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Magazines, much like television networks, usually start out pandering to one or a few interests — video games, movies, human-interest stories, the list goes on. Publishers like the brisk sales, and people in the demographic groups like the fact that they're getting a magazine devoted to their interests.
But then along comes Magazine Decay.
Some executive at your magazine realizes that he could attract more people in your demographic by, say, adding some dirty humor to your video game magazine. Or adding celebrity gossip to your housekeeping magazine. After all, housewives like housekeeping, like George Clooney, so why not combine them?
Despite the Old Media Are Evil bent in the insinuation (or outright statement) that the internet has been responsible for much of the decay by doing the same stuff for free, there's already examples here of the same thing happening to websites. It's only a matter of time before " Website Decay" becomes its own Trope.
Nothing to do with characters having to reload their guns more frequently.
Examples (sorted by original media focus):
Activism
- Details was originally an independently-owned gay activist magazine. It was bought out by Condé Nast and relaunched as Vogue for straight guys.
Anime/Manga
- Newtype USA's last issue was February 2008, due to the fact that ADV was stuck in a crappy contract with the Japanese (pay all the costs, get none of the revenue, you get the idea) and wanted out. It was immediately replaced with PiQ which covers not only anime and manga, but also American comics, movies, gaming, and similar subjects. While technically a separate magazine, Newtype subscriptions carried over to PiQ and since the Newtype name was licensed, it wouldn't have made sense to keep the name when changing the magazine content. At any rate, it only lasted four months.
- The Japanese magazine Weekly Shonen Jump has existed since 1969, and it has had many changes over the years. In the 1970s and '80s, it included series that seem shockingly violent or obscene now, such as Harenchi Gakuen, Mazinger Z, Space Adventure Cobra, Fist of the North Star, and Bastard!!'' Since the mid-1980s, it's become more acceptable to include Kid Hero characters, Bishōnen, and Heterosexual Life Partners. Some of these trends may be due to attempts to reach a Periphery Demographic of girls, including BL fans.
- The English version, after roughly 10 years of print, is canceling its print edition and switching to a digital-only distribution in early 2012.
Automotive
- Car and Driver used to be famous for abusing their position as one of the two biggest automotive magazines in existence to get away with insane and sometimes illegal stunts for the magazine — locking two writers in a diesel VW Jetta modified for long range driving and driving across the country non-stop without getting out of the car; taking eight sedans to test in Baja California and returning with six after multiple encounters with the Federales, a devastating El Niño season and an errant cow; and covering the original Cannonball Run cross-country rally, created by staff editor Brock Yates in protest of the national 55 mph speed limit. The writing at the time was fresh and honest, and could sometimes be properly described as "gonzo".
Now, though, the pressure to appeal to the advertisers by not condemning anything and giving every car at least a somewhat positive review, not to mention significant tightening of editorial control has neutered the magazine and made it into a shallow, milquetoast version of itself. In 2009, it took a turn for the worse with the replacement of longtime editor-in-chief Csaba Csere with Eddie Alterman, leading to even blander writing and more sophomoric humor (which is really saying something, as the humor was already pretty crude by the end of Csere's tenure). Car and Driver is still arguably the best American car magazine, but with major chain bookstores carrying Car and Top Gear Magazine from the United Kingdom, you can really see What Could Have Been.
- Ironically, C&D once ran a small article decrying rival mag MPH's infatuation with excessive references to one's posterior. MPH originally had Alterman as editor-in-chief.
- Sport Compact Car, during the era Dave Coleman worked there, was notable for being pretty much the only "import car" magazine that didn't feature bikini babes sprawling over ridiculous show cars. Instead, you had a (often freakishly-thick) magazine filled to the gills with performance modified cars, generally featuring multiple pages of technical information. And columns explaining the maths behind key automotive performance parameters. And truly unusual (and interesting) project cars, rather than elaborate product placement features. Virtually nothing about the magazine was about the "import scene". However, after some management shakeups and multiple editor changes, turned into Import Tuner without training wheels. It finally died in 2009.
