I used to edit a newsstand leisure magazine here in the UK. It was founded in the 1970s. We sold about 18,000 copies a month in our peak, making us the market leader.
I'm not the editor any more (I went off to do something else) but the magazine is still going. It won't surprise you to learn that it sells much less than it used to.
But that's not because the magazine has got worse. It hasn't. The writing is still as good as ever, the news reporting still pretty sharp. It's not because the market has changed. It's not because you can get the same information online for free. Much to my amazement, in 20+ years, no one has really catered for this particular market online - there's a lot of chuntering on forums and Facebook groups, but no one really doing compelling content. We were turning over £1m+ a year. I don't think anyone is even turning over £50k writing about this subject online.
So what changed? I think it's ultimately about attention. When I edited the magazine (c. 2010), people still chose to spend part of their leisure time reading about one of their hobbies. We were a fun way to do that. Today, people don't need to spend £5 to happily while away a few hours: they can just scroll through their phones. The magazine habit has gone.
Crucially, it's not that the information has gone online. It really hasn't. I read all the various forums and groups, and still when the magazine plops onto my doormat every month, I read it and find a load of stuff I didn't know. It's just that the time that was once filled with reading magazines is now filled with something else.
In marketing, a "competitor" is not just somebody else doing a similar thing;
one form of competition is something entirely different that you might spend your money or time instead (a "substitute").
Many business plans ignore substitutes and only focus on similar competitive offerings.
Smartphones are substitutes for a lot of things: playing football with a friend; human ad-hoc conversation at a bus stop; playing Candy Crush instead of reading newspapers on your morning commute; entertaining yourself and your date at a romantic dinner.
"Smartphones are substitutes for a lot of things: playing football with a friend; human ad-hoc conversation at a bus stop; playing Candy Crush instead of reading newspapers on your morning commute; entertaining yourself and your date at a romantic dinner."
It's a treacherous slide from Visceral to vicarious, to finally virtual.
Yeah. Speaking for myself, it's not that there are all these online novels I can read for free. (OK, there are in the public domain but that's not my point.) It's that there is a lot of other reading and entertainment/education options out there.
Some of which are free/donation, some of which are not. I'd be pretty surprised if people in general were reading as many novels as they did at one point. (I may be wrong of course.)
I recently ran across Treasure Hunting Magazine. https://www.treasurehunting.co.uk/ It bills itself as "Britain's Best Selling Metal Detecting Magazine." While technically this would be true if it was the only one it does at least give the impression that there are others.
I find it humorous to think about the second best selling metal detecting magazine's staff cursing that Treasure Hunting beat them to another big metal detector scoop.
> It's not because you can get the same information online for free. Much to my amazement, in 20+ years, no one has really catered for this particular market online - there's a lot of chuntering on forums and Facebook groups,
This "chuntering" is the replacement. It's the same reason I spend more time on HN rather than tech blogs. Here, I can directly interact with people who have experience in areas I'm interested in, compared to a blog or magazine where I can only passively absorb info from professional writers.
The quality of writing here is lower, and I have to "chunter" through a fair amount of noise, but the lived experience is orders of magnitude higher and more than outweighs the difference. I'd never go back to passively absorbing info from a magazine when I can have this.
Of course, HN is far higher quality than most FB groups. But the answer will never be to go back to printed magazines or their online equivalents.
Seems to me that the correct strategy for a successful print magazine is to not focus on the _content_, but to instead focus on the _form_. Which is to say that there _are_ people who do still enjoy reading periodicals and printed books, etc, in general, and producing something that is entertaining and interesting on it's own as an object beyond the "content" it contains is the way to cater to those people. Similar to what McSweeney's has been doing for decades. Create a magazine as a "collectable" or "art piece" that people want to put on their shelf and pick up again or show off from time to time.
With a somewhat loose definition, its arguable that the most successful magazine publisher right now is actually KiwiCo. Magazines haven't been the best way to deliver information to people for a long time, but there's a lot you can do with printed materials and subscriptions that just can't be done on a computer.
There is way too much free entertainment these days. That's the most underrated difference in the world between now and 40 years ago. The change is even more dramatic for people who live in developing countries where TVs were rare 40 years ago.
I also think this is why traditional opera and the symphony are failing. People have too much entertainment.
Opera and classical music are simply no longer the popular form of musical theater or music.
Stage musicals (Hamilton) and film musicals (anything from Disney) are still very popular.
Popular music concerts (Taylor Swift) are obviously incredibly popular, and they're usually not symphony concerts.
While popular tastes have largely diverged from classical art music, a good deal of "popular" (and often excellent, in my opinion) symphonic music is still being produced and listened to as film music and game music.
Were they ever "popular?" Hasn't Opera and Classical long been the domain of the highly educated and elite? The more intellectual among the middle/lower class only receiving via recordings, radio, charity concerts, and community ensembles?
