Filed under: journalism, magazines | Tags: Arena, British magazines, British media, Loaded, Maxim, Wired
The future of glossy, monthly magazines is looking increasingly shaky as news of the demise of men’s magazine Maxim is revealed this week. The magazine can no longer sustain its print version so is now confined solely to the web. This, of course, throws up all kinds of worrying questions about the future of print magazines in general, especially after the recent death of Arena and Eve. Perhaps the future of magazines is inevitably going to be online, a terrifying thought for any aspiring magazine journalist.
The launch of a different kind of men’s mag this week, Wired, does something to dispel this view however. Primarily a technology and lifestyle magazine with the tagline: ‘The future as it happens,’ Wired has jumped into the market at exactly the right time.
image courtesy of http://www.wired.co.uk
So, perhaps it’s not the demise of print journalism that we should be worried about, rather a shift in mood that the likes of Arena and Maxim have not been able to catch up with.
James Brown, former Loaded editor wrote in today’s Observer: “There are many reasons why the monthly men’s magazines sector is collapsing. They became to narrow in focus, driven mainly by covers selling sex, and they were rendered less relevant by the arrival of weeklies (Nuts and Zoo), frees (Shortlist and Sport) and specialist male newspaper supplements (The Mail on Sunday’s Live and Observer Sport Monthly).”
Read the full article http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/05/magazines-pressandpublishing
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Journo student: Thoughts and exploits 
Exactly Jenny – although some magazines are on the way out, I think, as you put it, “mood” is key. Hopefully the launch of Wired in the UK will give us all a bit of optimism.
Comment by rhianowen April 5, 2009 @ 7:54 pmI saw Wired in Borders yesterday Jenny and I think they are completely confused as to what it is about.
If it is about technology, they had some super random fashiony spreads full of random objects that looked like they had nowt to do with comps.
Jury’s out of that for me.
Comment by aulelia April 5, 2009 @ 10:37 pmI guess we’ll just have to wait and see how it fares. The launch seems to have been well promoted so hopefully it won’t just fade into the background.
Comment by jenruby09 April 6, 2009 @ 10:02 am