https://www.thecity.nyc/2024/07/11/mta-newsstands-revenue-vacant/
Yikes, the link in 1 is fascinating and a bit grim.
I'm trying to be less internety by going back to things like books, but the issue is space and clutter is a real problem. Also, I have no attention span left.
Substacks are the new magazines, and seem to be doing ok. Just need them to introduce some kind of bundling.
4: as you would expect, he has an opinion about that.
Ted (and many others) tout Substack as a possible replacement for the print culture we've lost. Though I'm politically left-wing, it seems to me that Bari Weiss' The Free Press is the closest thing to what Ted is talking about.
But there's a real barrier to this happening. Two actually.
...
I'm still not reading Substack as I think it's a conspiracy to get me to give $5 to Matt Y.
Can someone explain this paragraph to me? I can't make heads or tails of any of it.
> The first is Substack's finances. Maybe they can keep this up, maybe not. But even if they can, a one publisher ecosystem is a catastrophe waiting to happen. You think censorship was bad in 1957? Look at how Musk has changed Twitter. People like Hearst were assholes, but they weren't reaching down to individual readers and dogpiling them for Wrong Thought.
Stipulating that analogies are all bad, I do really like the analogy to sports. It's absolutely true that team sports support a much larger number of successful professionals than individual sports. The financials of being the 100th best Tennis player in the world is absolutely brutal, because no one wants to watch the 100th best player on his own. But people go see a team to see the stars, and the rest of the players still make a lot of money. Changing writing from a team to individuals results in a much much smaller number of professionals (many of whom are making much more money).
What's interesting is something the linked article touched on briefly - not all magazines are dying.
Truly profitable print magazine publishing is nearly impossible for anything but niche publications with built-in ad bases. I'm sure Cigar Aficionado is doing just fine, and while The New Yorker may continue to shrink, I suspect VOGUE will perk along in some form until the Sun explodes
So what do they have that others don't? He complains, correctly, that humour magazines are competing against lots of free humour on the web. Cigar Aficionado does product reviews and celeb profiles - plenty of those around for free.
I suspect it's a number of things. Partly it's that Cigar Aficionado and Vogue can deliver a reasonably large number of eyeballs from a very well-defined and desirable demographic, and a general-interest humour magazine can't. We could all list, without even thinking about it, ten products which might want to advertise in Cigar Aficionado or Vogue. We can't do that for a humour magazine - its audience is too diverse and poorly defined.
Partly it's signalling - someone doesn't (just) read Vogue for the content, they read Vogue because they want to be a Vogue reader, just as they wear Gucci not because Gucci is durable, high-quality, and elegant, but because they want to be Gucci wearers.
Can someone explain this paragraph to me? I can't make heads or tails of any of it.
He's not very clear, but I think he's making two separate arguments. (1) We don't know if substack is viable in the long-term. It's growing but it also feels like a bit of a ponzi scheme -- currently there's a steady flow of new people interested in trying it, most of whom will never make money. But if they decide that substack doesn't offer advantages for new people starting out that may dry up and growth will stall. (2) Even if substack does survive long-term there's the risk of building a magazine that's designed around a specific platform, because you never know if that platform will remain sane. Look at Twitter/X, things went badly fairly quickly.
The thing is that I've clearly been identified as part of a well-defined demographic that is desirable for certain marketers. They've just decided they only want to reach me with Facebook.
Follow up to 10.1; I was just reading the following, and isn't directly analogous to Substack, but it is another cautionary tale about the business vulnerability of relying on a specific platform -- https://tedium.co/2024/08/13/patreon-apple-platform-risks/
But I do know that Patreon should never have been at risk of this awkward moment in the first place. This week, Conte announced that the company was having to reset its entire business model at the behest of Apple, a massive, inflexible company that wants three out of every ten dollars the internet creates just because it built a digital storefront on a pocket slab.
The video of Conte, having to basically switch up his entire company's way of doing business for the sake of a company facing an antitrust suit, is a fascinating document to be studied by MBAs years into the future:
I think Ajay nails it. There's what people want to read, and that's usually specific people, and there are brands people want to be associated with, and that's where magazines can still find a niche. Hell, Jacobin and n+1 nearly pulled this off a few years ago, and if you just described them in a sentence, you'd give them no chance, but they almost became identity markers.
Are those magazines considered to have failed at this point? I just saw Jacobin at a grocery checkout, but admittedly that was in Berkeley.
I also think the article in the OP is indulging in some (understandable) hyperbole. I don't think he believes that the market for print magazines is impossible (he's still publishing one), but he wants to push back against the idea that the problem is just that magazines don't respect their writers enough.
