Comments on: Why did the readers stop reading?

By: D

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:40:39 +0000

Isn’t it only photographers that buy magazines these days?

By: olivier laude

olivier laude — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:21:55 +0000

Indeedee….most mags are glorified junk mail….So unless you’re into coupons why buy them…

By: ProPhotographer

ProPhotographer — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:58:57 +0000

On the photography side….

The bean counters decided they’d slash costs and that digital photography was easy and cheap so they drew up restrictive contracts to grab our rights and decided to make us jump through hoops to get paid.

They ended up having to hire the noobs and the desperate who threw in all-rights for peanuts and guess what? They produced crap photography.

No shit Sherlock.

Once a magazine brand starts cost-cutting by squeezing it’s regular suppliers so hard it’s just not worth the effort to do the gigs the quality suffers, the readership declines and so does the ad-revenue.

A big festering vicious circle which started when magazines just looked at profits and not the *quality* of their content. It was the content that the quality providers supplied which attracted the readers and advertisers in the first place; and ultimately gave them the profits they wanted to increase.

Bit like a race car team putting remould tyres on to save money and losing the race.

Do these people go to business school?

By: Thomas Pickard

Thomas Pickard — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 01:31:22 +0000

I can think of two magazines that I used to buy nearly every month, both from the US. They were full of great content and I would read them end-to-end. Then they started to change. More ads, fewer features, diluted ‘advertorial’ product / gear reviews. One day I just stopped buying them.

By: Andrew Lamb

Andrew Lamb — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:15:36 +0000

“So. The current wisdom is that journalism is in crisis because advertisers don’t advertise.”

I don’t think anybody, apart from a lazy journalist, would put it as simplistically as this.

By: Bruce DeBoer

Bruce DeBoer — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:58:31 +0000

Yup – similar to why stock photography is so uninspiring. True?

By: c.d.embrey

c.d.embrey — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:28:40 +0000

“You can rob me. You can starve me and you can beat me and you can kill me. Just don’t bore me!”
– Gunnery Sgt. Tom Highway (Clint Eastwood), Heartbreak Ridge

By: Jonathan Worth

Jonathan Worth — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:18:38 +0000

@Peter Garner, Hah, Hilarious, I remember vividly in 2001 “discussing” with the then managing editor at a Conde Nast magazine, London, how they justified paying a photographer £150 a page (inclusive of all expenses) whilst charging their advertisers absurd thousands for the privilege of sitting opposite it.

Her answer was that “I (the photographer) was paying to sit next to their advert”

I asked if her readers bought the magazine to read stories or adverts ?

Apparently you bought them to read the stories – who’d of thought ????

By: Peter Garner

Peter Garner — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:11:15 +0000

In the UK at least, the magazines that I used to buy (and that was quite a few) eventually became huge wads of glossy sheaves of advertisements with small articles squeezed in between them. Eventually I just stopped buying..