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RE: Print-zines, E-zines, size, policies, etc.

It's still all a little relative, no? E-zines are on their way up relative to print, but does not that reflect the fact they started at ground zero, and you would expect them to increase their presence? Likewise, years ago, print was the only game in town, now there is some competition and changing technology, and would we not expect a reduction in its numbers?

Is the audio print world different than the news print world? I think a lot of people read news blogs and the internet, but I suspect many of those same people read newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post and rely and trust the information the print media disseminates versus the bloggers. The difference, I think, is that the bloggers and e-zines essentially give their content and opinions away for free, and there will always be a perception that when you give something away for free it is always less valuable, and in the situation where the opinion leads to a purchasing decision, less reliable than those who charge for their opinions and information.

My own prejudice is that print publishers require more standards of their writers. The majority of internet news providers, for example, could not write for the New York Times because they are not good enough writers, because they lack the experience, or they lack the educational background, or all three. I've lost count of the number of e-zine articles and reviews I've read which feature poor grammar, misspellings, sentences ending in prepositions, run on sentences, and on and on, all of which an editor, or someone, has proofread.

Just because print has lost some business for a variety of reasons does not mean the end of the road for print media is near. Print will continue to dominate the higher value of the content until such time as the internet provider can provide content people deem valuable and important enough for which which they are actually willing to pay. The e-zines can talk about numbers all they want, but I strongly suspect that if they required a paid subscription to read their content their readership would dwindle to almost nothing. Are the numbers e-zines register because of the value of the content, or because it is free? Most certainly the latter. Certainly, if they felt they could charge for their content, they would do so. Until an e-zine can provide the former, I think readers will continue to perceive print to be the more reliable, and as long as it is perceived the more reliable, it will survive.

I would guess Stereophile's numbers are down relative to where they were twenty years ago for the same reason that virtually every newspaper's numbers are down, which is that fewer people are reading, and in the case of high end audio, fewer people are partaking in the hobby. I would argue it is not because of the e-zines presence because the e-zine gives its content away for free, and therefore the reader does not need to make an economic choice between the two. If e-zines were around twenty or thirty years ago, or whenever you think was the golden age of high end audio when participation was at its zenith, the e-zine's numbers would be down as well.

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