"Judas" by Lady GaGa leaked on April 15, 2011 at 11:54am. By 11:57am it was already in my iPod. Pictures of Chris Brown in the flesh leaked on an afternoon in March and within minutes it was entering all of my friend's phones. Justin Bieber gave his opinion on abortion to Rollingstone and within seconds I posted the link on my Facebook for my friends to read. That is how today's world works; anything and everything will hit the internet. Then within seconds it will spread quicker than a Rihanna weave change. Back in the day (and by that I mean about 5 years ago), if you wanted an exclusive from an artist or a beautiful spread of pictures, you had to go to a newsstand and buy a magazine. Now all you need is a smartphone or an internet connection to get all that and much more.
Magazines are doomed because of technology. Technology is the gun, the internet is the bullet, and the magazine industry is the victim. As a society we have become accustomed to obtaining information fast, with very little steps, and while we're doing 36 other things at the same time. We used to have to go through 200 pages of Vogue ads just to get to see Kate Moss' fashion spread. Now we can just type in the Vogue website and get to see all those beautiful pictures. And if Vogue refuses to post them online, there are a million blogs devoted to fashion that will happily post them up. Now what the internet has that magazines don't is the word free. Why pay money for a magazine when you can just obtain everything online for free? After the recession, the word free became a treasure chest. People had to do make cutbacks and subscribing to your favorite magazine wasn't as important as feeding yourself. And it wasn't like they were gonna miss out on anything because once again everything that is in that magazine is online.
Not only are we living in a world of technology but we are living in the world of multitasking. As I write this paper I am listening to Britney Spears, talking on the phone about the Black Eyed Peas concert I am going to tonight, checking gossip sites, and breathing. That isn't just the case for me but rather for millions of people around the world. Newspapers and magazines can no longer take up an hour of our time, nor can they take up our space. For example, a regular day for me would be going to school in Queens in the morning, going to work in the city in the afternoon, and going back home to wrap up my day. Now in between all this, I must check the news, the gossip sites, my Facebook, do homework, and squeeze in food. I am able to do all this because of my phone. During my bus ride I check my gossip news sites. During my lunch break I do homework on my phone's notepad. During my commute back home I check the news. I simply don't have the time to buy a newspaper or a magazine and then give that newspaper/magazine the attention it needs. I also don't have the space to be carrying extra weight since I am all over the place every day. I can just do everything I need on my phone.
Since magazines are being hurt by the internet, they are now becoming costly to maintain. According to, “Are magazines doomed, too,” by Jeff Jarvis, a magazine can only make money unless they get great circulation numbers and score big with advertising. Subscriptions are so discounted that the dollar per issue discount ends up hurting them because it takes roughly $5 to print and distribute a magazine. Entertainment Weekly went through $200 million before it became profitable. And at this point in the game, no one is likely to give up that money for any magazine. Now, magazines are turning their focus on their websites. Many magazines, like Entertainment Weekly, are including more features on their website that attracts the magazine reader on to the world wide net. EW is now writing articles by the hour and posting them online and then doing a big review of the subject in its magazine.
For this assignment, I was partnered up with Sadia. Like I said before, time is a privilege now so meeting up was a bit difficult since she was busy partying in the USA and I was being a social butterfly. However, when we did meet, we both agreed that magazines were doomed. Time was a big factor in our answer because we both agreed that sometimes we just don’t have those five required minutes to buy a magazine because those five minutes can be used for something else. We also agreed that we can get everything we want from our phones so a physical copy seems unnecessary. Basically unless we’re on the cover, having an actual copy of a magazine seems unlikely.
Now is the magazine doomed because of the internet? Yes. Is the magazine industry doomed itself? No. The magazine industry needs to find a way to translate a magazine on to the internet and the rest of technology out there. Magazines are already trying that, with the ipad supplying magazines on the ipad itself after a purchase. A lot of magazines are now adding additional articles and bonuses on their websites. Now the question is making the online magazine industry profitable. I don’t have an idea of how we can make it profitable but I do have faith. It took decades to figure out the formula for a successful magazine. Now we have to take the time to figure it out because once we figure out a successful formula, it will spread quicker than a Rihanna weave change.
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