They struggle right now yes, but the major organizations in the great cities (London, New York, Los Angeles, Vienna, Berlin, etc.) all seem to still stay afloat.
Opera used to be rather popular, back before there were recordings. Opera stars like Jenny Lind and Enrico Caruso used to be a big deal, and played to packed houses. Every city had an opera house, even quite small ones.
Ballet and classical music were similar, as was classical theater like Shakespeare. They would be presented by touring companies, as well as community groups.
I think that recorded media played a key part in displacing them. The older forms, in their most expensive incarnations, remained as entertainment for the wealthy, as a way to distinguish themselves from the masses who watched recorded entertainment.
But a lot of grand old movie theaters started life as opera houses and classical theaters. They used to be popular entertainment.
I think another reason for their failure is the same reason the bottom has fallen out of the antiques market, because of changes in the culture, people don't have the respect for the past like they used to. Toppling of old statues, renaming of all sorts of things to have no connection to the past or history, the rewriting of history in popular shows, etc, are all sort of extreme reactions against the past and tradition and it's reflected in a fall in demand for older culture.
It must be horrible if a story of a fight explained all the world you know all your life giving you conversation airsuperiority.. and then that story starts to fade out while you are in it..
>I also think this is why traditional opera and the symphony are failing. People have too much entertainment.
I haven't looked into this too much, but I hypothesize this might not be the case due to attendance numbers. Top-line symphony and philharmonics still sell out regularly. I know locally, the LA Philharmonic's shows at both the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Hollywood Bowl have robust attendance.
I want to explore a different avenue -- donors and patrons. I wonder if the new generations of millionaires/billionaires don't donate the way they once did to the classical arts.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/951... -- the LA Phil does rather well for itself, but with $64mm in artists' salaries/fees in 2023 and only $42mm in contributions, one cannot help but wonder if this could be helped out by a couple of more billionaires setting up endowments?
Free entertainment is great. it prevents additional resource extraction from the environment and allows acceptance of relative masspoverty (compared to our parents ). panem and circensis indeed.
I see a covid chart in the newspaper one time that had colored lines for the infections with different virus versions and vacinations with different "vacines" and thought woah! There is more information and clarity here than in hundreds of internet posts and articles combined.
I don't disagree - I subscribe to two magazines for a hobby of mine. I used to buy physical copies of one because I liked the fact I'd have to put aside time to disconnect and enjoy the content.
The ownership of that physical one change and the physical copy increased in price by 50%, so I went with the online subscription. Now I'm 6 months behind in my reading and when I do find the time I skim more than read.
I've written the even swearier FUPL as an alternative (FU standing for exactly what you think it does), but haven't had the cojones to use it in anger yet. https://pastebin.com/knPbAycm
One fun recent option I've seen is the NWSL (Nuclear Waste Software License), which begins:
> This software license is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it! Writing this software and associated documentation files (the "Software") was important to us.
It's functionally equivalent to a two-clause BSD license, but I pity the fool who tries to get their legal department to approve it.
> I have no idea why there are now apps that use Markdown as their back end storage format but only show styled text without the Markdown source code visible.
Because backend storage of rich text is not a solved problem?
RTF is a horrid, over-complex serialisation. Some platforms have their own internal format for rich text (e.g. NSAttributedString) but serialisation is either lacking or platform-specific.
Writing as WYSIWYG but storing in the backend as Markdown is not an insane idea, and I say that as someone whose muscle memory has been cmd-B/cmd-I since 1992 and would never choose to actually compose in Markdown unless I had to.
I used to edit a newsstand leisure magazine here in the UK. It was founded in the 1970s. We sold about 18,000 copies a month in our peak, making us the market leader.
I'm not the editor any more (I went off to do something else) but the magazine is still going. It won't surprise you to learn that it sells much less than it used to.
But that's not because the magazine has got worse. It hasn't. The writing is still as good as ever, the news reporting still pretty sharp. It's not because the market has changed. It's not because you can get the same information online for free. Much to my amazement, in 20+ years, no one has really catered for this particular market online - there's a lot of chuntering on forums and Facebook groups, but no one really doing compelling content. We were turning over £1m+ a year. I don't think anyone is even turning over £50k writing about this subject online.
So what changed? I think it's ultimately about attention. When I edited the magazine (c. 2010), people still chose to spend part of their leisure time reading about one of their hobbies. We were a fun way to do that. Today, people don't need to spend £5 to happily while away a few hours: they can just scroll through their phones. The magazine habit has gone.
Crucially, it's not that the information has gone online. It really hasn't. I read all the various forums and groups, and still when the magazine plops onto my doormat every month, I read it and find a load of stuff I didn't know. It's just that the time that was once filled with reading magazines is now filled with something else.
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