The future of magazines

There are many views as what is the future of magazines. Some believe that printed magazines will not stand a chance against the ongoing challenge presented by the Web and all its new platforms. Others believe that even though new devices have been created to take over the printed magazine business, they will not cease to exist.  

Nancy Gibbs – a noted essayist and editor at Time magazine was interviewed in the Katie Couric show and together they discussed the future of magazines. In the interview Nancy Gibbs stated that the problem with an online article “was that writers who produce long pieces of work were going to have an issue once they went online, since users would not feel the same way about clicking an online article for sixteen pages- this was asking too much out of people”.  She also mentioned that since new devices have been developed for reading purposes like the Nook and Ipad, people most likely will not have an issue with reading lengthy articles on those devices.

A concern that was raised was about journalism. Nancy Gibbs was asked how will journalism was going to be compensated if people did not want to pay for the content in the web? Since on a recent interview only 7% of Americans said they were willing to pay for online news. The rest said that if their journal of preference put a price on their online articles they would not pay it and would choose to go elsewhere.

On a different article Cathie Black spoke about the industry as well. She said that “we are all working under a new business model. The problem is that the revenue model is not there yet”. She expressed that the “Amazon's Kindle is a phenomenal entry into the marketplace, but it's not a great reading experience, and it certainly isn't a great reading experience for a magazine reader because we are about a graphic presentation. We are about beautiful photography, illustration and great writing, so I think that we'll see that in this generation--whether it's via the Apple tablet or another device. There will be dozens of devices. We want to think about how we move content, illustration and photography across multiple [platforms]”.