Magazines of the Future....part two

This news item caught my attention earlier this week:

Avril Lavigne wants to try her hand at running a celebrity mag — but only if it's scandal-free. "I would make it completely positive," she told us after her sold-out show at the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in Atlantic City. "There's so much negativity right now. I'd pick up the big stories, but they'd have to be positive." [Daily News]

And while it's funny to think of the Sk8r Boy singer acting as editor-in-chief, it does bring up my second prediction about magazines:


2. Celebrity [print] magazines will not be here in ten years.
All you have to do is look at what is happening to the newsweeklies to see celebrity print magazines are not long for this world. True, they have the financial resources to offer millions for celebrity baby pictures, but it's only a matter of time before online sites like TMZ edge them out.

Now you might say, "Hey chick, these are the most popular magazines out there!" but if you look at the trends, any magazine that delivers identical content online and can't keep up with that 24-hour news cycle is a dying breed. Examples being those news, entertainment and of course celebrity titles.

What will be the final knife in the back of these weeklies? Cell phones. Their life span should correspond directly with society's increasing willingness to text and surf the web on their phones, because what Britney's up to or what movie to go see this weekend are exactly the kind of in-the-moment, headline only stories that work well in cell phone form.