Cigar Afficionado The people who run trade magazines (well, Genetic Engineering News) refer to the news part of pages, the occassionally informative columns written by paid writers with knowledge of the industry, as "holes" because those parts of the page can't be sold. Cigar Afficionado, Vogue, Architectural Digest, these have relationships with their advertisers that general interest publications do not have.
I love magazines-- browsing bound old trade publications or old copies of Life or Popular Mechanics in libraries is basically a guilty pleasure and potentially a huge timesink. Contemporary magazines too.
It's sad to read this-- I was in CZ recently and picked up a literary magazine, things must be even worse in smaller markets. There were great experiments in what I think of as the recent past (median age here is now probably 50, yes?), Brill's Content, Lingua Franca. And before that Wired or Omni. My first job was at a newsstand with a big magazine section indoors.
About a third of any issue of n+1 works for me. There's a Cleveland Review of Books and also LARB that are new-ish, but obviously swimming against the tide.
Also magazines have people who catch formatting errors....
IIRC, Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, had some financial difficulty. I'm not sure that Vogue is profitable. I think Vogue is also more than a magazine.
10. Twitter went bad fairly quickly. But a lot of people who should know better still post there regularly, because where else is there?
Apple is a case of Gucci wearing Vogue reading. There's nothing intrinsically better about Apple products than the competition, but everybody but me and V wants a fucking iPhone. Because iPhone, apparently. V has one which was wished on her by a friend, and she hates it like poison. But the friend thought she was bestowing a big favour.
18. Anna Wintour's salary is reported as being $4M.
Does she need budgeting tips? Because I could make that work.
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Can someone recommend an alternative to google for search. It's driving me crazy
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I find it odd that Facebook recommends I friend someone with the same name as somebody I went to high school with but who is not that person. No obvious connection that I can see.
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Can someone recommend an alternative to google for search. It's driving me crazy
What browser do you use? I'd try looking for "udm=14 extension" and see if that works for you (it performs google search and adds a key to turn off the AI summary and give an older style results).
Merging the threads, this was an interesting piece by Anne Helen-Peterson about People magazine.
By 1977, People had reached three million in guaranteed circulation -- an absolutely wild number just three years after launch. People held that number for more than two decades, with massive (and massively profitable) direct sales at the newsstand. In the late '90s, guaranteed circulation hit 3.5 million; in the second half of 2002, sixteen consecutive issues of the magazine hit 1.5 million in newsstand sales alone, and total circulation reached 3.6 million.
...
But today's People Magazine is thinner, less glossy, and generally less substantive than its heyday. There are so many reasons for the magazine's declining influence, most of them related to its own stubbornness when it came to online content in the early 2000s, the ill-fated Time Inc. merger with AOL, the rise of the "new" unsanctioned scandal press in the form of upstart gossip blogs, the spread of celebrity social media, and the ongoing contraction of print media and print advertising.
And yet: the People brand is still incredibly lucrative. . . .
Also, MC, I posted the link from 1 in comments on the article and the author replied.
That is AMAZING and unsurprising. If I was part of New York City government, I would claim newsstands as an iconic Nyc thing, like Paris' pissoirs :-)
"If I was part of New York City government, I would claim newsstands as an iconic Nyc thing,"
And I think we've found the new bodega.
I suspect that a big reason for Vogue etc to continue to exist is also that it allows sleazy people easy access to models to exploit.
I was actually just noticing that 'newsstands' as such are almost gone, and there's a bit of a missing name for what's left in their place -- what used to be a newsstand is now mostly a rack of candy, gum and chips and a drinks fridge, but without the newspapers and magazine rack you can't really call it a newsstand any more.
Go back to my childhood and you'd call it a cigar store, not because cigars were all that large a part of what they sold, but most of the signs had ads for a cigar company on them. But that's obsolete too.
I'm starting to see signs saying "convenience store", which is a perfectly reasonable thing to call them, but it would have been odd to put it on a sign until recently.
In convenience store news out here, these egg salad sandwiches are an important development but true enlightenment will only come with onigiri.
Some of the ones here sell Spam musubi.
That's wild! Is there more AK/HI exchange than I realized?
20: She's well paid. That doesn't mean the company and its shareholders get good financial returns. But also, Vogue puts on sponsored events which aren't quite the same as making money on subscriptions and advertising in a paper or even online periodical. I believe that the Atlantic also has live events with roundtables and the like.
Apparently The Free Press is the highest revenue Substack publication: https://www.axios.com/2024/08/13/independent-journalists-substack-news
That's wild! Is there more AK/HI exchange than I realized?
Yes, there's a longstanding relationship that actually goes back to before either was part of the US. Anchorage in particular has a significant Polynesian cultural influence which is primarily Samoan but takes in aspects from various other areas.
Early on, yeah. More recently fishing, especially work in the canneries.
