This past week, i've been listening to A Life Well Wasted, which was presenting an episode about the death of Electronic Games Monthly. Amongst other tales, however, one of the sub themes was the general lament that blogs and other more immediate options have killed off long form magazines.
Now, granted, there's some validity to that, but let's not forget that in an era when a game can be released, made available, promoted, played, completed and shelved within a month, it's going to be a bit hard to justify purchasing a monthly publication that describes what you already discovered. Hell, you can download games directly onto your platform of choice, so you needn't get off your sofa to get thee to the game store in many cases.
Still, what struck me was that folks were lamenting the death of the glossy paged monthly publication that they loved. Honestly, that struck me as folks weeping about the death of rotary phones.
Folks are still going to want to consume the data. i still want someone's advice or suggestion about whether or not a game is actually playable and worth the $5-$60 i may plunk down for it. A magazine is merely one way to provide that. There are other ways.
We're a commuting society, but our methods of commute are different than most of the rest of the planet. We don't pile on buses or trains and are more likely to be part of a carpool or driving ourselves than standing shoulder to shoulder with our proletariat brethren. Publishers could take advantage of that and do things like make podcasts, PDFs, and other forms of content that can be electronically delivered onto the various gizmos and gadgets that we use. Hell, i listen to podcasts while driving and waiting around because an MP3 player fits in the pocket better than a magazine.
If you've been reading this, you know darn well that i keep saying that the time is ripe for Golden Age Radio type shows to re-emerge onto the new stage. Heck, the most popular podcasts are shows from NPR and PRI. No reason that the same thing can't happen with newspapers and magazines. In fact, at least one has. (Note: while it's possible to show this on the Sony PRS-505, you may need a jeweler's loupe to read it. As for the iTouch, sure do wish there was a way to load PDFs directly onto the device so that the apps could render them, Apple. Ok, so pretty much any mobile device short of the laptop had problems with rendering that file, but hey, it's a start.)
Getting away from buggy whips is a good idea for more than the music and movie industry, huh?
