NYO: First Annual Survey of Magazines

SO the New York Observer decided to devote a whole bunch of stories today on the magazine industry. Because you actually have work to do, here is a nice little summary so you can feel smart and in the loop about your profession:

Will Magazines Be Here 10 Years From Now?
NO!....says Graydon Carter, golden boy of Conde Nast---the company that:

said that it’s using its magazine’s Web sites as a way to boost subscriptions for its magazines.

Yeah. Cause that's the forward-thinking kind of insight that will naturally lead to Carter's vision of the future magazine:

In the next five years in Graydon Carter’s world, you’ll walk onto a plane, or a subway, or a soon-to-be-invented mode of transport, and you’ll tuck a little electronic book under your arm. Inside that little book, which will be very expensive at first but soon will cost $150, there’ll be a series of mylar “pages,” and there will be small buttons off to the side, and once you hit one of them, whoooosh, words and photos from Vanity Fair will suddenly appear.

Meanwhile, over at Wired, Chris Anderson apparently has been spending too much time with those old foagies in the newspaper industry:

In a decade time frame?” asked Chris Anderson, editor of Wired. “No. Technology adoption happens slowly. This is the editor of Wired telling you no. Obviously, newspapers are going to be changing dramatically over the next few years, but magazines are not newspapers. And I think magazines 10 years from now are going to look something like they do now.”

My summary: You really know newspapers are dead when their dead-medium debate has moved on to magazines...