Thinner news
Christine November 19th, 2008
As more people become intimately comfortable with using computers and the internet, subscriptions to print magazine and newspapers as you all are aware, have dropped sharply and have been dropping for some time. Many magazines have been coasting along in this country on the readership of our relatively older population who still feel most at ease with something substantial between their hands when they sit down in their recliner chair. However, recently Time Magazine announced it was downsizing and also the LA Times — 300 workers at Time and 150 in LA. There are many other print species in trouble too. The Atlantic for instance is also sputtering :please subscribe to keep the Atlantic alive! The Christian Science Monitor is going weekly; the list goes on. I think it’s great if people want to spend their money to keep these old literary giants going, but honestly maybe it is just time to let them quietly slip away.
We don’t have many print mags coming to our mailbox anymore. I subscribe to SEED Science is Culture, for our son and National Geographic. (Honestly speaking, there is just no replacing National Geographic with anything online.) Time, however still keeps showing up every week despite repeated attempts to cancel it two years ago. Each week, nearly as punctual as those front porch, whole milk carton drops from my childhood, (remember whole milk?) the stealthy Time Magazine appears although in a much thinner package. I don’t know if they are keeping us on their list and sending us free magazines just to boost their distribution numbers to satisfy their advertisers, or what. They must be charging some mysterious credit card which we don’t own, perhaps? It’s weird. I hope to get to the bottom of it soon.
In some ways it is really sad this is happening. I remember The Atlantic coming in the mail to my Dad when I was a kid. I even read it on a consistent basis. And Harpers. That probably explains a few things, huh. Then, his subscription list got to leaning a little too far to the right for me so I stopped reading his magazines when I was home from college. Besides, the U of M library had far more interesting periodicals on their stands. I remember subscribing to the CS Monitor one year. I loved it. Their travel narratives were outstanding. Now all that is going down the tubes. Literally, this intricate series of Tubes we call the Internet. What is to become of print media? What’s your take on this particular slide of current trends and history?
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