Belated Bereavement For Blender
AUDIO By Gotty™ on March 30, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Kelly Clarkson On Blender’s Final Cover…What A Way To Go
Every week, it seems as if another newspaper or magazine is going belly up. Even for those that haven’t, it’s only a matter of time & these occurences are like a living funeral. Once again, here we are at the edge again with another music magazine pushed over the cliff as Blender took the leap last week.
Gut feeling is that I’m amongst the minority in saying I did like Blender, myself & a handful of bloggers who were influenced & inspired by their tongue in cheek writing & ability to cover seemingly everything in pop-culture. I’m not a huge of fan of dense reading in magazine form. When part of your job is to read & ingest material all day, you like to watch writers who can provide a comedic punch. I want quick, precise writing for when I go take a crap & Blender had that. That plus I always thought their interviews, created from reader questions submitted by readers, were always off the beaten path enough to keep my interest in acts I could really give a rat’s arse about.
Paid subscriptions fell 8% [from 2007-08] to 768,000, while newsstand sales declined 18% to 44,233. Ad pages at Blender also plunged 31% last year and another 57% from January through April, according to the Publishers Information Bureau and Media Industry Newsletter.
Yeah, heavy debt & declining income can be tough to overcome. I had a free subscription for several years. Come to think of it, maybe that was part of its demise maybe. Either way, I haven’t heard Obama say anything about bailing out print media. Shameful when you think there were employees @ Blender, actual people with families to feed. As Gross notes, “Sure, they can blog to their heart’s content (like here), but for many of them who rely on it as their first income, this is pretty troubling.” Furthermore, it signals the change for writers across the board. Inside the heart of every little blogger, clicking away @ a keyboard in oblivion, the goal is to one day possibly have their work deemed “good” enough to be published in print form. With the continual shrinking of the medium, the chances of that happening are less & less. And writing for a living? Pssh.
Death will most likely be making a stop by Vibe’s door soon and I wouldn’t expect Complex to be immune either. This all may sound trivial to some, jovial to others. But you have to start thinking of where you’ll be going for full, trusted opinions for music if print media keeps taking the L.
We can hope and dream that the patchwork of sites, blogs, zines and such will be enough to cover the bases in the music world (or we can even try to make it happen ourselves) but the fact of the matter is that it doesn’t always and it can’t. Other publications will eventually pop up in their place but they’ll face the same problems of how to stay alive in a Net age. And as you might have heard, there’s no reliable model for that yet so there’s no guarantees for any of the up and coming pubs to survive either. That’s what’s kind of unsettling to me and if you’re a real music fan, it might just creep you out too.
For now, Blender will be moving to a scaled-back, online version, but I’m not one to take the laptop into the lavatory with me and too many others have cemented themselves as the go-to spots online, so…bye-bye Blender. You will be missed.
In other news, online advertising grew 10% last year. Potential ad seekers, get @ us. We take check, cash & Paypal.
Alpha Media Shutters Blender [Ad Age]
What Does Blender’s Demise Mean For The Music Biz? [Pop Matters]
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Posted in AUDIO, DIGITAL NEWS, Everything Else, GENERAL, MUSIC, SMOKE BREAK, STRAY SHOTS — Tags: Alpha Media, Blender, Death Of Print
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17 Comments
Just as long as Ego Trip doesn’t fold, it’s all peaches n cream.
and too many others have cemented themselves as the go-to spots online, so…
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How ironic is it that I’m reading about this on MY go-to spot online?
Anyway, I still had a subscription to Blender and I hate to see it die. As a video game head, I still haven’t come to terms with EGM yet, lol.
Jadakiss Feat. Raekwon & Ghostface – “Cartel Gathering”
http://sharebee.com/4354c515
Got it from Sermon.
Thanks & we try. But most online spots have dug themselves into a niche so deep, it’s hard to expand. Hell, even we try & y’all rebel lol.
Just as long as Ego Trip doesn’t fold, it’s all peaches n cream.
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that’s the thing: no mags are really “safe” @ this point. Didn’t Mass Appeal go under too?
Fucking blogs, it’s all your fault damn it!!!
“Furthermore, it signals the change for writers across the board. Inside the heart of every little blogger, clicking away @ a keyboard in oblivion, the goal is to one day possibly have their work deemed “good” enough to be published in print form.”
^^Truth^^
There’s something about getting your words printed that makes you feel good: especially for a big time publication. I didn’t read Blender like that but it sucks that people are losing their jobs like you said.
@EF Huttin’: Yeah as a big gamer nerd EGM’s demise was hard to take haha. I didn’t read it for years but that was one of my fave mags back in middle school. It was all about EGM, Vibe, The Source, and XXL back then although I shouldn’t have been reading most of those mags at that age.
As a video game head, I still haven’t come to terms with EGM yet, lol.
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Werd?
Damn, son. I know I fell off over the past few years, but….damn. That used to be on my monthly mag list.
If the New York Times (plus most major newspapers) is bleeding readership numbers and barely turning a profit, then there ain’t much hope for these magazines either. I wonder who’s next to fall off the cliff???
@Gotty, true true. Well if a long established staple like VIBE isn’t safe, then basically all bets are off. The paper based scribe, might not be a thing of the past, however, with the net, available more or less on the go. You can get your fix, whilst waiting in a traffic jam, riding the train, on your lunch hour or whatever. The rules have changed.
BTW, not to go off on a tangent but you done a 15 minutes with Ali Vegas yet? About time dude got some shine.
@ Paw: I second that request, dude is too sick with it. Did you check out his “Generation Gap” album???
^ I actually spoke w/his manager once upon a time. Saving the backstory, it obviously never took place. Not their fault, moreso ours.
^ I remember that G. I don’t know anything about Ali Vegas, so yeah. I thought he was Ali G. LMAO.
@Amp: yeah man the last issue was in January. A nigga had sit down for a minute, lol.
With newspapers closing up shop left and right, it’s getting ugly out there. We’re about to see a lot more print media die off before it’s all said and done. I feel bad for all the people I know who work for newspapers, magazines, etc because nobody knows what’s next. It ain’t safe no more (no Busta).
Insteada Blender they shoulda called ths rag Mulch because that’s how bland it was. I mean, look at your leads:
Kelly Clarkson. If i wanna see cute white girls, i’ll wait for my Cooler fix—i can count on 3 snowbunnies a week, TSS style.
Hotties on Spring Break… Who the eff says “hottie” anymore?! (Even HSM fans think it’s too whitebread)
Amy Poehler… Jason Mraz? (What was Michael Buble too busy?)
And 15 must hear downloads? Yeah, because i’m gonna wait for the mass-marketed rag that drops once every 45 days or so to tell me what’s hot online—70 days ago.
U2’s album? Amazon’s already discountin’ that puppy for $7. As Griff said,
“go get a latepass, step!”
@Flea, yeah man, I certainly did. (Well a rough cut of it anyway). Some decent gems on their.
@Gotty, any scope of you re-connect with the dude? Think it would be interesting. Just checked out one of his videos on Rick Cordero’s Three/21 , and I was like damn I remember this guy! Nice track, I like the way the beat and mood flips half way through.
http://www.three21media.com/videos/play.php?vid=97
In the midst of the madness that is the print media dying a painful death, somewhere, journalism students across the country are rushing to change their majors.
Print is dying because the kids didn’t grow up with it. My Grandparents taught me and my brother how to read with The Washington Post. He sent me to get that metro section whenever we were cuttin’ up. Now (hopefully) most parents watch the news with their kids. Most people think getting news online gives them control. How many times were you flipping through a magazine and something caught your eye.
Death of print means the death of investigative journalism too.