A little less news for you at Broadway and Granville

Back in January of 2016 I made this observation at the end of a post about the merging of the Vancouver Sun and Province news rooms:

The rise of the Internet has not only hit newspapers hard, but other print media, too. A few days ago I walked by Mayfair News on Broadway for the first time in quite awhile. This was once one of my favorite places to buy magazines as they had a huge selection. Today they have what appears to be half of one aisle devoted to magazines, about 1/6th of what they used to have, with the rest of the store converted over to a dollar store model, shelves stuffed with cheap plasticware and other small goods. On the one hand, it makes me sad to see the change, but on the other I admire their resilience and ability to adapt to a changing market.

I was recently in the area of Broadway and Granville and noticed Mayfair News seemed…not busy. I went over and sure enough, it was shuttered, its space sitting empty for perhaps months after I made the comment above. The book store/art shop beside it had also closed. The demise of Mayfair News meant the single best magazine store in Vancouver was gone.

Related, I noticed the current issue of Rolling Stone on Save On Foods’ tiny magazine shelf a few days ago while not shopping for eggnog. Despite having Trump on the cover, I picked it up and was shocked at how thin it was. It was less a magazine than a robust leaflet.

It was kind of depressing.

The Rolling Stone website, on the other hand, is packed full of content and covers events that have happened just today.

It’s hard to imagine why anyone would choose a print magazine now, unless they needed something to read right now and had no access to the internet or had an aversion to reading magazine-style articles on a smartphone/tablet/laptop.

Nothing lasts forever, but if you had told me 20 years ago that the magazine market would be seriously ailing shortly into the 21st century, I would have laughed and gone back to trying to make DOS games work in Windows 95.

If you are what you read…

…then I’m a guy who jogs and likes to write.

Which would be pretty accurate.

I buy two magazines regularly: Runner’s World and Writer’s Digest. Maybe I just like magazines with apostrophes in the titles. I’ll admit having an incredibly hot guy on the cover of Runner’s World helped persuade me to take a look at the first issue I picked up but I’ve been buying it regularly since (the covers alternate male and female). It’s somewhat surprising how much can be written about an activity that consists entirely of just putting one foot ahead of the other and repeating.

Writer’s Digest is a magazine I’ve been buying on and off for many years but now that I’m writing more I can actually try employing some of their techniques and suggestions. Note: do not ever subscribe to their online newsletter. They spam your inbox like crazy trying to sell you seminars, books and probably Writer’s Digest widgets and toilet paper. I routinely archive without reading so I should probably unsubscribe at some point.

I will occasionally buy other writing or health magazines and the odd issue of Asimov’s of Fantasy & Science Fiction. What I don’t buy anymore are computer magazines (pretty much replaced by the web) and gaming magazines (also pretty much replaced by the web and most have died, besides). I lament several magazines I used to buy that went defunct a long time ago, notably The Twilight Zone magazine (which published excellent short fiction) and Marvel Illustrated, best described as “Heavy Metal without the breast obsession”. Okay, I sometimes also bought Heavy Metal because where else could you read stories where people rode astride giant penises like the sandworms of Arrakis? I also miss Omni. I wish there was still a good general interest science magazine around (no, Discover doesn’t quite do it). Mad magazine is one of the few I genuinely outgrew without even being conscious of it. They probably lost their gestalt when they began putting in real ads to pay the bills, anyway. That’s my cynical take and I’m stickin’ to tingit!