Always on paper
: When Always On started, I snarked that it was a magazine from a company that couldn’t afford paper anymore. A big cruel, I’ll admit, but I liked the line.
Now it turns out to be true — and they can afford the paper. AlwaysOn is freeze-drying itself as a magazine.
Somebody (I forget who) said it was the first web site to become a magazine. Nope. Nerve beat ’em. And Lawrence.com is a web site that became a paper. Ditto NorthwestVoice.
Are readers demanding to see all these sites on paper? No, I don’t think so. Ad sales people are. It’s still a lot easier to sell ads on paper than on screen. The ad industry just hasn’t caught up to the market.
But as soon as you try to make the switch and get the ambition to kill trees, watch out: Lots of risk and expenses — production, paper, ink, printing, distribution — follow. Print is hard.
: Rex Hammock, the boswell of slick print, chortles at all this:
So, just to bring us all up to speed regarding these vaporzines: The Red Herring is selling subscriptions to a weekly and Tony Perkins is selling subscriptions to a quarterly written by former Red Herring writers.
So does Rafat Ali.
