Like you, Joel, I'm sad to see such long standing titles - and their often long standing and experienced staff - vanish. What should, in most cases, be flagship titles have simply surrendered, put up the white flag and folded. Call it 'going online' if you like, but most will in reality have gone for good.

And that's where the really sad story starts. Because what's happened is driven by cost cutting. Most of these titles will never survive online by charging for content, because having trimmed staff and costs to the bone there is nothing of unique value to sell. The whole thing shows a lack of investment and - most importantly - a complete vacancy of ideas and business strategy. Like the proverbial rabbits, they are crouching down and hoping when the juggernaut whooshes over them they'll have enough left to start again when things get better. They won't.

What's needed is a fundamental look at the assets they have - their titles (brands?)and the people who write for those titles. And then look at their readers, what they want, and need, and aspire to. People will pay for content - after all, many were willing to pay for subscriptions once - and they will pay again, provided they get a quality product. That, of course, takes investment and, most importantly, some idea of what you want to do - a vision. While all publishers seem know is cost cutting there will be little room for that, but until they do I can see only one direction they are headed in...

I liked your article on “Marketing magazines RIP?”. I think the whole migration from print to electronic is interesting to watch and is causing a good deal of disruption and several (to use an overused expression) paradigm shifts. As a marketing manager I firmly believe, and my own research with my customers has shown, that many customers still like to read hard copy. When I produce a newsletter or on-line article I make sure it displays well but also prints well or has an attached pdf formatted for print. I think the change here is that people use the on-line versions to find what they are interested in – doing a search, scanning an article, etc. – but many still want to sit down and read the whole thing on paper. Not all, and I must say I have been fairly impressed at the readability of the Kindles and clones. Paper is far from dead, but in order to have people find it you need a good on-line version.

Another thing that is interesting is the ability of the audience to surge. I loved the quote about how Google thought it was under attack following the Michael Jackson death. Yes, physical newspapers sell out quickly but that also puts a damper on how much readers can swarm the system and they are limited geographically. Today, an event can generate unexpected interest and crash the whole site as we have seen time and time again. We need to be ready to handle both feast and famine, and we can’t do that through traditional means. Instead of “owning’ an infrastructure and scaling up in a steady fashion, we need to take increasingly take advantage of on-demand systems that can support massive surges in traffic when needed but still charge a low rate for normal operations. More outsourcing and more focus on our own differentiated value-added, which is not owning and maintaining an IT infrastructure for content delivery.

Thirdly, the availability of content is inversely proportional to the quality of content. Too many people believe most anything they read on the internet, and even more educated information consumers will fall victim to assuming that something is valid if it shows up on several sites. Do a search, get 5 or 6 hits – it must be true. Misinformation and urban legend has never had the opportunity to spread so fast as it does today. This, perhaps, is also a large contributor to the devaluing of the traditional news outlet when there is so much credibility placed on “information” that is so easily available.