Time for a new model?

Read this excellent piece in NY Mag on Time Inc's recent history and murky future.

....Other longtime editors worry the clock may have run out. “What the hell do you do?” says Okrent. “Corning was once a glassmaking company that didn’t see much future in making glass, so it became a fiber-optic-cable producer, and I don’t see Time Inc. getting into fiber-optics. As a magazine company, the future looks beyond grim.”

It is lengthy piece about the changes in the print industry and specifically the inner workings of the executive ranks at Time during this period.

I spent several years in the print world, and witnessed first hand the struggle to get the organization to embrace digital.  I like Joe Ripp's (CEO of Time Inc.) quote right after the one above:

You know the BuzzFeeds and Voxes are valued on the number of buzzes they get. Who gives a damn what that is? We have to make tough decisions, because what’s the alternative? Let it all die? The reality is, magazines as a print business will ultimately die. If we don’t transform this company, someone else will come in and do it.”

Print is just a vehicle for delivering content...we have better and cheaper ways to do that now.

I'll let Henry Blodget of Business Insider continue my point

Media consumers in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s grew up reading newspapers and magazines. Old habits die hard. Many of these consumers will never be as comfortable with digital as they are with paper, and they will keep reading newspapers and magazines until the day they die.

But media consumers in the 0s, 10s, 20s, and 30s have no such print habits or allegiances. To them, the idea of printing information on a dead tree and then trucking it to houses and newsstands seems ludicrous, old-fashioned, inconvenient, and wasteful. To these folks, paper-based publications are a pain to carry and search, easy to misplace, and hard to share, and the information in them is outdated the moment it appears. For those who weren't raised on paper, digital is superior in almost every way.