- AutoExchange, a free weekly magazine which was circulated in the United Kingdom between 1996 and 2009, started to fall victim to this trope towards mid-2010, when it was reduced to a mere two regional editions, namely Staffordshire, Cheshire & Shropshire and South & West Wales, with all the others being phased out, despite the fans not being pleased. Admittedly, it was an advert magazine, nothing more, but the designers tended to be Doing It for the Art with their adverts in the 13 or so years of its existence.
- The main problem (well, for the Staffordshire, Cheshire, Shropshire & Warrington edition at least) was the paper size being too large to be portable, and the loss of the familiar header and footer on opposing pages which read:
- TO ADVERTISE TELEPHONE 0000 0000 000 - SAY YOU SAW IT IN AUTO EXCHANGE (or variants).
- Yet, despite that, fans still want it back.
- Same for the related Auto Freeway published by GMG Media, which ceased in 2008 (except in South Africa). British car-buyers wanting their fix of automotive dealer adverts will need to get the Auto Trader and that's got lean on print adverts - for now, unlike the other two which were print-advert, not private-advertiser heavy.
- The free auto magazine market is on the periphery of Deader than Disco and Popularity Polynomial, for now, anyway.
Children's Interests
- Disney Adventures was once a nearly educational magazine aimed at children, covering varied and sundry topics (one issue, for example, covered the Vikings and Norse Myth). It also used to have a lot of comics of the Disney Afternoon properties, including one ambitious effort to tie all the different series together into a shared canon, despite how unlikely this seemed. As the years passed, however, it narrowed its scope to the point that it became yet another facet of Disney's marketing department. It was canceled after its last issue on November 2007.
- Dinosaurs!, a children's magazine about, well, dinosaurs, started out as being solely about dinosaurs. Then it stretched out to other prehistoric animals at issue 45, with some dinosaurs thrown in. Then it broke from its tradition of having the main creature of the 'Identikit' section on the cover by featuring one of the two others. Unlike many other examples here, though, it was not canceled, and finished with an issue containing an index to the entire series; an appropriate way to close shop, as opposed to just making the Grand Finale seem like just another issue and then a month later you wonder why a new one isn't out...
Card Games
- InQuest, a magazine covering the rise of collectible card games (especially Magic: The Gathering), started introducing content for RPGs. Still a good time. Then they began adding more and more content about computer games. And now it's dead.
Comedy
- MAD has been decaying for so long that it's become a Running Gag at the magazine. In their 400th issue, they joked, "The second issue of Mad goes on sale on December 9, 1952. On December 11, the first-ever letter complaining that Mad 'just isn't as funny and original like it used to be' arrives.". Another joke claims that MAD was best when you first started reading it, and if you never liked it, then it was best just before you first started reading it.
Some signs of actual decay, however, would include its budget cutback in the late '00s, forcing it to dump its two sister mags (MAD Kids and MAD Classics) and, for a time, switch from a monthly format to quarterly. It's also started running real ads and making articles plugging other people's comedy, stuff they would have gleefully derided in their glory days. The ads also cut down on the content per issue; the page count was increased by less than the number of pages taken up by ads.
- After years of being a more or less open copycat of Mad, Cracked magazine began to slip greatly. Tabloid owner Dick Kulpa took over the mag and cut pay to the artists and writers, causing longtime contributors such as John Severin to leave, and stuffing the magazine with filler out the wazoo. Newer issues were few and far between during Kulpa's tenure. The mag then retooled itself with Maxim-esque production values and adult lifestyle humor more akin to Spy. (It says a lot when a mag that was always considered an inferior Expy of Mad still manages to decay.) It finally went to an online-only format in 2007, becoming the website that it is best known as today.
The website incarnation, meanwhile, began as a Something Awful clone with lists such as "The 9 Most Hilarious <adjective> <nouns> of All Time". Then they seemed to realize that there wasn't much setting their site apart from every other satire site on the web, so they decided to go "intellectual" and picked up David Wong as editor. To everyone's surprise, it actually worked. While lists still make up a large chunk of its content, it has since added videos, web shows and non-list articles to its repertoire.
