One of life’s little treasures used to be dawdling at the news stand, browsing through the magazines and… what? You don’t know what a newsstand is? Come to think of it, there are entire generations who have never seen a newsstand, which is weird, since at one time they were as ubiquitous as having a car with AM/FM radio.
There were the ones on the sidewalk, with stacks of the local papers, magazines clipped to the open doors, a guy chomping on a cigar, taking your quarter for The Daily News. There were actual storefronts, the magazines displayed in slots along the walls, candy by the register, cigarettes behind it, memories of going there on a Saturday night to grab the first editions of the Sunday Times as they came off the trucks. And there were other places to read magazines, like Barnes and Noble (which may be the last one standing of the remaining magazine sellers) or the checkout line at the supermarket.
This exercise in nostalgia is brought to you by the news this week that McClatchy, the newspaper chain, is shutting down some of the stalwarts of the supermarket checkout, namely First For Women, In Touch, Life & Style, and Closer. All four will be shuttering at the end of June, leaving the company with the recently-acquired Us Weekly and Woman’s World as its remaining magazines alongside the Soap Opera Digest website that survived the print version’s demise.
Magazines are getting thinner and thinner, and harder to find as well, and it’s as hard to imagine any of them surviving in print as it once was to imagine them gone. If you want the articles, they’re on the web. If you want the gossip and breaking news, it’s on social media. It’s not that people don’t like or want the content, it’s that they want it in a different form, delivered in a different way, just like newspapers.
And radio and television, for that matter. Radio has the advantage of being in your car, where video is both dangerous and largely illegal. The problem is that there are other audio options now, offering customized playlists and on-demand programming, and being able to offer subscription options to wipe out the annoying ads, and they’re available on the same in-car systems as radio.
Radio hasn’t come up with an answer for that; it can’t lose the advertising, attempts at customization have largely been ignored, and the one thing radio can do is to issue content in podcast form, which is a different medium from radio with different content requirements and different capabilities. The trickle of stations, mostly AMs in small markets, giving up the ghost and turning their licenses in to the FCC, is still a trickle, but if you could bet on it becoming a flood, you’d probably do so.
Magazines served their purpose when the public a) liked reading weekly or monthly material on paper and b) had no other option. Now, everything that used to come to you in magazines, newspapers, on television, or on the radio comes to you on your phone. It’s become a cliché to depict people walking around with their noses buried in their phones, scrolling through social media, their ears filled with AirPods.
The fact that radio is still around and — absent corporate debt — can still be profitable (although less so than in the past) is somewhat of a miracle. As an industry, radio thinks of itself as particularly endangered, but that’s true of most traditional media. Radio still has its uses, which you really can’t say for newspapers and magazines except for catering to the last print-subscribing holdouts, even less of a growth industry than broadcasting.
That’s good to remember when assessing the future. Nobody can argue that things are bright and sunny for radio going forward, but there’s still a business in creating audio content, whatever the medium. The lessons learned by the slow, painful demise of magazines and newspapers are right there in front of you, and maybe someone will take advantage of that to keep the medium viable. Maybe it’ll be Spotify and podcasts running aground while radio putters along.
Or not. Nothing is guaranteed. Maybe you’ll read about it in a trade magaz… oh, yeah, right. Let’s not go there.
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Perry Michael Simon is a weekly news media columnist for Barrett Media. He previously served as VP and Editor/News-Talk-Sports/Podcast for AllAccess.com. Prior to joining the industry trade publication, Perry spent years in radio working as a Program Director and Operations Manager for KLSX and KLYY in Los Angeles and New Jersey 101.5 in Trenton. He can be found on X (formerly Twitter) @PMSimon.
