For my own part, I have to second what’s been mentioned above, about the economy. As much as I enjoyed Craft, I couldn’t afford it. But I can’t afford much in the way of extras these days. We have a tenant who hasn’t been able to afford her rent in five months. Take $650 out of your monthly income, and magazines will quickly move into the “luxury” column, especially since Michael’s stopped letting you use those 40% off coupons on them. (Joann’s still will, if they aren’t on sale, so most of the time their magazines are on sale, at 10% off!) I know I’m not the only one feeling a serious pinch right now. I used to have a hard time leaving a store without a magazine in hand. Now I stand at the check out and tell myself, “You don’t need it. You don’t need it. You don’t need it.”

(On the tenant: My husband has been ferrying her to and from job interviews, since she lost her job. It looks like maybe there’s a job on the horizon. We just couldn’t see our way clear to evicting her.)

I do agree with Sarah’s discussion concerning the huge plethora of titles that have come into being in the past 10 years. It has been overwhelming. And like so many parts of our culture, it is a sign of the trend these past 15 – 20 years toward massive overconsumption. And the magazines have all reflected that trend by way of creating more and more in your face space for advertising at the expense of quality content.

And now that the advertisers have recognized the internet as a rich and
fertile ground they are leaving the print media. Only the publications offering high quality content and those with the most subscribers will survive. Anitra was right! Support your favorites. Subscribe, blog, buy gift subscriptions, talk about it, share old issues…. And it wouldn’t hurt to let your favorite publications know what content you want them to include – the content that will help them keep your interest.

I already miss the glossy pages and the excitement of sitting down for a moment of quiet time.

Over the next years as we start to recover from this recession, I hope we Americans will become more careful with our money and more focused on quality instead of quantity. As this happens, we’ll be able to afford a few very good magazines (perhaps a lovely book-like magazine such as Craft:, and a zine from the nice lady in our town that gave us a kombucha starter that one time), and we’ll pay a reasonable price for them, and we’ll be able to afford it because we’re choosing those mags carefully and not getting everything on the shelf. If we want more, we’ll trade with friends, or buy second-hand.

I like paper magazines. I do. Yet I do feel going electronic makes sense, at least for now while this whole thing shakes out – I just hope they make it easy for subscribers to print out their zines on their home printer if they want it in paper format that badly. Or, provide a “premium” paper service and charge enough to actually pay for it… without advertisements.

so it sucks that so many that i loved (three which you have pictured) have gone kaplunkt!

i but mags because i love the pictures. i love taking them into the second office (the bath) and soaking them in.

i love referring back to something, clipping and tagging pages, sometimes rippin them out and putting them on my dream/inspiration boards.

so i buy them on the stands sometimes, subscribe, tell people about different articles etc.

I guess if magazines want to stick around, they have to figure out a new model of revenue (much like TV is migrating online and advertising models for TV are changing). I don’t know what the answer is, though!

I guess I’m glad the plans for expanding CROQ didn’t work out after all…

I don’t like the way craft magazines resemble ads for craft products. I don’t like that I’ve had craft magazines request my products to be featured and then they fold and I never hear from them again, either. There has to be a middle ground.

I want the latest issue of CRAFT in a BAD way! I do!

OK, I still cannot believe I emailed you about this and it turns out you blogged about it yesterday. I’m going to go click the links in the article and read more.

I’m sorry. This is so frustrating to me! I hate digital versions of magazines. HATE THEM. They completely ruin the experience for me of sitting down with my coffee or tea and flipping through a magazine. Or reading just one article before I go to bed. I don’t want my laptop weighing on my chest when I snuggle in to bed. (Not that I am not guilty of doing this once in awhile).

Everyday I burn holes into my eyes by keeping up with nearly 300 blogs on my reader, and that is enough. I don’t know why advertising isn’t working anymore for print – maybe they just need to have more interesting things to sell! Back when I started to read Bust magazine, I would read EVERY. SINGLE. WORD. even the advertisements. I would visit nearly every website – it was like a whole new world for me. Maybe if advertising was like that all the time, magazines would succeed!

I make a point of subscribing to my favorite magazines, because I know that doing that helps out. I am so frustrated with receiving notices from magazine after magazine saying that they are just not printing anymore. Then I have to call said company up and fight to get my money back. *COUGH* Martha Stewart Omnimedia (terrible handling of the Blueprint fold).

Books and magazines are precious to me. Especially books about dance, crafting and cooking. They are featured prominently in my apartment, and I like the leisurely way that I flip through stacks of them for inspiration. Question: What happens when your computer crashes and you lose all of those digital files that you did not back up? The possibility of my books getting destroyed (say by a fire or flood) seems far less likely than a computer crash. I’ll keep my precious objects within arm’s reach, thanks.

I’m just babbling at this point. I should post a proper rant on my own blog. However, I will end with this.

I WILL NEVER BUY A KINDLE.

I’m just sayin’.

xo, an old-fashioned girl