Glenn Fleishman:
My labor of love the last two years has been The Magazine, first as its hired hand and then, in May 2013, as its owner. The sad truth has been that, while profitable from week one, the publication has had a declining subscription base since February 2013. It started at such a high level that we could handle a decline for a long time, but despite every effort — including our first-year anthology crowdfunded a bit under a year ago — we couldn’t replace departing subscribers with new ones fast enough. We’re a general-interest magazine that appeals to people who like technology, and that makes it very hard to market. “Pivoting” to a different editorial focus would have lost subscribers even faster.
While I was sad when I first about this news, like Marco, I’m not surprised:
Many non-ideal factors and decisions I made up front probably contributed to The Magazine not being sustainable forever. But the biggest challenge was simply that running a magazine today is a really tough business. I thought making a high-quality app was the hard part that was keeping iPad magazines from being more successful, but the app turned out to be the easiest and least important part of the business.
Today’s news is a blow to independent journalism. I was thrilled to be in the third issue; it’s something that is still on my “hey let me do a freelance article for you” resume.
That said, I can’t help but agree with Marco — publishing is a hard business. Growing an audience is difficult; keeping them may be even harder. We’re reading less and less long-form material, and that is bad for everyone, publishers most of all.
There’s a new Kickstarter project to fund a hardcover book of The Magazine’s second year of essays. The first book was great, and I’m sure this one will be as well.