BoSacks Speaks Out: Proof that Print is Dead and Why it Should Be

As you might be able to determine by the title of this rant, I am mighty angry right now. We are sometimes, as an industry, our own worst enemy. 

Today I read Samir Husni's listing of new publications for February. A very nice list of pubs, and I wish them all the best of luck. The one that really caught my eye was Disney's new Frozen magazine. I have a 5-1/2 year old granddaughter, who loves the Frozen franchise. As any loving grandfather would do, I ordered a subscription for little Lena from the Disney site. After the entire process of ordering I received a message that I should expect Lena to receive her first magazine in 7 to 9 weeks. HUH! It is the 21^st century and Amazon delivers to me damn near anything I want in two days or less, if I ask. This past Friday I ordered shoelaces and a keyboard and received them on Monday morning.

If after all these years the print magazine industry can't deliver a new magazine subscription in under one week or less, then it dies with the knife of its own making. A pox on rate base and other tricky subscription business plans that hold a magazines delivery that isn't almost instant.  What are you guys thinking? 9 weeks is the path to print publishing's success? OMG!

I want answers. All the big guys read this newsletter and the middle guys and the small publishers too.  Please are you telling me that a new subscriber still has to wait 7 to 9 weeks for a first issue? The exact same battle plans that we had in the 1980s?  How's that working out for ya? Please, please say no.

No wonder print is crashing and burning. The subscription process is an ancient antique creaking in its own self-imposed death throws. It's the damned 21^st century. Doesn't the circulation department know that? Perhaps not. This kind of sloppy process proves that some print is not only dying but isn't even trying to live. Tell me one other living industry that makes the public wait over two months for delivery? Name just one!

To those titles and publishers that still insist on a 8 or 9 week delivery cycle, I say, Sayonara. So long. It's been good to know ya. You can't possibly survive with 19^th century thinking and decrepit old business life cycles in the digital age of instantaneous everything else. 

Death is the welcome cessation of idiocy.

Stephen Evans 

I welcome your thoughts and responses to this essay. If you are a proponent of the 9 week cycle, I'd like to hear about that too.