Friday 8th September: Amazon does its level best to kill genre magazines

Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Chris, from the Highlands.

Want to chat about any of these stories with fellow media professionals? Join us at voices.media/community

(Book this ad slot)

Once again we see the inherent unfairness of digital publishing for smaller publishers. Indie magazines are automatically success stories if they even launch in this day and age; it takes something truly special or blessed to actually have some longevity. It’s a rigged system — with the rigging coming from the fact that indie titles have to put their trust in giants like Amazon, which can crush them without a second thought.

“Some will regain their footing. Many, including Clarkesworld, have been invited to become part of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program, where people pay a monthly fee for access to books and ‘select’ magazine subscriptions. Although even those who become part of Kindle Unlimited will not be seeing the same income as they did with straight subscriptions.”

As this article on The Verge points out it is invariably the genre titles that get caught up by this power imbalance, your sci-fi or literary mags. It’s a terrible, terrible shame — some of the greatest short works of fiction ever were published in print magazines to which these digital titles are the successors. Without them we miss out discovering new voices, and having a plurality of magazine genres.

I’m torn on the premise of this article. On the one hand I never, ever go to a site because I think it’s had good ads in the past. On the other hand I have stopped visiting sites because of recommendation-engine fuelled pablum ads in the sidebars, so maybe it’s fairer to flip the argument and say ‘crap ads play a crucial role in alienating audiences’?

It’s good to see people get what’s coming to them in the media industry. It happens so rarely. So this look at what a lie peddling ex-Murdoch employee* went on to do is both refreshing and a breezy indictment of both Fox News and Elon Musk’s Twitter, where controversy is interchangeable with valuable and nothing needs to be corroborated.

^{*Tucker Carlson, not all the other ones}

I was only chatting with Owen Meredith the other week about the lack of philanthrophic sources of news funding in the US compared to the UK. And lo and behold, another US-focused philanthropic effort to solve the problem of local news deserts has sprung up.

More from Media Voices