Some time ago, without notice to me, Berta unsubscribed to all of our magazines.
It has taken a while for them all to run out, so we still receive the occasional issue with one of those “This is your last issue” card stock covers, but for the most part, we just don’t get any magazines in the mail these days. I was curious what I’ve been missing, and then I got to thinking about whether I really need the dead tree editions of what information I can probably find online.
One of the bigger offenders lately is Wired. I’ve been a subscriber to Wired Magazine since the first issue, and I’ve always found their articles interesting and timely — until lately.
Still, they’re well on top of the curve, but with the internet I’m so connected into the ideas they publish that I’ll hear about them weeks before I receive their magazine. I used to look forward to their Fetish section, showing the latest gadgets, but they haven’t published anything over the past year that I didn’t already know about. Recent articles are all starting to have this distinctly leftist tilt that unnerves me in what I had previously considered a source of news, even if I tend to agree with the specific ideals that they promote.
You can get a continuous stream of great new product announcments from Engadget (leaning: pleasant and informative) or Gizmodo (leaning: snarky and staccato). The rest of the featured articles eventually show up on Wired Magazine’s own web site! So why subscribe at all?
If I can do without Wired, which is the first magazine I thought I might not be able to do without, then what about some of these others?
One of the other staples in pulp around the house is Entertainment Weekly. This is probably as trashy as our reading gets, and I feel weird even admitting that we read it, but it’s useful.
I primarily use Entertainment Weekly to find out what movies are playing and what they’re about. I sometimes use the published sales ranks, ratings, and reviews (in that order) to determine which of several choices is the best for our rare in-theater movie screenings. Can all of this be replaced by web sites? You bet.
You’ll get a better overview of reviews from Rotten Tomatoes, who aggregates many published reviews and then gives you a “freshness” score based on the percentage of positive reviews.
You can get box office earnings from Box Office Mojo, who publishes an astonishing array of statistics on earnings.
And dare I even suggest using TvTorrents as a way to keep track of TV? You can create an account, add your favorite shows to the list, and use your account page to keep track of the latest episodes. I’m telling you, it’s only a matter of time before broadcast TV is a thing of the past. But if you just want legitimate info on what’s on the tube, Zap2It’s TV section really isn’t bad, especially compared to EW’s awful, outright insulting TV coverage.
Of course, you could always visit Entertainment Weekly’s web site itself, but my opinion of their writing is such that I’d rather get my info from people who aren’t so jaded by entertainment.
I would like to say that I subscribe to more “important” magazines, but I really don’t. Perhaps that’s the problem — Maybe I should pick up Time or Newsweek or National Geographic, but I figure they’re probably all online somewhere now, too, so why bother? My coverage of world news via the computer is as sophisticated as what provides the news to those magazines. Why see only one viewpoint when I form my own opinion from hundreds?
The real magazines that are impossible to replace with web sites are the ones I buy infrequently at Barnes and Noble. For example, Tin House. It’s a literary magazine, so only some of the contents are likely to be published on the web. I think Tin House is representative of the many small magazine publishers who have - if not important or well-crafted - interesting publications to offer. Are the small magazine publishers much different from blog authors, though? Or at least, from blog directories that feature excellent blog posts?
One other type of publication are the magazines that include CDs. I’m not so much referring to magazines like .NET (imported to here from Britain) or the litter of Linux rags, whose CDs are mostly available for download anyway. I mean the audio magazines. For example, we subscribe to CMJ. I would think it difficult to replace CMJ with something as useful, but I haven’t done much looking. Wouldn’t it be great to find a web site that lets you sample newly released music by MP3?
Come to think of it, you can pretty well find new music using services like last.fm (currently offline?) and Pandora. I guess I didn’t even have to do more research on that one, and I can continue to let the CMJ subscription expire.
What magazines can’t you do without? Have you looked for online replacements for the magazines that you have?
