The Death of the Magazine

what does art become when the form goes extinct?

Meanwhile, publications, still burdened with relics of a bygone era, like copy desks, fact checkers, human resource departments, and health care plans, find themselves locked in a losing battle against a nimbler opponent, one with none of the checks and balances that gum up the production of hot takes.

The economy is interconnected. There are a lot of reasons newspapers have died off. Some were out of their control. I imagine a future where there are plenty of local publications that serve their communities with smart reporting, structured data sets around important issues and great ad products for marketers.

One argument is that pre-internet, journalists had a more reliable source of revenue, enabling them to do more investigative work, and the business model shift to online advertising meant they'd now have to produce popular pieces more frequently.

The media ecosystem is in crisis because social media has a mental illness and traditional media has a physical illness. Today’s dominant social media platforms might make us angry and dumb, but they have functioning business models and, with the exception of X, financial stability. Today’s largest traditional media companies have the opposite prob... See more

In recent months, two macro trends have rocked the media industry: publications have pivoted hard to a subscription-first model, and thousands of journalists have been laid off.