Magazine Decay: Difference between revisions

Some changes can be chalked up to the changing landscape of print media, especially considering the competition with new media—traditional comics give way to [[Web Comics]] with an [[Infinite Canvas]], news magazines give way to news websites that can be easily up to date, actual print give way to e-books and the internet, and so on.

 

 

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

== [[Comedy]] ==

* ''[[Mad (Magazine)|Mad]]'' has been decaying for so long that it's become a [[Running Gag]] at the magazine. In their 400th issue, they joked, "The second issue of Mad goes on sale on December 9, 1952. On December 11, the first-ever letter complaining that Mad 'just isn't as funny and original like it used to be' arrives.". Another joke claims that ''MAD'' [[Nostalgia Filter|was best when you first started reading it]], and if you never liked it, then it was best ''just before'' you first started reading it. Signs of ''actual'' decay, however, would include its budget cutback in the late '00s, forcing it to dump its two sister mags (''MAD Kids'' and ''MAD Classics'') and, for a time, switch from a monthly format to quarterly (currently it's bimonthly). At the [[Turn of the Millennium]] it started running real ads and publishing articles plugging other people's comedy -- stuff they would have gleefully derided in their glory days. The ads also cut down on the content per issue: The page count was increased by less than the number of pages taken up by ads.

* Arguably, ''Puck'' (roughly, the more political, 19th Century precursor to ''[[Mad]]'') after [[Author Existence Failure|creator and main artist Joseph Keppler died in 1894]] and was replaced by [[Suspiciously Similar Substitute|his son, Udo]]. The actual decay took some time, as between the elder Keppler’s death and the turn of the century, some of the magazine’s most famous and enduring cartoons were produced.

 

* ''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.

* [http://snarkweighsin.blog-city.com/sowspoof.htm This blog post] complains that ''[[Soap Opera]] Weekly'' devoted most of its cover that week to ''[[American Idol]]'', which is '''not''' (despite the cover) a soap. Or maybe it is -- hard to tell with all the [[Filler]]. In any case, the decline of U.S. network soaps made change inevitable. With only ''four'' such shows remaining in 2012, ''Soap Opera Weekly'' came to an end that year, making way for the unfortunate (but probably more appealing) ''Reality Weekly''.

 

== Mechanics ==

== [[Music]] ==

* ''Rolling Stone'' has done this several times over the course of its run. It began in 1967 as a rock version of older genre-specific music magazines (such as ''Down Beat'' and ''Sing Out''), with some pretensions toward being a hippie version of ''Newsweek''. <ref>As early as 1972, they endorsed George McGovern for President and ran [[Hunter S Thompson]]'s famous ''Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72'' series of articles; further, they had P.J. O'Rourke on their masthead for 20 years.</ref> By the mid-to-late 1970s it became a corporate rock fanzine (they were notoriously slow to pick up on [[Punk Rock]]), and by the 1980s it was pretty much ''People'' for pretentious folks. The mid-1980s success of ''Spin'' forced ''Rolling Stone'' back into a music-heavy format, which it followed for the rest of the century. The rise of the Web gave them strong competition in the music coverage arena, forcing them to look for another hook... which they found in left-wing political reporting. Lately, they've been cutting down on the length of their news coverage and returning to music, which has drawn charges of decay from people who were fans of their political articles — they often exceeded "legitimate" news sources in scope, with Matt Taibbi in particular becoming a significant name in journalism.

* ''VIBE'' magazine kinda got this hard when the new editor took over in the late 1990s. Then readers started seeing non-urban artists like [[No Doubt]] appearing on the cover, which is likely the magazine's attempt at avoiding [[Pop Culture Isolation]].

* After a regime change in 1996, ''Sassy'', a teen magazine that had come to cater to female fans of indie rock music, became a bimbo teen-girl mag in the vein of ''Seventeen''. Naturally, it failed pretty quickly with the audience it had before, and it was gone within a year.

* ''U.S. News and World Report'' used to be even more hardcore hard news than ''Time'' in its heyday and TV ads for subscriptions presented that as a point of pride. But it too succumbed to the banal and shallow, in particular putting out a Special Christianity Issue every few months. Aaaaand now it's online only.

* One of Johnson Publication's flagship books, ''Jet'', used to clock in at a decent 80+ pages chock full of interesting national news about black Americans and civil rights. For example, it published unedited photos of Martin Luther King, Jr. after his assassination while most media outlets glossed over his murder. It also had a bikini centerfold, usually on Page 43. Nowadays, the centerfold pretty much appears anywhere near the back because the magazine on average barely reaches ''35'' pages anymore, and most of the civil rights coverage and national news has been shafted in favor of celebrity fluff.

* ''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?"<br /><br />After a few years of rapidly shrinking circulation, combined with growing indifference for news magazines in general, ''Newsweek'' was sold to the 90-year-old founder of a speaker company, who paid a pittance of $1 plus debt for the title. Soon after, it merged with ''The Daily Beast'', the current pet project of bouncer-around and failed CNBC talk show host Tina Brown, which is considered [[The Poor Mans Substitute|a highly inferior competitor]] to ''The Huffington Post''. Not surprisingly, every name writer with the magazine fled anywhere else upon seeing the blood on the wall and facing Brown's diva reputation.<br /><br />Since then, it's devoted covers to stuff like the trashy erotica novel ''Fifty Shades of Grey'', [[Fan Service]]-y pictures of [[Sarah Palin]] in [http://www.yenra.com/wiki/images/Sarah-palin-newsweek-cover.jpg form-fitting workout gear], and sensationalistic headlines asking [http://www.akawilliam.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/newsweek_racist_baby-226x300.jpg "is your baby racist?"] They've also run [http://www.newsweek.com/id/236999 an inflammatory article] claiming that openly gay actors like [[Will and Grace (TV)|Sean Hayes]] and [[Glee (TV)|Jonathan Groff]] come off as self-hating, artificial and too gay in straight roles, which sparked massive backlash from Ryan Murphy, [[Kristin Chenoweth]] and other supporters of the LGBT community.

** The [[Magazine Decay]] of both ''Time'' and ''Newsweek'' is made all the more ironic with the success in the past two decades of ''[[The Economist]]'', which so far [[Averted Trope|averts]] this trope pretty hard.

== Technology ==

* More from Brazilian magazines, ''Info'' was about computers and technology. In the 1990s? Programming hints, tips for power users, reviews of useful and high-quality hardware and software, and ads for pretty much anything computer-related you might need. Now? The internet made the magazine pretty much useless and boring for anybody with computer-themed interests beyond gadgets and games.

** This was pretty much universal for hobbyist-oriented computer magazines in general from the time they first emerged in the 1970s; each of them would start drifting away from hobbyists, geeks, and computer enthusiasts into the more lucrative corporate business computing market, but most would fail at this and go defunct, to be replaced by a new generation of magazines following a similar trajectory.

* 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]]''!).<br /><br />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!