Here’s a good read about the future of weekly news magazines (Time, Newsweek etc) in the expanding online and mobile world. The article is as relevant to our own Bulletin magazine (which incorporates Newsweek). Here’s a quote from the article by Matthew Flamm.
Like newspapers, which have seen an acceleration of their decline in the last year, the newsmagazines must either find ways to extend their brand or face a slide toward extinction, as happened with the Saturday Evening Post and the original Life.
The article is another in a long line of wake up calls for news magazine publishers to embrace online (and I’d say podcasting) to build relevance to the consumers who rely more on those delivery mechanisms than the more traditional printed product.
As discussed elsewhere here, Newsweek has taken some steps to embrace podcasting and Business Week is making good strides with blogging. Time will tell if these steps are enough.
Enough consumers have moved from aggregated product – whole magazines, whole television shows, whole newspapers, whole CDs – to what interests them more: specific songs, stories and photos for publishers to have to respond. This disaggregation (unpackaging if you will) is something media companies will have to embrace to reach the younger and more mobile audience. It is also the biggest threat to the traditional news and information supply chain.