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Commentary & Analysis
"Magazines are the Wine of Media"
By Adam Dewitz
Published: November 28, 2007
Jason Tanz, business editor of Wired magazine was interviewed by PRWeek and shares his view on how magazines can compete with new media (emphasis mine):
Rex Hammock, president of Hammock Inc., a custom media company based in Nashville provides a more refined statement on the power of magazines, "A great magazine is something to be experienced and savored. A well designed and edited magazine is the wine of media. The web is about instantaneous and ubiquitous information, connections and transactions. It’s like the central nervous system of media. To live, you must have a central nervous system. But to live, you should experience great wine."PRWeek: The decline of newspapers because of the Internet is a perpetual theme, but another theme these days is the corresponding decline of magazines. Do you think magazines are in the same danger as papers?
Tanz: Yes, of course I do. It's kind of a surprising paradox that Wired is weathering the dot-com storm better than most. I think we have a philosophy that, the Internet can do a lot of things really great, so focus your magazine on the things the Internet can't do really great—write long stories, print it on nice paper, have beautiful layouts. I think that a lot of other magazines are trying to make stories shorter and become adaptable to the web, and essentially make the magazine product something that dovetails quite nicely immediately into the web format. So why buy the magazine? Even though we do put all the content of our magazine online for free, people still do find a different experience in coming home and opening it up and spending time with it. I'm very proud to be working at a place that believes in that kind of flight to quality.
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