What Happened to People Magazine?
annehelen.substack.com
annehelen.substack.com
The print magazine had no advertising, and bought their products for review - no free/loaned products loaned by manufacturers.
When it went online, it basically sold out.
It became a funnel - it would review all these products, then funnel you to online purchases where it would get a commission.
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.
It's circling the drain as viewership evaporates with the disappearance of rooftop aerials.
NPR review: <https://www.npr.org/2024/06/25/nx-s1-5017620/book-review-cue...>
LARB review: <https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/to-be-real-on-emily-nuss...>
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.
"Live sports are headed to streaming services, and audiences are ready" <https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2022/live-sports-are-headed...>
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.
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.
Parasocial relationships are remarkably powerful.
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...
Digital media? All the time. Love reading articles and fiction online, just don't care much for the physical object it's often printed on.
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.
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.
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.
1) A box fan with a HEPA filter taped to it;
2) The ones IKEA sells, or equivalents.
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.
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.
I hope so.
How did you evaluate its accuracy?