And, is spam cuisine also a thing in HI? I thought it was a postwar hellscape thing.
My great uncle apparently hated spam. And his family kept sending him spam because that's what the people said you were supposed to send to your son fighting in Italy. But I guess it keeps.
Developed locally, or via migrants from west Pac?
Originally brought by GIs, apparently, but quickly integrated into the local cuisine.
Spam musubi in particular presumably got its start among ethnic Japanese communities in Hawaii but, somehow, was just too darn appealing to stay in that niche.
My favorite thing about Spam is that it's short for "spiced ham." The spices are salt and sugar, because it's from Minnesota.
an alternative to google for search
Not sure what problems you're running into, but I've been using Kagi for a while and am happy with it. I think they still have a free tier.
28: "convenience store" is something a bit bigger, no? I'd expect convenience stores to be actual shops with doors, and to have a few household goods. Chiller cabinet, cereals, tinned food etc.
In the UK at least, what you're describing - a booth with a couple of racks of goods, where the owner stands inside behind a counter and the customer stands outside, would be a kiosk.-
And his family kept sending him spam because that's what the people said you were supposed to send to your son fighting in Italy.
Reminds me of George MacDonald Fraser's description of fighting in Fourteenth Army, which, being woke and diverse, had eleven (!) different ration scales for its troops, carefully worked out to be acceptable to each national, ethnic or religious group; so tinned stew and hard tack for British troops, rice and mutton for the Bengalis, and so on. And of course the troops all rapidly worked out that they preferred each others' rations to their own, so you had a complex web of food swapsies where the Gurkhas swapped chapattis and curry for tinned sardines and condensed milk etc...
1857 was quite the wake-up call, after all.
The rumour about cartridges being deliberately greased with beef tallow and pork fat was the latest in a long line of weird fake-news stories; as far back as 1806 Indian troops were convinced that the British were carefully sprinkling diluted pig blood over the sacks of salt intended for Muslim regiments. What's most notable, then and now, is how violent people get when they fear they're about to lose some position of relative status that allows them to trample on people further down the chain. High-caste Hindu soldiers in 1857 were terrified that they might lose caste and have to treat lower-caste street-sweepers as equals; high-caste white Americans in January 2021 were terrified that DEI would force them to work alongside, or worse yet underneath, lower-caste black and Hispanic people. Result, in both cases, hysterical violence.
And they weren't wrong in either case! A lot of Brits in India really did dislike the caste system and thought it should be got rid of. A lot of people in the US government really do think that there should be more non-white people in positions of authority.
What's most notable, then and now, is how violent people get when they fear they're about to lose some position of relative status that allows them to trample on people further down the chain. High-caste Hindu soldiers in 1857 were terrified that they might lose caste and have to treat lower-caste street-sweepers as equals; high-caste white Americans in January 2021 were terrified that DEI would force them to work alongside, or worse yet underneath, lower-caste black and Hispanic people. Result, in both cases, hysterical violence.
I'm currently reading Isabel Wilkerson's Caste and this is more or less exactly its thesis. It's an interesting read, definitely a journalistic popularization rather than a scholarly account but it engages more with the scholarship than is typical for that kind of book.
Re: magazines, it reminds me of comic books (American, specifically, focused mostly but not entirely on superheroes). 40 years ago they occupied the same spaces. Then a few famous IPs hit big milestone anniversaries and there was a speculators' boom in comic books. Then they developed an ecosystem of dedicated stores specializing in comic books. Then the industry churned out schlock to capitalize on that boom and it went bust soon after. It's funny to look at comic book fan magazines (back on topic) from the 90s and see what characters were considered A-list then and who was in fantasy casting to play them in movies. Actual comic book readership has declined meteorically but there's still a lot of interest in them because they're still tied to blockbusters.
So I guess the secret to saving magazines is getting Tom Holland to play Matt Taibbi in nine movies or something.
3
I'm trying to be less internety by going back to things like books, but the issue is space and clutter is a real problem. Also, I have no attention span left.
I address the problems of space and clutter by going to the library. The downside of it is getting a specific book/DVD may take days or even weeks if someone else has it checked out or its current location isn't the library nearest to me, but it's rare that I want to read one specific book ASAP.
No clue about the attention span thing, though. Sorry.
Actual comic book readership has declined meteorically
Isn't this the "traditional", e.g., superhero, comic segment? A lot more people read comics if you count manga in translation.
I don't count it. If you can't read Japanese, you are missing too much.
Elke reads an astounding quantity of Korean webtoons on her phone.
52: Fair point, and including American graphic novels (a.k.a. trade paperbacks) helps too. Notably those are both sold in conventional bookstores in addition to specialized comic book stores.
Someone still believes in print!
No Joke: The Onion Thinks Print Is the Future of Media/i>