The Future of Magazines
May 4th, 2009
Listening to the mighty Democracy Now, which on May 1 was broadcasting from Wisconsin (Wishconsin represent) to celebrate the 100th anniversary of The Progressive, a magazine founded in 1909 by badass Fighting Bob La Follette (below) a man who clearly never had any use for the ‘thumbpoint’ so beloved by modern day Democrats.
In the interview, The Progressive editor Math Roschild says something really interesting about the future of magazines. Instead of espousing the viewpoint that magazines need to go the Web 2.0 route or become aggregators for blogs, he goes the opposite route:
“So I think magazines, to the extent that they’re going to be able to survive and The Progressive is going to be able to survive, need to become more like books or need to take a higher altitude look at the news and do investigative reporting and give people analysis that they can’t find anywhere else. But if you just say what did Barack Obama say at his press conference yesterday, newspapers and magazines are going to go.”
Definitely food for thought, and something that will be chewed over by overzealous web evangelists who are fleeing the sinking ship of print media and leaping headlong for the web lifeboat without checking to see if it has any oars. (Not to name names, but, if a certain reporter from the Seattle Intelligencer is reading this, you know who you are).
