According to “A Changing TIME” on the Time.com website, Time Magazine will now be published to news-stands on a Friday. The article says this is change has come about because Time perceive “the news environment has shifted”.
I’m not regular Time.com/Time Magazine reader, but after some investigation it appears that it appears they currently publish the print magazine’s articles to the web, rather than writing different copy for the different mediums.
It was only after realizing this did I appreciate that I had clearly been reading something that only made most in the context of the printed version and meant nothing to me reading online.
Blindly publishing the same article to two different mediums is a broken way of doing things, and here is a clear example of that.
Fortunately I read on… The other news in the article is that from next week Time.com will carry different articles to the magazine. It’s not clear whether ‘different’ actually means “all of the print articles plus original articles” or “all-original articles”.
As I said, I’m not a regular reader of Time.com (and I don’t buy magazines or newspapers anymore) but I’ll watch what happens over the coming months with this. It’s a bold move – both commercially and editorially – to produce different content and it will be interesting to see whether quality is maintained and whether readers feel the print magazine is devalued.
For the past 10 years we’ve been writing about how the newspaper industry needs to reinvent itself, as online news websites make the newspaper appear practically out of date by the time it reaches the newsstand.
However the more editorial and news-analysis type publications like Time and The Economist have been able to weather that storm a little, as the nature of their content is less perishable.
Nevertheless, the observation by the folks at Time that they need publish more frequently is just as much a reflection of people’s changing consumption desires for even editorial and analysis pieces as it is a reflection upon the medium’s affordances over print.
Just because their articles carry a lot more background and analysis to the current news agenda, doesn’t mean I want to wait a week before I can read them.
Another example of old media waking up, I guess hope.