4 ms·

When they removed the good cartoons and the horoscopes, the writing was on the wall. It was very clearly over. That was back around 2005.

irrational 8y ago
Removing something as useless as horoscopes was a sign they were going down hill? I would think that would be a sign the content was improving.
- iCannotEven 8y ago
  It's indicative that they didn't even have the budget to syndicate horoscopes. Does that make a little bit more sense?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - _Codemonkeyism 8y ago
    "didn't even have the budget to syndicate horoscopes" A clear sign, and only 14y later they closed.
    - chillwaves 8y ago
      No doubt predicted by the horoscope.
      - iCannotEven 8y ago
        Okay, like I give a fuck. Go back and look at the moment in time when they changed formats. They dropped a bunch of extras, and their journalism got bland when they stopped paying for good people. It was obvious that there were cut budgets behind the scenes. The paper was thinner and smaller, and a number of regular columns and features dried up. The most visible difference was that after you flipped past the table of contents, you saw no comic strips, and flipping through the concert section, the end of the section was no longer the horoscopes, and it ran directly into the red light district, so to speak.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >A clear sign, and only 14y later they closed. For someone who knows the industry, such a sign is not as irrelevant as it appears - nor is closing down a sudden affair. Unlike SV startups which can fold in 1-2 years, news outlets are surprisingly resilient in their dying. It's a long process of decay with several milestones along the way... As someone that has worked in the print business, and am familiar with the history of lots of businesses (although in a different country), alot of media businesses had a decade or more of struggling before they finally give up the ghost -- and it indeed starts with signs like these (first they cut some expensive syndications, a first round of lay-offs, then they give up some subscriptions to news services like A.P. and Reuters, call off special reporters stationed abroad, a few major columns are cancelled because they can afford their top columnists, the quality of photography drops, and so on. In the end, the content is mostly sloppy rewrites from whatever wire service they still have, plus amateur "opinion pieces", then a final round of layoffs, and they die... The cancelling one or more expensive features, like syndications, are a sure fire sign of a decay process starting...
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - bena 8y ago
        You're getting into some really sketchy territory though. For it to be a sign, it has to be consistent. The vast majority has to follow the rule. Exceptions need to be rare. Otherwise, it's pretty much just anti-survivor bias. Yes, all failed magazines did these things, but doing that thing doesn't mean your magazine is failing if all magazines do it. Or if enough successful magazines do it. 14 years is a long time. It would be like saying water is deadly because everyone alive who has ever drank it has died or will die in about 100 years or so. Or everybody who has ever gotten divorced was married at one point. So marriage is a sure sign of an inevitable divorce.
        coldtea 8y ago
        >For it to be a sign, it has to be consistent. The vast majority has to follow the rule. Exceptions need to be rare. Exceptions are rare. Flaying outlets invariably go through those moves. >14 years is a long time "long" makes sense only relatively. For some things the time from writing on the wall to dying off is in that order, and media outlets are one of those things. I already explained how a SV startup for example can die in 1-2 years (because VC money dry off etc), but established news outlets die much more slowly, in the span of a decade or more. It's something I've witnessed unravel from inside and from friends inside with dozens of outlets in my country, and I've seen from afar the same path followed in several others in the US and elsewhere. >Yes, all failed magazines did these things, but doing that thing doesn't mean your magazine is failing if all magazines do it. Well, all magazines don't do it. Few do it without such reasons.
  - mturmon 8y ago
    You are right. For more on the demise of the big city alt-Weekly, see the linked excerpt from a 2009 summary by Marc Cooper, who used to be an editor of the LA Weekly. This was also taken over by Mike Lacey, and as Cooper recounts, they tried to cost-cut their way to profitability. [http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2009/01/marc_cooper_the_la_weekly.php http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2009/01/marc_cooper_the_la...]
- coldtea 8y ago
  A media _business_ going downhill and its content improving or regressing are two orthogonal concerns.

irrational 8y ago

Removing something as useless as horoscopes was a sign they were going down hill? I would think that would be a sign the content was improving.

iCannotEven 8y ago
It's indicative that they didn't even have the budget to syndicate horoscopes. Does that make a little bit more sense?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- _Codemonkeyism 8y ago
  "didn't even have the budget to syndicate horoscopes" A clear sign, and only 14y later they closed.
  - chillwaves 8y ago
    No doubt predicted by the horoscope.
    - iCannotEven 8y ago
      Okay, like I give a fuck. Go back and look at the moment in time when they changed formats. They dropped a bunch of extras, and their journalism got bland when they stopped paying for good people. It was obvious that there were cut budgets behind the scenes. The paper was thinner and smaller, and a number of regular columns and features dried up. The most visible difference was that after you flipped past the table of contents, you saw no comic strips, and flipping through the concert section, the end of the section was no longer the horoscopes, and it ran directly into the red light district, so to speak.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >A clear sign, and only 14y later they closed. For someone who knows the industry, such a sign is not as irrelevant as it appears - nor is closing down a sudden affair. Unlike SV startups which can fold in 1-2 years, news outlets are surprisingly resilient in their dying. It's a long process of decay with several milestones along the way... As someone that has worked in the print business, and am familiar with the history of lots of businesses (although in a different country), alot of media businesses had a decade or more of struggling before they finally give up the ghost -- and it indeed starts with signs like these (first they cut some expensive syndications, a first round of lay-offs, then they give up some subscriptions to news services like A.P. and Reuters, call off special reporters stationed abroad, a few major columns are cancelled because they can afford their top columnists, the quality of photography drops, and so on. In the end, the content is mostly sloppy rewrites from whatever wire service they still have, plus amateur "opinion pieces", then a final round of layoffs, and they die... The cancelling one or more expensive features, like syndications, are a sure fire sign of a decay process starting...
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - bena 8y ago
      You're getting into some really sketchy territory though. For it to be a sign, it has to be consistent. The vast majority has to follow the rule. Exceptions need to be rare. Otherwise, it's pretty much just anti-survivor bias. Yes, all failed magazines did these things, but doing that thing doesn't mean your magazine is failing if all magazines do it. Or if enough successful magazines do it. 14 years is a long time. It would be like saying water is deadly because everyone alive who has ever drank it has died or will die in about 100 years or so. Or everybody who has ever gotten divorced was married at one point. So marriage is a sure sign of an inevitable divorce.
      - coldtea 8y ago
        >For it to be a sign, it has to be consistent. The vast majority has to follow the rule. Exceptions need to be rare. Exceptions are rare. Flaying outlets invariably go through those moves. >14 years is a long time "long" makes sense only relatively. For some things the time from writing on the wall to dying off is in that order, and media outlets are one of those things. I already explained how a SV startup for example can die in 1-2 years (because VC money dry off etc), but established news outlets die much more slowly, in the span of a decade or more. It's something I've witnessed unravel from inside and from friends inside with dozens of outlets in my country, and I've seen from afar the same path followed in several others in the US and elsewhere. >Yes, all failed magazines did these things, but doing that thing doesn't mean your magazine is failing if all magazines do it. Well, all magazines don't do it. Few do it without such reasons.
- mturmon 8y ago
  You are right. For more on the demise of the big city alt-Weekly, see the linked excerpt from a 2009 summary by Marc Cooper, who used to be an editor of the LA Weekly. This was also taken over by Mike Lacey, and as Cooper recounts, they tried to cost-cut their way to profitability. [http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2009/01/marc_cooper_the_la_weekly.php http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2009/01/marc_cooper_the_la...]
coldtea 8y ago
A media _business_ going downhill and its content improving or regressing are two orthogonal concerns.