February 17, 2015

Advertisements as Content on the Front Page of Forbes Magazine

We know the slogan of Forbes magazine is that it's a capitalist tool, but putting advertisements disguised as content on the cover might be taking that concept a bit too far:

Ads, Editorial, It's All #Content

Print magazines are desperate to generate revenue any way they can as ad dollars from agencies and companies increasingly chase new media outlets, but disguising an ad as content is a bridge that no large, mainstream media outlet has crossed before. Readers should be able to delineate clearly the difference between an ad and content. The latter is generally perused, while the former is scanned. The utility of a magazine decreases when the two are conflated as it confuses the reader. Perhaps this is a just a death knell for Forbes magazine. Though I never regularly read Forbes, it's always had a nice nostalgic note for me by cracking the fabrications of Stephen Glass the fabulist at the New Republic in the late 1990s. Jukt Mirconics forever!

The death of print magazines is sad as it is a print medium I still enjoy reading. I like the convenience of flipping through the pages of a magazine as paper/ink than as pixels/slides on an iPad screen, or as a bunch of links on a website. But if print magazine's path to survival includes ads disguised as content, then you can count me out.