As much as I liked Wired back in the day, I won't cry for Conde Nast. They are, um--h0w shall I say it?--not the most enlightened publishing conglomerate in the world.

I still can't believe Lucky qualifies as a magazine. It's like paying to be exposed to advertising. Come to think of it, so was EPCOT.

I feel that most mags are taking the route of Kmart and the GAP and training their subscribers to wait for the deep discount rates. I don't know what the answer is ( I subscribe to five magazines a year on average what more do you want) but I would hate to see magazines go away. I keep mine and reference them over and over again.

I used to be a voracious reader of Wired, both online and in print. When it came out, it was relevant, useful, and interesting, chock full of tech trends and analysis that actually mattered. These days, it seems far more a forum to sell products that the write about, and to promote specific interests in the IT world.

Part of the reason that old-style glossies are losing ad revenue, beyond the recession, is that people are finding that very few of them actually give anything of value to the customer. I know I keep harping on Salon as a model, but it makes a nice contrast to Wired in this case as well. Wired SHOULD have been a natural leader online, but they were, and are, mired in the old model of glossy magazines and large advertising budgets. Advertisers are starting to realize that they aren't getting the bang for buck that they used to from those kind of expenditures, and so they are taking much of their money away.

Lady mags are tanking? Best news I've heard all year. They have been treating average women like crap for ages. Now that they have to be about more than overpriced clothes and making women feel like shit, they don't have any resources (or reader goodwill) to fall back on.

And WIRED never really recovered from the dot-com implosion, which vastly reduced the amount of start-ups and new products to write about.

Devastating structural change.
Even brides.

The reason I unsubscribed from WIRED was not due to the recession, but due to its insane graphics, which often made the text unreadable.

How in the world does one read white type against a silver background?

It succeeded, I believe, because it was the only publication of its kind for a long time. I'm not surprised its revenues are down. Too many of us went blind trying to read it.

Hurrah!!

Most of the list is crap that deserves to die. (Not true, of course, for Architectural Digest, GQ or VF. And not true for Golf Digest, which serves its niche, and its niche boasts income, commitment and Tiger Woods.) But let's face it, we're in the same leaky lifeboat here. Maybe there ain't no hope in the old business model, but I'd personally like to see every print content provider (and their auxiliary websites) turn off the free tap at once and sue the shit out of any asshole aggregator who steals the product. Why reward freeloaders if we're doomed anyway?