As I sauntered into work today (yes, sometimes I do in fact saunter), I sat down in front of my color calibrated monitor and wacom tablet with some coffee ready to create a perfect retouched reality, then proceeded to wonder, who in the hell reads magazines anymore? Why isn’t the CMYK industry moving faster to the RGB internet? Is the print industry dying?
I think about the amount of people who pick up a newsstand copy of the magazines I work on and how many will get a subscription in the mail. I think about the deadlines and stress everyone deals with at the job to push out issues on time to get them to a printer and distributer who will then take 2-4 weeks to produce 80k copies per title. I wonder why we’re working on dated information 2-3 months ahead of time that will be irrelevant when the magazine hits the stand.
Magazines seem lazy to me.
A tangible television.
A 20th century commodity.
An old business model.
Gossip aside, exclusive entertainment and information magazines don’t need to break stories as fast as US Weekly. They have the potential to handle content differently. By the way, what’s up with the redundancy of information on their site vs their magazine? Why must we receive news from one source.. 2 WAYS? In 2007 there was a quiet magazine study done on popular titles and their effect online vs print which revealed US Weekly’s website taking more hits than their print subscribers. Why not resort to only 1 source?
Oh right, advertisers.
Advertisers are keeping this old business model around through a tangible social status. You can’t hang a web page from a hook at the checkout line in Vons. It’s impossible sample a fragrance immediately online. Not yet, at least. And incidentally, you’ll look like a total geek reading news about Hannah Montana on TMZ.com in an internet cafe.
Basically, magazines are tangible market-targeted advertisement novels. You like big boobs? Here’s a list of pill manufacturers that claim they can make your dick bigger and last longer so you can keep your pretend girlfriend satisfied. You like fast cars? Oh, well here’s a thin book with an ad index of part manufacturers to dump your money into so you can get your car to look like the one on pg 12.
It’s an evil business that’s clouded with subliminal advertisements.
I wonder if in 20 years, a green government will take control and condemn printing plants that continue to remain environmentally crude (unlike Printhaus) and will have to shift their base to the internet; in the coattails of the digital cable transition maybe? Even if the pages are made of recycled paper, the printing process and materials alone that are used to create, produce, and ship a product are extensively rich with toxic chemicals.
It’s in your hands then in the trash an hour later. This needs to change.
Love your commentary on The Life Cycle of Magazines. I currently reclaim magazines and make them into handbags for many of the reasons you have addressed in your cleverly written observations. How can I reclaim even more of these items to make a larger impact? Please check out http://www.cosmicbobbins.com, and http://cosmicbobbins.com/about.html to learn more about reclaiming magazines to help lift people out of poverty. How can we get more people and companies involved in this movement?
Comment by Cosmic Bobbins — September 6, 2008 @ 8:45 pm
What you’re doing is great, Cosmic. I’ll add a link to you in my Blogroll. Thanks for visiting and for your comment!
Comment by Bryan — September 7, 2008 @ 1:13 pm