Comic Books
- Wizard, once the most well-known comics magazine, went from a title with objective reviews and an actual focus on comics to "Maxim For Nerds", and their reviews were frequently little more than blatant toadying to comics writers. It became measurably thinner with each issue, going from issues that were as thick as dictionaries (as late as 1999) to issues in the late '00s that were only about twice as thick as the game manual for Gears of War. Maybe. Including ads, of course; remove those and it becomes about even. The magazine fired nearly everyone, to the point that one comics review podcast claimed that the only evidence there was still anyone working there was that they kept on firing people long after you'd have expected them to have run out. It finally died in January 2011.
- Wizard's sister publication Toyfare began a slump around mid-2006 when head writers Matthew Seinrich, Tom Root, and Doug Goldstein left to focus more on Seth Green's Robot Chicken.
- DC Comics' The Brave and the Bold began as a historical adventure anthology featuring knights, viking princes, Roman gladiators, etc. After two dozen issues, it switched to being a tryout title for new characters and teams (most famously the Justice League of America). Then, after a couple dozen issues of that, it switched to being the Alternate Company Equivalent of (or predecessor to, if you prefer) Marvel Team-Up.
- Undoubtedly the biggest comics examples are those of Detective Comics and Action Comics, which went from anthologies to focusing exclusively on their most popular features, Batman and Superman respectively.
- A good portion of the Silver Age Marvel heroes started in other books. Tales of Suspense, Journey Into Mystery, Strange Tales and Tales to Astonish became books for Iron Man, Thor, Doctor Strange and the Incredible Hulk, respectively. None of these are running anymore, although Strange Tales has been converted to an indie anthology mini-series.
- Now that Writing for the Trade is standard operating procedure, "mainstream" Comic Books have turned into vehicles for shilling the graphic novels. Phil and Kaja Foglio came right out and said this when they converted Girl Genius into a webcomic.
Dolls
- The Pleasant Company toy company and its daughter magazine, American Girl, were once fun, interesting ways to get young girls into American history. Then Mattel bought Pleasant Company, and American Girl's articles on historical events and characters were replaced by manufactured crap about cutesy hair, nails and arts and crafts designed to appeal to "tweens". The original intent of the company was pushed to a back shelf, leaving a lot of dedicated history fans and and doll collectors rather annoyed.
Fashion
- Seventeen began in 1944 as a fashion magazine for teen girls, true enough, but with enough intelligent content to separate it from most other magazines like it. Sylvia Plath got her start at Seventeen when they published her short-story, "And Summer Will Not Come Again", in 1950. There was even a time when the magazine encouraged girls to be happy with the shape their body had taken, instead of shoving stick-thin models as an "ideal" down their throat. Now, it might as well be the Twilight rag. All that jazz about loving your body whatever its shape? Pfft. Those real-life "it happened to me" stories that used to get featured and even blurbed on the cover? They've been reduced to a single page and less than 100 words.
- Cosmopolitan used to be a sophisticated magazine that would cover a variety of topics and also included short stories (like a pre-decay Playboy, but without nudity or a specific focus on either gender). Now, to quote Kurt Vonnegut in his foreword to Bagombo Snuff Box, it "survives as a harrowingly explicit sex manual". The sex advice isn't even all that explicit — it's just tantalizing enough to be considered risque, but doesn't offer any actual advice due to the lack of detail.
Film
- SET is the most popular movie magazine in Brazil. It was common to see articles done with set visits and exclusive interviews. The magazine was accused of decaying in the last few years for various reasons — adding not-film-related music, questionable cover choices (Van Helsing and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow were covers instead of both Kill Bill parts, which were released around the same time), and excessive comic-book-movie covers. But the real decay came after problems led to a change of publisher and staff. In a month containing the second Transformers, the sixth Harry Potter, and the high profile Public Enemies, the new team put on the cover... Drag Me to Hell, with a badly designed work◊ (image will certainly scare you and may be NSFW)! That phase lasted three issues, then the publisher changed again and the former editor-in-chief returned. Nowadays, the only decay is in periodicity.
