Teaching Online Journalism

Death knell for general-interest magazines

Really good post by Jeff Jarvis about magazines. Another case of answering falling circulation with a price hike. (Hello?) His observation that general-interest magazines seem to stand on shaky ground is sensible.

When I was growing up in a small city with a really bad newspaper, kids who had educated parents got Time (or Newsweek, or U.S. News & World Report) at home. Those kids always knew all kinds of stuff about the world that I never got from our newspaper (which I read daily). Then I moved to New York, where I had access not only to a good newspaper but also to good radio news and a good PBS station. When I went to work at Time magazine, I often sat there Saturday night putting the book to bed and thinking, “Man, there’s not one thing in this issue that I didn’t already know on Thursday.”

And then it clicked for me: Time wasn’t written for the people with a good daily newspaper. It was for all those people with rags out in the hinterland. Like where I grew up.

Well, that was then, and this is now. There is broadband in much of the hinterland (although rural areas are sadly underserved), and people don’t need Time to tell them what’s happening on the other side of the world today.

The good news? For specialized and niche publications, the world is their oyster. That is, if they understand how to pry open the shell:

The wise magazine will enable its community to speak among themselves. And it will also find ways to extract and share the wisdom of its crowd. This is true not just of magazines but of other, similar brands in other media … (from Jarvis’s post)

More about magazines: What’s next for online content?

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