Magazine Decay: Difference between revisions

 

[[I Thought It Meant|Nothing to do with]] characters [[Bottomless Magazines|having to reload their guns more frequently]].

 

== Activism ==

* ''Details'' was originally an independently-owned gay activist magazine. It was bought out by Condé Nast and relaunched as ''Vogue'' for straight guys.

 

== Automotive ==

: Now, though, the pressure to appeal to the advertisers by not condemning anything and giving every car at least a somewhat positive review, not to mention significant tightening of editorial control has neutered the magazine and made it into a shallow, milquetoast version of itself. In 2009, it took a turn for the worse with the replacement of longtime editor-in-chief Csaba Csere with Eddie Alterman, leading to even blander writing and more sophomoric humor (which is really saying something, as the humor was already pretty crude by the end of Csere's tenure). ''Car and Driver'' is still arguably the best '''American''' car magazine, but with major chain bookstores carrying ''Car'' and ''[[Top Gear]] Magazine'' from the United Kingdom, you can really see [[What Could Have Been]].

** Ironically, C&D once ran a small article decrying rival mag ''MPH'''s infatuation with excessive references to one's posterior. ''MPH'' originally had Alterman as editor-in-chief.

 

== [[Film]] ==

* ''[[Star Wars]] Insider'' used to have interesting articles that really were considered to be "insider"—concept art, exclusive features on the [[Star Wars Expanded Universe|expanded universe]], behind-the-scenes features on the "Lost Cut" of ''[[A New Hope]]'' and the marketing of the films, etc. Now, it's only good for retreading the movies and advertising ''Star Wars'' merchandise. Once in a while, the magazine will have a genuinely great issue (as they did with their issue-wide tribute to ''[[The Empire Strikes Back]]''), but most of the time it's just promotion for another property associated with the franchise.

* Less well-known is ''Star Wars Galaxy Magazine'', which hit this trope with record speed. When it premiered in 1995, the magazine focused on a variety of aspects of the ''Star Wars'' universe—toys, radio dramas, comic books, novel excerpts, and the evolution of the series over the years plus exclusive features and columns. The magazine also included rare collector cards, one-shot comics, and posters. After three years, the magazine changed to ''Star Wars Galaxy Collector'' and most of the content was jettisoned in favor of appealing to toy collectors. The "new" magazine was canned after eight issues.

* Most of the earliest ''[[Entertainment Weekly]]'' readers remember it as the magazine that covered ''[[The Simpsons (animation)|The Simpsons]]'' and ''[[The X-Files]]'', since they brought the magazine the most success (along with ''Star Wars'' stories as [[The Nineties]] wore on). But it also stood out from other entertainment industry-focused weekly mags (like ''People'' and ''US Weekly'') with its in-depth coverage of movies and TV, treating celebrities as real people/artists rather than gossip fodder, and nurtured under-appreciated hits, like ''[[Arrested Development (TV series)|Arrested Development]]'' and ''[[The Wire]]''. But since 2008's major administration change, the magazine has gotten a bit wonky. With the decline of printed media, ''EW'' has focused much more on their web content, and the mag's usual depth diminished as a result. Compare a 1990s issue to a recent one, and the difference is noticeable. The TV coverage is mostly limited to longtime TV writer Ken Tucker, for instance. The coup de grace to many longtime readers, which coincided with the 2008 changeover, was an infatuation with ''[[Twilight (novel)|Twilight]]'', presumably to attract its fanbase into purchasing the magazine. While their borderline manic coverage has toned down since 2010, the multiple covers and articles turned off non-fans before then (in the second half of '09, covers seemed to alternate between ''Twilight'' and [[Michael Jackson]] retrospectives).

* ''US Weekly'' has spent so long being the trashy tabloid we all know and loathe that few remember that it actually used to be a pretty good monthly entertainment magazine called ''Us''. By the end of [[The Nineties]], however, decay set in as they switched to pure cheap celebrity gossip and photos, then became a weekly. Currently it's "''Teen Mom'': The Magazine", with someone who appeared on the show getting the cover spot every single week. Not only is it annoying, but it sets a bad example for teenagers.

* The UK's ''Heat'' magazine started out as the closest thing Britain had to ''Us'', but then EMAP decided that in a magazine landscape filled with stuff about the soaps, fashion, gossip, and body Fascism what the people wanted was... another mag filled with stuff about the soaps, fashion, gossip, and body Fascism. [[Viewers are Morons|Unfortunately, they were right.]]

