Is print dead? If you ask the over 100 publications that have ceased production due to the current economic climate, then yes, print has died. But if you go to your corner newsstand or mall bookstore you’ll see a vast collection of beautiful printed material ranging from high-end fashion magazines, to gardening, photography, cars and skateboarding. Sure, some of these magazines may be hurting and had to cut the fat but they are still here. Print is not dead; it’s on a sabbatical. Think of it like this. You were in love with print for so long and it was a good relationship, you were happy—content. But then sexy ass Internet grew up and started doing things that print was just physically unable to do. And you liked it. Internet showed you things that you never thought possible—Two Girls And A Cup wouldn’t have translated well between the pages of a magazine.
The relationship between print and Internet media is different then what we experienced back in the late ‘80s and in the ‘90s when CDs became more popular that cassette tapes. CDs were the new wave of digital music, it sounded better, you can put more music on a CD, and they just stacked up cleaner on your bookshelf.
Magazines aren’t dying because they don’t have the quality of writing or photography that you find on a blog or an “on-line” magazine. The reason why magazines are falling like flies is because of money, more specifically, advertising money. The price it cost for a company to continually run advertising in a monthly magazine could easily run up to the six figure range. Sure after awhile they would get a discount but still…that’s a lot of cash for hocking your goods. When marketing budgets started shrinking so did the advertising in magazines and being that’s how magazine survive…you can see where this going. The Blogs that have made a name for themselves with a million hits a day and nice design realized that they had the upper hand over magazines by selling ad space to companies for a lesser price.
Call me old school or whatever but I don’t see how a physical magazine or newspaper can be replaced by a computer screen, publications have something that online media doesn’t have—a soul. When a magazine is being created its art. When a Blog post is being created its cut and paste and then upload. I don’t think magazines or newspapers will totally be disregarded in the same way as the VHS or the cassette just because print still has a relevant position within society. We just have to wait out the recession and everything will be ok. The same thing happened to skateboarding and look how well that turned out.
Maurice Pendarvis
Unemployed Editor-In-Chief