- Star Wars Insider used to have interesting articles that really were considered to be "insider" — concept art, exclusive features on the expanded universe, behind-the-scenes features on the "Lost Cut" of A New Hope and the marketing of the films, etc. Now, it's only good for retreading the movies and advertising Star Wars merchandise. Once in a while, the magazine will have a genuinely great issue (as they did with their issue-wide tribute to The Empire Strikes Back), but most of the time it's just promotion for another property associated with the franchise.
- Less well-known is Star Wars Galaxy Magazine, which hit this trope with record speed. When it premiered in 1995, the magazine focused on a variety of aspects of the Star Wars universe — toys, radio dramas, comic books, novel excerpts, and the evolution of the series over the years plus exclusive features and columns. The magazine also included rare collector cards, one-shot comics, and posters. After three years, the magazine changed to Star Wars Galaxy Collector and most of the content was jettisoned in favor of appealing to toy collectors. The "new" magazine was canned after eight issues.
Girls' Interest
- When it started in 1994, Girls' Life was aimed at 8- to 14-year-old girls and featured "regular" girls as cover models and had great, age-appropriate stories on how to deal with crushes and be assertive and how to deal with the usual things that plague late elementary school-aged/middle school-aged girls. They were even associated with the Girl Scouts for a short time in the mid-1990s. But now, it features "bikini body" tips, has celebrities on the cover, and has put a laser-like focus on relationships and dating. It's aimed at 10- to 14-year-olds, so a small amount of articles devoted to boy problems would be understandable, but devoting nearly every freakin' article to it is insane. It seems to think that all pre-teen and teenage girls are boy-crazy. The only redeeming quality is that they now feature an article about real issues in society in every issue, such as one about texting while driving.
Literature
- Beginning in January 1924, The American Mercury was a world-class literary journal, edited by H. L. Mencken and publishing and promoting the likes of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Saroyan, Sandburg, and Dreiser. After the Stock Market crashed, the magazine began trying to keep with the times, and did so admirably; its most lasting influence came in 1945, when it debuted Meet the Press on the Mutual Radio Network (the show moved to NBC-TV on November 6, 1947 and has remained a network stalwart). Unfortunately, beginning in August 1952, ownership began changing hands, each time passing to a crazier anti-Semite. Circulation plunged, and by June 1966 the Mercury was a quarterly hardcore white-supremacist magazine with 7,000 subscribers... and it only got worse as the years wore on. It finally ended in 1981 and, per The Other Wiki:
"The last issue concluded with a plea for contributions to build a computer index with information about the 15,000 most dangerous political activists, actual or alleged, in the United States."
- Gargoyle, a student-run magazine at the University of Michigan, started as a literary magazine with a jokes page. It has since turned into a humor magazine reminiscent of MAD in its prime. Lampshaded in some issues, poking fun at how it went from respectable to pandering to the Lowest Common Denominator, which could very well be an example of Tropes Are Not Bad.
Live-Action TV
- TV Guide was, for decades, a convenient source of regional program listings and articles about TV. By the end of the 20th century, the articles in TV Guide, and even issue covers, had very little to do with television. Coverage of TV celebrities, mostly photo spreads and short interviews, is the greater focus. To add insult to injury, they got rid of the regional program listings that were part of their format from the beginning... although due to the prevalence of on-screen program listings and the internet, there's not as big a need for regional program listings in a magazine anymore.
- The Mexican version can be best described as a gossip magazine with TV listings.
- With the exception of Radio Times (which is obsessed with Doctor Who), all British listings magazines are obsessed with lifestyle and soap operas these days.
- Technically, Radio Times is an example in another way — as the name suggests, it was originally just radio listings. Then television drove radio dramas into the abyss.
- Katso, which for a long time was Finland's primary TV magazine, similarly eventually transformed into a celebrity gossip magazine that also lists TV programs.
