Hardly limited to any one magazine; it's common across all forms of media that has found its market dramatically changed and has to transition to advertising thinly veiled as content. Even daytime news/talk shows (GMA, The View, Today Show, etc) have segment where they're pushing products that you can "buy" from their site (affiliate links)
It's so much worse. Several of our local news programs have segments where it's advertisements for local businesses extremely thinly veiled as 'news takes', including a local PI attorney giving a public service "don't drive drunk, but if you get hurt call me!" ad.
network television is on life support; cable news’s doomsday clock is ticking;
The thought's occurred to me recently that television (OTA broadcast, networks, and cable) are about to get, or are in the process of getting, newspapered. In the sense that the evisceration which hit newspapers from ~2000 to 2020 is about to hit the video sector. Mostly because of advertising flight and audience shifts to elsewhere.
I don't know what the end result will be. Maybe the situation in the radio industry, where increasingly there's little more than hit-driven track-programmed pop stations, increasing dominance of Spanish-language broadcasts, and at the left end of the dial (in the US) a smattering of public, religious, and college broadcasters. Rock radio is all but dead. Classical all the more so. What TV's analogue to this might be I'm not sure, though I suspect it's already somewhat represented by present offerings: shopping networks, non-English broadcast (particularly Spanish), and highly-automated syndication, all chasing smaller ad spend and, likely, less lucrative audience segments.
Having largely avoided TV for the past four decades I'm really not positioned to observe what's happening here, though I'm seeing increased general signs of stress from articles and news reports.
US OTA prime time is largely low budget unscripted nowadays. Game shows and "reality" shows dominate. For the few scripted series, they're largely spinoffs of established series. CSI:Lodi[0] or Law & Order:Parking Enforcement have probably been pitched at this point.
It's circling the drain as viewership evaporates with the disappearance of rooftop aerials.
See Emily Nussbaum's Cue the Sun! for a history of reality television. It's older than you think (antecdants to 1940s radio), and has often been driven by budgetary considerations and writer work actions.
If you've ever been to Lodi, or any number of dead end towns, you would understand why John Fogarty got lucky picking that city as a fill in for being stuck somewhere.
The end result will be productions going dark and staying dark. As with newspapers, turn everything off, go home and stay home.
It is already happening in Hollywood. Massive bloodletting and unemployment as tens of thousands of jobs simply evaporate into the ether.
Even low budget/low manpower efforts like reality shows are getting axed left and right.
With the exception of CBS, network television is experiencing a gaping chest wound, with everything posting massive loses in viewership every year. CBS is the healthiest, but even their top shows are getting lighter by 25% a year. Nearly all their shows are some variation on the same thing. Cop show, fire show, md shows.
When was the last time anyone talked about a show on network television? Decades? I can't name a single show on any network, and I know I am not alone in that regard. I can only name a handful of shows on cable, but that's only because we talk about how bad they are.
The largest owner of broadcast stations is trying to dump 30% of its holdings, including its best performing stations. The problem? No takers. No one wants to buy a ship that is sinking.
Streaming is changing, too. Companies are no longer going to bankroll a million productions to see what sticks.
The same applies to movie theaters and movie stars. It's more fun to watch people on YouTube talk about a movie or series than actually watching the show.
Elsewhere, I've read of softening in live sports viewership. Though SuperbOwl viewership trends are still apparently increasing: "Super Bowl nabs 123.4 million viewers, according to CBS" (2024) <https://www.nbcnews.com/news/sports/super-bowl-ratings-rcna1...>. Swift may have been a factor.
Internet, social media, and democratisation of means of content monetisation facilitated the emergence of tens of thousands of "celebrities" who weren't being carefully paraded in front of a handful of photographers and interviewed by a handful of interviewers. What we then discovered was that global attention splintered and magazines and newspapers had to compete with blogs and social media for audiences' attention and advertising money. Initially hesitant, politicians and corporations allowed outsiders access previously limited to accredited journalists, because it weakened the hold the traditional media had on them.
In a couple of decades when most active politicians will be online media savvy, I predict politics will get quite interesting in a bad way. We've only seen old dinosaurs adapting to it, not top players who grew with it.
Hard to see what niche People magazine fills that is not already well covered in social media. It's not like they were doing hard hitting journalism or sending the reporters out to dangerous locations for scoops.
People actually started as a column in Time Magazine itself. Someone had the brilliant idea of doing a spinout, that as this article implicitly points out, ultimately outshone the parent.
As the legitimacy of institutions continues to fade, you'll see more and more transparent cash grabs. This applies across the board: media, government, etc.
AskHN: Somewhat related to the topic at hand, I'm curious to know how much time do you spend sitting down and reading something?
I mean, not while you're on the train to work, or sitting in a waiting room - but actual dedicated time for reading?
I know that ever since I became a parent, I basically have zero time to do that anymore. I used to read lots of magazines, tech or other, in the afternoon. Books, not so much during the day, but usually in bed before turning off the lights - but even this has pretty much come to a halt: my habits have changed, and now I go to bed when I'm too exhausted to stay up anymore, and wouldn't be able to actually read something.
But I know that lots of people love reading books (it's not that I don't...), and you know, there's the whole curling up on the couch in the winter with a hot chocolate and good book kind of stuff...
