Category: Let's talk
Hi do any of you know what ever happened to this great magazine are there others like out there online that are free? Haven't seen a new one of these for months wonder why they would close down?
It's always too bad when you see something close down. I liked the Ziegler in its hayday. I had recently cancelled my subscription to it, was getting quite bored with the new incarnation of the magazine, but still it is sad that they couldn't turn it around and have apparently closed down. It was a venerable magazine in its day.
I never knew about this publication until recently.
However, there may be a reason for this: Now, there is so much free and low-cost information available on the Internet, and in the blogosphere, that many magazines are having trouble keeping subscribers. Part of this is financial, sure. If you paid $24.95 a year per subscription, and Matilda Ziegler had ads from targeted advertisers, at one time you could see quite a revenue stream. Again, I don't know about this publication, but this very same problem affects the entire magazine / newsstand industry.
Next to cost, you have markets and targeting. Magazines that try and "look web-ish" in their pages are trying to attract new subscribers, keep up with the times,and so on. This comes with varying degrees of success, since people who liked the magazine look and feel now are a bit put off: they can go get a similar look and feel by searching the blogosphere.
The entire publishing industry is experiencing what the Catholic Church did after the rise of the printing press and during the reformation. No longer are they the source for all things informational. You could publish blogs on the same information that Matilda did, with maybe a slightly different slant. You may not be the professional journalist that Matilda's contributors are, but most people are just not that picky.
My daughter has had the same problems when checking out photo journalism as a career. She's one of those nature photographers who could spend three hours photographing a single leaf. But most people can't really appreciate her work, and don't know the difference between a quick snap of an autofocused cell phone camera, and the workmanship produced by her higher-end camera and lighting.
In my boyhood, before the Internet, she would have had no trouble at all working for Field and Stream or some other outdoors magazine producing this kind of spread.
Content producers - even specialized content producers - like probably Matilda Ziegler is, and certainly the Wall Street Journal or the Economist is, simply can't compete with free.
Not just free in price: freedom of exchange. Blogs have instant comments, shares to Facebook and Twitter, comments about comments, and so on. The interchange of ideas can be quite noisy at times, and certainly can create the same kind of echo chamber effect of yesteryear where people read what they agree with and ignore the rest. But that's really hard for a publication to compete with.
Any publication that released any articles at all in Year 2014 had to do a lot of work to do so that they didn't in 2004, or certainly 1994.
publications have fewer staff: The reporter or journalist has to do all the work now. Not just be the writer, but go out and get the pictures, sell advertising, and so on. Of course, that has raised some journalistic ethics concerns.
Now some might argue that some of the largest outfits still exist and seem to be doing well. New York Times, National Review, Wall Street Journal, and so on. They are still in business, but I wouldn't say they are doing okay. They're struggling in ways the industry simply doesn't know how to cope with.
Consider that the media / content / publication industry has had the sole monopoly on content distribution for an upwards of 500 years. Certainly since the broadsides of the 1800s, but long before that. They were the first step after nobility controlled all content dissemination. You and I cannot imagine such monopolistic preeminence. Whether they can survive the competition is a matter of natural selection.
In the words of Charles Darwin, "It is not the strongest species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."
Add to that, natural selection is extremely wasteful. Most experiments ultimately fail, even if they had preeminence for a very long time.
The content dissemination industries simply have had no real competition for eons in business time. Without that, they have never grown up enough to reimagine their world.
This is not a hit against Matilda Ziegler, a magazine I have no right to say one way or the other since I have never subscribed to it. But in general, my guess is that within 50 years we will not see content distribution as an industry anymore.
We live in historic times. The priests / witch doctors who used to control what we the masses got access to have simply lost their power. The only power the content providers had was exclusivity of ownership.
I'm not trying to be critical of individual people, or even the industry: doesn't matter what industry we're talking about. If there is no real competition of ideas, no new challenges to how things get produced or distributed, the fattest industry will eventually die. The laws of natural selection simply guarantee nothing.
It shut down several months ago. I used to read it on NFB Newsline, and there was an announcement when it closed. I did enjoy the special notices section but really didn't get much from any of the other sections.