- Most of the earliest Entertainment Weekly readers remember it as the magazine that covered The Simpsons and The X-Files, since they brought the magazine the most success (along with Star Wars stories). Later on, EW stood out from other entertainment industry focused mags (like People and US Weekly) with its in depth coverage of movies and TV, treating celebrities more as real people/artists than gossip fodder, and nurtured under-appreciated hits, like Arrested Development and The Wire.
However, since 2008's major administration change, the magazine has gotten a bit... wonky. With the decline of printed media, EW has focused much more on their web content, which has made the mag's usual depth diminish as a result. Compare a 1990s issue to a recent one, and the difference is noticeable. The TV coverage is reduced, and mostly limited to longtime TV writer Ken Tucker. However, the coup de grace to many longtime readers is the mag's recent infatuation with Twilight, presumably to attract its fanbase into purchasing the magazine. While their borderline manic coverage has toned down since 2010, the multiple covers and articles turned off non-fans before then. Though this is more a case of "starting to slip", for some it feels like "true decay".
- Even US Weekly, the tabloid we all know and loathe, actually used to be a pretty good monthly entertainment magazine called Us in the mid-1990s, but by the end of the decade the decay was setting in as they switched to pure cheap celebrity gossip and photos, then became weekly. As of this writing, it's basically "Teen Mom: The Magazine", with someone who appeared on the show getting the cover spot every single week. Not only is it annoying, but it sets a bad example for teenagers.
- This blog post complains that Soap Opera Weekly devoted most of its cover that week to American Idol, which is not (despite the cover) a soap. Or maybe it is — hard to tell with all the filler.
- The UK's Heat magazine started out as the closest thing Britain had to Us, but then EMAP decided that in a magazine landscape filled with stuff about the soaps, fashion, gossip, and body Fascism what the people wanted was... another mag filled with stuff about the soaps, fashion, gossip, and body Fascism. Unfortunately, they were right.
Mechanics
- Popular Mechanics started as a magazine for mechanically-inclined people, and consisted primarily of plans for building stuff. Today, most of the magazine is spent shilling for gadget manufacturers with the remaining space devoted to stories about "cutting-edge" military technology and UFOs. You're lucky if you get 10 pages of plans in an issue.
Men's Interest
- Penthouse was more or less Playboy with a racier edge — full-on nudity, simulated sex, slightly more "sophisticated" (read: sluttier-looking) centerfolds. Then somewhere around the late-1990s, it turned into a virtual fetish mag with golden showers, full-on hardcore sex, and porn starlets galore. After sales plummeted (a drop that the Gucciones still blame on the Internet), Penthouse actually regressed, eschewing even the softcore simulated sex of their heyday and going with photospreads (and models) virtually indistinguishable from any dozen high-end adult pay-sites. And the articles (which Penthouse did actually have) now read like rejects from Maxim's staff (a move duplicated by Playboy, BTW. But at least they keep the faux-Maxim content segregated to one section).
- Speaking of which, Playboy once held as much of a sense of sophistication as it was possible for a magazine featuring naked women. It was once genuinely possible to say "I only read Playboy for the articles" and be dead serious. It's really quite astonishing to see some of the articles Playboy ran in the 1960s and '70s — interviews with Jimmy Carter, Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Speer, and Vladimr Nabokov; short stories by John Updike, Philip Roth and Ursula K. Le Guin — basically, half the great American writers of the late 20th Century.
But with "men's interest" magazines cluttering every single magazine shelf in stores, even the ones that won't hawk full nudity, Playboy has tried to compete by simply turning into a Maxim clone where the girls actually show their nipples. And the damnedest thing about it is that, even though they're now trashier than ever, they actually show less naked women than they used to.
- The Brazilian version is accused of decay for both "less naked women" and "more pseudo-celebrities" (about four Big Brother contestants a year!), not to mention "questionable cover choices" (a surfer that some compared to Gerard Depardieu, and a writer which had a nice pictorial... except for the model, of course◊ (image is SFW).
- Giant started out as a men's magazine which, unlike the rest of its ilk, was presented intelligently, featuring interesting articles (one of its staff writers was Kevin Allison of The State) and good interviews, including one where rock musician Beck announced the existence of his then-upcoming album Guero. Then in 2006, it was bought by the former editor of a hip-hop magazine, who essentially turned it into an urban Maxim... but not before he fired all of its writers and canceled all subscriptions.