Since kids unless I am reading to them, I only get to read books when I donate plasma twice a week. an hour of peace and quiet is worth the pint of plasma.
Plasma up to twice a week with at least 48 hours between the donations, whole blood requires a 8 week cooldown, and a double red blood cell at least 16 weeks.
> How the Most Important Celebrity Magazine of the Last 50 Years Started Endorsing "The Best Air Purifiers of 2024"
The notion of "Most Important Celebrity Magazine" is begging the question so hard that the question turned over its house keys and moved out. People has always been a magazine about things that don't matter whatsoever. Now it's a website about different things that don't matter. It evolved from a waste of paper to a waste of electrons, and I can't think of a single reason we should care.
Hobbies are hobbies. It is bizarre the ways in which people pretend that certain hobbies are more of a waste than others. If this article was about the downfall of PC Gamer magazine or something similar, I bet the top comment here wouldn't effectively be "good riddance, video games are a waste". I can't help feel that this is in part because of latent misogyny that views hobbies disproportionately enjoyed by women as lesser than those enjoyed by men.
I would straight up state that celebrity news garbage magazines are of less value to society than PC Gamer.
Following celebrity, cough, news, cough, is the precursor to the toxicity of social media. It's not a hobby, it's an inducement of the negative base motivations of humanity; normalisation of negativity.
Disclaimer: my understanding of People magazine is as celebrity gossip. I'm not sure if it was more wholesome earlier in it's life. In fact, celebrity gossip itself may have been somewhat more wholesome back in the days when society overall seemed a bit more polite.
And you can't engage in conversation about celebrities? You can't learn anything about life, society, your friends, or yourself from reading about and discussing celebrities? It is all a waste, but video games, now that is really doing something.
No, I don't think you can get meaningful inside from random celebrity news. As I write this, the front page of people.com features "Jessica Alba's Daughters Look All Grown Up as They Rewear Mom's Decade-Old Dresses: 'Throwing It Back'". I don't think there's anything whatsoever self-improving to take from that.
If Taylor Swift has something interesting to say about the economics of music production, I'm all ears. That's something I don't have a view into, and she has a reputation for being smart. I bet she could teach us some things about that. I can't talk myself into having an opinion on her relationship with Travis Kelce beyond "good for them, hope they're happy together".
Also, no one else is talking about video games. But yes, I'd find someone passionately talking about gaming -- something they participate in -- more interesting than another person talking about what they'd read about some mundane thing that another person had done.
Henry Buckle said[0]
> “Men and women range themselves into three classes or orders of intelligence; you can tell the lowest class by their habit of always talking about persons; the next by the fact that their habit is always to converse about things; the highest by their preference for the discussion of ideas.”
To each their own, but I'm on Hank's side on this.
I mean this article is about "What Happened To People Magazine?" and not "People Magazine Is Just As Great And Insightful As It Has Always Been". It seems a little silly to ask me to defend the merits of specific articles on the site now.
However, I will point out the strong irony in that appeal to authority you are doing there. Why is what Henry Buckle said any more important than the soon-to-be president like the article's example of the Gerald Ford cover story in People's 4th issue? I guess being born two centuries ago means he isn't a "celebrity" so we can trust him?
The most cost and air purity effectiveness is literally just a box fan with a filter meant for an HVAC sealed around the intake end. If you want to be clever you could go further and make a cube of filters and control the fan with controllable power outlet or something.
However if your value lower sound, form factor, or aesthetics, that make things more complex on whether a price overhead is justified.
Some filters will clean the air more quickly, but a filter that needs more “passes” of air through it to clean may still reach the same level of cleanliness when given enough time. Like when you have a quiet fan always running in a room like I do.
> big publishing conglomerates like Dotdash Meredith have adopted a private equity model that “utilizes public trust in long-standing publications to sell every product under the sun” via Google SEO optimization
Am I the only one who likes this? I was looking for a new smartwatch and had no idea what was out there. I took the top 100 results, which from inspection were clearly all SEO optimized as mentioned, and ran them through ChatGPT to pull out the unique features and most important considerations when choosing a smartwatch. I took the search results again and ran them again through ChatGPT but this time asked it to pull out the different smartwatches and rank them on all the features previously identified. Voila, a detailed comparison table of smartwatches. I went back and checked and no individual site (even what this article says are "actual" review sites like the WireCutter) went into as much depth on features or different models as my table. Like no, I would not read each article by itself, but if life gives you lemons, it's a great time to make lemonade.
> Like no, I would not read each article by itself, but if life gives you lemons, it's a great time to make lemonade.
Nobody wants your lemonade. There's too much lemonade.
You're lucky you live in the brief moment where you can take the lemons and use ChatGPT to turn them into combustible lemons, and use them to burn the stupid lemonade stands down. This era will soon end, as businesses adapt to ubiquity of LLMs.
Indeed. The day that advertising is integrated into LLMs so they only promote sponsored lemonade we'll have to make the LLMs take the lemons back! Get mad! We don't want their damn lemons!
What's wild is you used to be able to just go to a store and touch them and look at them and you'd actually like one a lot more than the others instead of relying on paid reviewer product placement and blog spam results.
Well, for the top ones I watched the YouTube reviews, they all matched 100% with the objective specs but occasionally the YouTubers disagreed on the subjective qualities.