 

** In a fictional example, on ''[[30 Rock]]'', Jack Donaghy once commented that ''Jet'' was originally a magazine for airplane owners, and wonders how the editors could have made that drastic a change.

* ''Newsweek'', once situated just behind ''Time'' as one of America's most respected newsmagazines, has fallen far from its once-lofty perch, causing detractors to nickname it "News''weak''". The decay began once the Washington Post Company (which owned ''Newsweek'' from 1961 until 2010) bought ''[http://www.slate.com/ Slate]'' from Microsoft in 2004, with staff writers like Daniel Gross and Dahlia Lithwick brought over from the site and the magazine starting to take on its style. Coverage drastically shifted away from firsthand and secondhand information gathering and towards opinion pieces, prompting one letter in the Feedback column to ask, "Where's the news?"

* ''[http://www.listener.co.nz The New Zealand Listener]'', since Pamela Stirling took over as editor in 2004. Its focus on serious current affairs was diluted in favour of an increased consumerist-lifestyle approach.

 

== Politics ==

* ''Maclean's'' is roughly the Canadian equivalent of ''Time'', and while it's always had a fairly prominent editorial board, it was seldom overt in its politics. Accompanied with a questionable aesthetic makeover (very quickly dropped after many reader complaints) were fairly sensationalist headlines and some genuinely controversial articles from a source that simply wasn't known for it. Its treatment of Stockwell Day practically finished any respect a lot of Western Canadians had for it.

** ''Time'' '''artificially darkened''' the mugshot photo of OJ Simpson to make him seems scarier and were called out on it. [[The Daily Show|Jon Stewart]] declared it the day Print Media "[[Jumped the Shark]]".

* The Brazilian equivalent of ''Time'', ''Veja''. They used to be a standpoint of good journalism, specially as they started the same year the military dictatorship got stronger and censored the magazine copiously for about 15 years. But in the 2000s it started being tarnished by both a right-wing political bias and questionable cover choices (which were at times done to avoid subjects they didn't want to talk about). Add that in 2012 the editors and journalists were accused of suffering influence by a convicted lobbyist...

 

 

== [[Tabletop Games]] ==

: After [[Wizards of the Coast]] bought out TSR, they contracted the writing of ''Dragon'' and its sister ''Dungeon'' to another company, Paizo. Around the time the new edition of ''D&D'' was announced, Wizards ended their contract with Paizo and relaunched the two magazines as online-only, as it exists right now. Paizo launched their own magazine, ''Pathfinder'', which has everything they used to put in the other two magazines.

: Even then, the decay proper didn't set in until Guy Haley left as editor. Soon after that, ''White Dwarf'' became a glorified catalog with even the editorial pieces previously used for a bit of humorous commentary given over to telling you what the new releases this month were (in case you missed the ten solid pages of them). Not only has the magazine become increasingly content-free, but it's actually been getting much slimmer, so the number of pages given over to advertising the latest shinies increases even while the total number of pages decreases. It's like magazine decay ''squared''. Oh, and the price has been going up all the while.

: In its defense, though, the cover does read "[[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|Games Workshop's Monthly Hobby Supplement and Miniatures Catalogue]]". It also seems to be improving with the recent ''[[Tank Goodness|Spearhead]]'' expansion.

* The [[ZX Spectrum]] magazine ''Your Spectrum'' was once a magazine discussing all sorts of software and hardware related issues, with type-in listings for every kind of application from games to business programs, and always a subtle undercurrent of subversive humour. When it was renamed and relaunched in 1986 as ''Your Sinclair'' (a change made due to the reports that the replacement for the ZX Spectrum probably wouldn't be called a Spectrum - it was), it became a magazine that occasionally discussed games and spent the rest of the time being completely off the wall (one issue came with a free copy of ''[[Viz]]''!).

: The kicker? Most people think these changes were for the ''better''. The rot set in for good around 1990 when Future Publishing bought the mag and prices started spiralling, page numbers fell, and the system itself was on the wane... although it took a further three years to finally fold, by which time the main discussions in the magazine were about PCs ''emulating'' it!

