It’s no small wonder magazines are folding.
Here’s what happened yesterday:
I filled out an application to join MediaBistro and it asked me whether I wanted a free subscription to New York, Wired, Gourmet or W magazines. Erm…Wired?
And then I thought, speaking of magazines, where the Murray Perahia have my New Yorkers and Vanity Fairs gone off to? And why didn’t I get the last two issues of my beloved Domino, may she rest in peace. So I got on the horn with Conde Nast, only to learn that they had removed a “3” from my address for no apparent reason, but that they would start sending my magazines again next week. Oh, and did you get a letter asking about where to transfer your Domino subscription to? No. Well, do you want Architectural Digest for the next 2 years? I mean, I guess?
Then I bought tickets to something at Joe’s Pub, and was told again that I got a free subscription to New York magazine, which I guess means that, via Joe’s Pub purchases, I have a 3-year subscription?
Forget giving their content away for free online; they’re giving away the print versions, too! I think the last time I wrote a check to a magazine, it was for $12 which got me another 2-year subscription to Domino plus a gift subscription that I sent to my grandmother. Apparently my 12 bucks were not, in fact, enough to keep the magazine afloat.
And in other news-news, when I was on vacation a few weeks back, a stapled series of pages called “TimesDigest” arrived at the door every morning where the actual New York Times used to be. So, presumably, instead of shipping the newspapers to Costa Rica, where I was, they e mail the hotels the highlights and the hotels print/photocopy in-house. Fine by me and the environment, but probably not ideal for the Times. Unless the shipping and printing costs were getting prohibitively expensive, and at least this way their brand stays out there?
I think that you’re mistaking cause for effect a bit here: the dead-tree media’s ongoing death spiral is _resulting_ in the grasping at straws such as giving away subscriptions to print editions.
The theory behind that has two parts. The first — preserving the total-subscriber numbers which are the basis for advertising rates — kind of exposes what has always actually been the core business model in the magazine biz.
The second — “we just need to get some people to give our stuff a look and then they’ll decide to pay for it” — is just a new application of an old and now-discredited idea from the performing-arts world.