I started the day writing an obit. This one happened to be for a man who was a senior officer in the business, and in whose orbit a lot of us operated on the gathering place of the Hawaiian Islands- lovely O’ahu.

I posted the obit to the professional web site and filed a copy for the last hard-copy issue of the Quarterly I am going to generate later this Spring. I thought wistfully about that. I realized I am going to have to write another obit for a grand experiment in home-town journalism that now goes back 27 years.

There are naturally pluses and minuses to all this. The first plus is that the organization will save $10,000 an issue. The second is that I will get back several weekends a year when that passes away, but there is another action that goes along with it- I need to generate a mailer explaining things to the membership of the professional association.

We don’t want to startle the older readers, after all.

The Quarterly has been part of my life for almost a decade. I will keep writing for it, I just won’t have to worry about mailing lists and typos and lay-out issues and table of contents. Maybe it will make me sad, too, though on the whole, getting the time back is going to be a good thing.

I was day-dreaming about that as I typed up the dates of birth and death for our colleague, and the inevitable paeans of praise to his memory. Then I considered the obit I will have to write for the magazine.

It is like Newsweek. The glossy mag was one of the big providers of information back in the day. Big Mama hated Time, but considered a weekly newsmagazine essential to an informed electorate. It seems quaint these days, but she used to give me a Newsweek subscription for Christmas every year, though I could feel myself drifting away from it over the years as the covers stretched the bunds of reality more and more.

I recall the one with the cute Lesbian couple on the cover. Inside, they explained that they had struggled mightily in the editorial meeting about what image they wanted to harness for the issue-oriented issue.

Apparently they had a cute male couple, too, but viewed the women as being less threatening, or controversial or something.

I read about the death of the print edition with interest last year. Traveling editor Tina Brown told the world that the magazine was going to merge with the Daily Beast and shutter the print edition just before the venerable rag turned eighty. It first appeared on the newsstands this month in 1933- in the depths of the Depression, and disappeared in the struggling and confused chaos of the Great Recession.

Newsweek was losing $40 million a year when the decision was made to pull the plug, cut losses and move on. It is all about economies of scale, after all. Our little organization spent $40,000 a year on the print edition, in the heyday of the Quarterly

Tina attempted to put on the best face for the announcement: new name (Newsweek Global), new focus (paid on-line subscriptions a la the NY Times) and new delivery methodology (e-readers and tablets).

I had dropped my subscription before the last issue was physically printed in December.

There are indications that the NY Times model might succeed. I now blanch at the idea of all that newsprint stacking up in the apartment. If we are living smaller, the whole thing just seems…well, inelegant.

The entire concept of weekly news magazines has become outdated, and the cover images increasingly weird. Did you see the one that Time ran of a confident young action-oriented mom glaring at the camera with the seven year old son affixed to her bosom?

Enough, already.

As Tina remarked, “Exiting print is an extremely difficult moment for all of us who love the romance of print and the unique weekly camaraderie of those hectic hours before the close on Friday night….Regrettably we anticipate staff reductions and the streamlining of our editorial and business operations both here in the United States and internationally.”

I will work on how I exit the print business. In the meantime, I have a couple articles I need to get posted for the bold new digital future. Regrettably, I anticipate staff reductions. I have not told the lay-out folks or the printer, though I imagine they will figure it out when I send them the files for the last issue.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com