce magazines. They’re just not going to schlep them anymore. Just as the National Enquirer is owned by American Media, mostly a distributor, Motor Trend and its group was owned by something called Source Interlink. In the manner that only corporations can do, the Motor Trend portion of the business cut the Source Interlink portion of the business off its rotting body and declared it bankrupt. And threw three hundred of my fellow Illinois residents out of work without notice.  

This leaves essentially two major distributors and American Media left in the business of hauling magazines to the newsstands.  Under normal circumstances three very healthy actors in any industry would be good enough. That’s not the case here. None of the remaining schleppers are actually primarily in the distribution business. American Media is as close to a distributor as is left—and it’s primarily a printing broker, a quasi publisher for magazines  like… Playboy. The other two distributors are Time Warner and Newscorp.

Both Time Warner and Newscorp have quite a bit invested in print. One imagines. Mighty Time Warner owns Time Magazine and People Magazine and Sports Illustrated, not to mention a book publisher or two plus DC Comics. Newscorp was built on a raft of good, old fashioned newspapers. The sun never sets on their newspaper holdings! (Although the sun might skip over every place east of Berlin.) They own HarperCollins. They even own a bunch of magazines. (Generally the Australian version of some American best sellers.) Both of these firms are print behemoths.

One imagines. Time Warner actually owns CNN. And a bunch of cable content providers. And the Warner part of it is mostly a movie studio—itself a cable content provider. Sometime after becoming such a behemoth it was purchased for cash by web thingy AOL, before that itself became obsolete as web thingies sometimes do. As for schlepping, the firm’s last foray into that field was a cable company, which they sold. So today the only real schlepping the company does is in magazines. And the reason Motor Trend got out of the magazine schlepping business is because it owed Time Warner money. And Time Warner now has to restate its forecasts because Motor Trend stiffed them. So I’m sure the people at the Movie Studio and TV Network are real enthusiastic about the prospects of the entire magazine distribution field.

As for Newscorp, it’s actually Fox Television and a bunch of other sort of television type things. Print? Sure, as long as old what’s-his-face is still alive. And they’ve gone so far as to split the company into two units, Fox Future and Fox Past Dead On Arrival What Are We Doing With This Crap. And you’ll never guess what division magazine schlepping falls into.

American Media has gone bankrupt twice now, so don’t count on them to surge into the void. Now both Newscorp and Time Warner have promised to pick up the slack where Motor Trend dropped off, if only to secure the distribution of their own offerings into such far flung outposts as Chicago. But I really wouldn’t be counting on anyone to jump into the magazine schlepping business any time/ever again. And the people who are in it because they have to be aren’t about to plunge any big investments into it. In fact, the two remaining big players may very soon take a very jaded look at the whole thing.

It’s not looking good.