Andrew Sullivan is none too convinced by the merger between the online Daily Beast and the print magazine Newsweek.
Picking up on the Beastweek nickname (see my posting), he refers to as suggesting "a strange and unnatural coupling".
It's either a sign that new media will reorient print magazines and, by attaching them to vibrant websites, save them.
Or, he wrote in the Sunday Times,it is "proof that the entire financial model for newspapers and magazines truly is kaput."
His balanced analysis of the merger's outcome merits reading in full, but he owns up to scepticism.
"The entire possibility of a 'magazine' has become problematic," he wrote. "What is a magazine, after all? They didn't exist until there was widely available paper and printing presses and a large, educated elite...
"They were ways by which a group of writers and editors became a collective by connecting themselves to a physical object — a bunch of pages bound by a stapler — and selling that physical product, along with adverts in it. Take away the physical product and what do you have left?
"You have a bunch of bloggers vying for attention online with hyperlinks. And blogging is essentially a solitary business."
And there was more where that came from:
"As institutional brands decline and social media grow, power shifts more and more to readers and writers and away from editors and magazines.
"Starting a magazine online is like putting a chain-link fence in the middle of the sea. The water simply goes where it wants to go."
Yes, yes, yes. So, despite my often disagreeing with his political line, yet another reason to appreciate Sullivan.