- Both Esquire and GQ could be seen as this. Esquire was once a monthly digest that consisted mostly of short stories, features and interviews from some of the top writers of the time (including Gordon Lish, William F. Buckley, Truman Capote, etc.). GQ was a fashion magazine for the men's clothing trade, and was aimed at wholesale buyers and retail sellers. In 1979, Conde Nast acquired GQ and subsequently turned it into a general men's interest magazine to compete with Esquire, and ever since then, the two publications have mostly become carbon-copies of each other — they both contain similar features, including advice columns, reviews, political features, human-interest stories, a "Sexiest Woman Alive" yearly poll, and cover interviews (including racy photoshoots) with reigning stars and starlets.
Music
- Rolling Stone has done this several times over the course of its run. It began in 1967 as a rock version of older genre-specific music magazines (such as Down Beat and Sing Out), with some pretensions toward being a hippie version of Newsweek. *
As early as 1972, they endorsed George McGovern for President and ran Hunter S. Thompson's famous Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 series of articles; further, they had P.J. O'Rourke on their masthead for 20 years. - The Source can be called the GamePro of hip-hop. There was a time when it had journalistic integrity in its articles and reviews — albums that received five mics were truly regarded as classics. Its "Unsigned Hype" column featured up-and-coming MCs who actually grew to be famous (Notorious BIG, DMX, Eminem, etc.). The Source even dealt with social and political topics in every issue.
Nowadays, it's entirely over-glossed and irrelevant, much like the rest of the rap industry today. Anybody with the cash can get a cover photo and shining album review (Lil' Kim isn't physically capable of recording a five-mic album by the old standards). It doesn't help that the magazine was partly owned by rapper Benzino, who placed his own likeness on the cover despite being relatively unknown, gave preferential treatment to his friends, and brought his various feuds into the pages.
- VIBE magazine kinda got this hard when the new editor took over in the late 1990s. Then readers started seeing non-urban artists like No Doubt appearing on the cover, which is likely the magazine's attempt at avoiding Pop Culture Isolation.
- After a regime change in 1996, Sassy, a magazine catering to female fans of indie rock music, became a bimbo teen-girl mag in the vein of Seventeen. Naturally, it failed pretty quickly with the audience it had before, and it was gone within a year.
- For almost the first year of its existence, Revolver was one of the most eclectic and cool music magazines available. Content to interview anyone from The Police to Korn, they also featured sidebars on Frank Sinatra, Niccolo Paganini, Fiona Apple and Jim Morrison. But it was not meant to last, and they abruptly changed to an all-hard rock magazine. Though worthwhile articles pop up occasionally, it hasn't been worth subscribing to for non-rock listeners in a long time.
- Alternative Press: What once started as a punk magazine and guide to indie bands is now pretty much a large advertisement for the Warped Tour.
- Kerrang! started out as a one-off special devoted to heavy metal (or what was categorised as HM in 1981) with Angus Young of AC/DC on the cover. Metal fans bought it in sufficient numbers to make the magazine a going concern, and it went from monthly to fortnightly and finally a weekly.
The rot started when they tried to persuade the readership (the metal crowd tends to know what they like and don't like) into more mainstream acts, first featuring Duran Duran (cue angry letters), then putting Prince on the cover (cue deluge of hatemail), then allowing alternative rock to creep in. Once the grunge boom hit, they totally turned their back on the bands they previously featured in favor of the latest trend, something they continue to do to this day. They've jumped on every bandwagon from Ska-Punk to Nu Metal, and jumped straight off again once the next thing rolls around. AC/DC were shunted out in favour of Gwen Stefani and Ozzy Osbourne elbowed aside for daughter Kelly. In short, it's a trendy pop magazine nowadays.
