And Still More Impact From The Long Tail

Matt Drudge writes, “Threatened By The Internet, Time Magazine Slims Down”:

TIME magazine, which has been coming out every Monday for over 36 years, hit the streets last Friday instead.

“I believe that getting the magazine on newsstands on Friday helps us set the news agenda,” explained Richard Stengel, the managing editor.

NEW YORK TIMES media columnist David Carr takes the opportunity to rain on TIME’s first weekend parade:

“At the end of the month, there will be significant layoffs at the magazine division… In the last six months, the huge rate base of Time magazine has been cut by almost 20 percent, the street date has been moved, and at the end of the month, the standard editorial model — a centralized, well-paid cadre processing every bit of copy that comes in the door — will be kaput…”

Carr explains: ‘A tremendous amount of effort has been expended on TIME’s new Web site, which makes its debut Monday.”

Carr knocks the print magazine: “In its current state, a thin weekly on increasingly thin paper, TIME magazine is not much of a thing to behold.”

Not that the New York Times is the picture of health of course, either financially or in terms of flawless journalistic credibility. The Feiler Faster Principle and the Long Tail of the Internet have both radically reshaped the media environment that both of these two old liberal warhorses compete in.

James Lileks once described how that world used to work: