My October issue of the magazine Business 2.0 was wrapped in a white cover emblazoned with black and red lettering that proclaimed: “This is your last issue of Business 2.0 magazine.”
No, this was not because my subscription was expiring. It was because the magazine was expiring.
The protracted and difficult gestation of e-books may be distracting some from observing the successful birth and thriving of an older sibling—electronic text.
Ominous blog post
The death of Business 2.0 was foretold one year ago in a blog posting by a knowledgeable magazine worker with the job title “Creative Director.” The blog entry compared the advantages and disadvantages of text delivery via print versus electronics and contended that magazines emphasizing information and data would naturally migrate to an electronic-only format. Ominously this “Creative Director” actually worked for Business 2.0.
In a curious sense the dissolved magazine is migrating to the Web. For example, the editor-at-large, prominent journalist Erick Schonfeld, is now the co-editor of the influential electronic-only blog TechCrunch. Several of the journalists will remain with Time-Warner and move to Fortune magazine, where a key part of the new assignment is providing content for the website Fortune.com.
Deadly ad myths?
“Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner says the problem with Business 2.0 wasn’t a lack of readership, but a lack of advertising,” reports a writer for the MediaShift blog. “He told me the magazine had more readers than ever before, about 630,000, but lost out on a key source of advertising.”
“The problem,” says MediaShift, “is two-fold for general business magazines: Advertisers believe that the target audience for these magazines—affluent men—are all online and off of print. Plus, the stories of business magazines are being told in an array of other lifestyle magazines, with business becoming ever more ingrained in our culture.”
It is true that even TeleRead covers business stories because of their importance to e-text, and certainly much of my reading has moved to the web. Further most of my magazine and newspaper subscriptions have been dropped. Perhaps other TeleRead blog viewers have also shifted reading patterns.
Related: TechCrunch on Biz 2.0’s demise.
(The blog article title is a play on novella titled Chronicle of a Death Foretold by the Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márque.)