** In the early ''MacAddict'' era, they would do "fun" things like Photoshop the entire staff's facial features into a "new" person, video-tape themselves destroying PCs, review children's games with actual children, allow users to write in their own "reasons why the Mac is better than a PC", and include funny stories and pictures in the letters section. They also had a stick-figure mascot named Max who was also used in their ratings system (Freakin' Awesome!, Spiffy!, Yeah, Whatever, and Blech!), and even included a full cartoon page in the back. By 2002, pretty much all of this was gone and literally every page was plain text on white backgrounds, with virtually no humor to be seen; in short, a magazine version of [[Cerebus Syndrome]].

*** And now they should just rename themselves "iLife" and be done with it, since every single article seems to be about the iPhone or iPad. There is very little coverage of actual Mac computers anymore.

** It's also safe to assume that at least a few gaming magazines bit the dust thanks to the rise of free walkthroughs and previews on the internet. ''Electronic Gaming Monthly'' was bought out by another company which [[Executive Meddling|immediately axed all the staff of the magazine]] and canned the title. In 2010, they returned when the original founder of the magazine bought the rights to it back and rehired a bunch of the writers, as well as other respected game journalists.

* ''EGM'' itself was also a victim of this Trope before its cancellation. It began as, essentially, "Famitsu America". However, as advertiser dollars dried up, the magazine employed numerous ''[[Maxim]]''-like gimmicks to keep reader interest that were only tangentially related to video games (such as interviews with [[Goodfellas|Henry Hill]] and various E3 "booth babes" who clearly didn't know how to use the medium they were advertising on their T&A).

** The magazine also got thinner and thinner over time, although a lot of this was probably the decrease in advertisements. Someone on the interwebs somewhere did a comparison — for some magazines, pagination has ''increased''...but thickness has decreased due to using thinner, cheaper paper.

** Averted in the reincarnation of ''EGM''. It's almost exclusively about gaming, even as it proudly lists "iPhone" and "iPad" as the consoles it covers. To be fair, mobile gaming is getting rather big, so long as ''EGM'' only focuses on the gaming part of it.

** For that matter, they used to be pretty good about actually playing the games, even delaying the review for ''[[World of Warcraft]] Burning Crusade'' specifically so they can play it more in-depth. Nowadays? You can spot their low-budget reviews/games whose publishers didn't drop enough advertisement money...their ''[[Tales of Legendia]]'' review was practically trashing the game because it wasn't ''[[Tales of Symphonia]]'' and barely mentioned what it was '''about'''. Their ''[[Halo]]'' reviews also pretty much '''only''' mentioned Multiplayer, or mentioned Single Player for a bit and then spent the rest of the review heaping praise on the Multiplayer.

* Averted by ''Gamefan'', which only had one botched scoring in its long run, they apologized for it, and then they died out due to oversaturation prior to the internet, though when they began adding an anime section there were fears of this. (Which turned out unfounded; the editor personally wanted them in to drum up sales of anime he liked/warn people about those he found terrible.) As costs grew so did the amount of ads, but they tried their damnedest not to lose pages to the ads. Also, they had a comic series which starred the avatars of the reviewers, which caused cries of this when it ended as it put a handful of game refs in sequential order with what they were reviewing. Nifty idea.

* ''[[Daily Radar]]'', however, is a different story- beginning as an ''IGN'' lookalike for the US market, the site closed, but not before extending the brand to the UK, which remained open. Eventually, the UK site rebranded to ''Games Radar'', and reduced its original content in favour of reprinting content from [[Future Publishing]]'s print portfolio. After Future acquired ''[[Computer and Video Games]]'', it took on the "all reprints" mantle, and GR re-focused to light-hearted features with the odd review to give Future three games sites — CVG in the comprehensive coverage IGN space, jokey Games Radar, and Edge doing industry news. Daily Radar soon re-emerged as an aggregator site for Future's male-oriented online content.

* ''Official Playstation Magazine'' dipped into this briefly, when it started giving increasing coverage to other products. A couple pages of DVD reviews made sense (as the [[PlayStation 2]] was the first DVD player many people owned), but did enough people really use the [[PS 1]]'s music CD playing function to justify a page of album reviews, even if all the albums were by artists whose songs were featured in [[Skate Heaven Is a Place on Earth|skateboard games]] and the like? And two or three for toys, many of them not related to video games? And a page of weird weblinks? And a page or two on general movie news? Luckily, this decay was reversed a few years into the run of the [[PlayStation 2]].

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

[[Category:Print Media Tropes]]

[[Category:Index Decay]]

[[Category:YMMV Trope]]

[[Category:Depressing Tropes]]