New York Magazine Begins to Give Up on Print
New York magazine is considered one of the most prestigious magazines in America. New York magazine is no longer able to publish a weekly print edition. We were not joking when we told you thousands of times that print is dead.
Starting next March, New York will print only two issues a month. David Carr sums up the unavoidable logical reason why:
Digital revenues have been growing at a rate of 15 percent year-over-year, and in the coming year will surpass print advertising revenues, according to Mr. Burstein. But part of the reason those lines are crossing is that the print revenues are plummeting.
Print has been a technological anachronism for years now. But newspapers and magazines continued to reap good profits from print ads, so they continued printing. As digital ad revenue inevitably rises and print circulation inevitably drops, more and more magazines will choose to invest more and more online, and more and more print issues will fall away. Print will never truly die—like radio and other once-dominant media channels, it will just shrink down to a more modest size as other, more popular, superior media technologies eat away at its user base. So this is all a process of right-sizing, really. The worst thing about it is the loss of jobs that will hit the print lifers who were unlucky enough to be too old to get rehired elsewhere (though those jobs will be replaced, to some extent, by jobs online).
The second-worst thing about it is all the dewy paeans to print that we will all be forced to endure by nostalgic media people. None of these should be read, or written.
The best thing about it is the satisfaction of knowing that Adam Moss is now basically a website editor.