Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

The New York Times, among other media outlets, is reporting that “Time Inc. announced yesterday that Life magazine would cease publication next month, the third time since Life’s founding in 1936 that its owner has pulled the plug.” The last issue will appear on April 20. Increased competition from similar publications, such as Parade and USA Weekend, contributed to the death of Life, but another factor was the rise of Internet usage and the fact that Life is putting all of its photographs on the Web, “where consumers will be able to download them free.”

The company explained their decision in a statement: “While consumers responded enthusiastically to Life, with the decline in the newspaper business and the outlook for advertising growth in the newspaper supplement category, the response was not strong enough to warrant further investment in Life as a weekly newspaper supplement.”

Looked at in terms of the “print is dead” debate, Life’s general erosion of readership and brand value can be linked to more and more people getting what they want online for free or else from other media outlets who have a robust online presence. During the magazine’s heyday of the ‘40s and ‘50s, Life — along with Look and National Geographic — was one of the premier ways to communicate experiences and images to readers across the country, and yet now the Web can do that much more quickly and efficiently. Life has been usurped by websites, Flickr pages and photoblogs, and the world itself has been so flattened in terms of information dispersal that new images are communicated throughout the world in seconds; no one waits for them to arrive once a month in their mailbox.

NY Times: “Life Magazine, Its Pages Dwindling, Will Cease Publication”