- Metal Hammer is similar — as the name may suggest, the original intention was for metal (generally heavier than other magazines at the time), but it fell victim to similar mainstream influences as Kerrang!, seeking a wider readership (which has generally not worked) at the cost of its main emphasis. Metal Hammer these days mostly covers Metalcore, Nu-Metal, and even types such as soft rock and indie, with the occasional nod to classic metal bands. Cue one hell of an Internet Backdraft.
On the whole, they have managed to maintain themselves as more alternative than Kerrang! and good bands are still found in it (although often not without some searching), but most former fans will say it's heading the same way, and it has largely been abandoned by its original audience and is a joke to much of the wider metal community.
- RAW was a British rock magazine launched in the late-1980s by some former Kerrang! writers who wished to explore areas of rock music beyond pure Metal; it lasted about a year before it was bought by the large publisher EMAP. Soon after, EMAP went on to buy Kerrang! itself and the decline of RAW was complete by the mid-1990s, as it was relaunched to capitalise on the Britpop boom. Having completely alienated its existing readership and totally failed to attract the Britpop crowd it was hoping for, the magazine was quietly closed after a handful of Britpop-orientated issues.
- Zig-zagged to Hell and back with Country Weekly. They started out in 1994 with news on the industry, reviews of new albums, full-page bios on new and existing artists alike, dancing instructions, a reprint of that week's Billboard country singles and albums charts, puzzles and lists of upcoming concert performances. Many of the not-news features have come and gone over time — the dancing tips were cut once line dancing became passé, the touring schedules were probably removed due to the rise of artists' websites as a source for that, crosswords and word searches have come and gone, the Billboard reprints have been cut from Top 40 to 30, CMT and GAC video charts have been added, and the "retro" look at a previous year's Top 10 Billboard hits was removed. Even the reviews were 86'd for a few months for one-offs like "Sounding Board", where various national DJs gave their opinions on new songs, before they reappeared with a new and more discerning reviewer than the blatant Four Point Scale abuse of the past.
For a while, they had a three-page gossip section and articles on the stars' beauty tips, but lately the mag has shifted back to being more focused on industry news and album reviews, with minimal gossip, bias or sensationalism. They also have gotten progressively better at covering obscure and/or indie artists, although some may debate the inclusion of recipes in every issue.
- Top of the Pops magazine started out as a magazine featuring backstage news on the show and the latest chart stars. Slowly, even before the show was canceled it started featuring more TV shows, fashion, and real-life stories. You can hardly tell it apart from all the other preteen magazines that surround it on the shelf.
News
- U.S. News and World Report used to be even more hardcore hard news than Time in its heyday. But it too succumbed to the banal and shallow, in particular putting out a Special Christianity Issue every few months. Aaaaand now it's online only.
- One of Johnson Publication's flagship books, Jet, used to clock in at a decent 80+ pages chock full of interesting national news about black Americans and civil rights. For example, it published unedited photos of Martin Luther King, Jr. after his assassination while most media outlets glossed over his murder. It also had a bikini centerfold, usually on Page 43. Nowadays, the centerfold pretty much appears anywhere near the back because the magazine on average barely reaches 35 pages anymore, and most of the civil rights coverage and national news has been shafted in favor of celebrity fluff.
- In a fictional example, on 30 Rock, Jack Donaghy once commented that Jet was originally a magazine for airplane owners, and wonders how the editors could have made that drastic a change.
- Newsweek, once situated just behind Time as one of America's most respected newsmagazines, has shifted rather drastically away from firsthand and secondhand information-gathering and toward opinion pieces.*
As one letter in the letter column asked, "Where's the news?" The decay began once the Washington Post Company (which owned Newsweek from 1961 until 2010) bought Slate from Microsoft in 2004, with staff writers like Daniel Gross and Dahlia Lithwick brought over from the site and the magazine starting to take on its style. Coverage shifted rather drastically away from firsthand and secondhand information gathering and towards opinion pieces, prompting one letter in the letter column to ask, "Where's the news?"
After a few years of rapidly shrinking circulation, combined with growing indifference for news magazines in general, Newsweek was sold to the 90-year-old founder of a speaker company, who paid a pittance of $1 plus debt for the title. Soon after, it merged with The Daily Beast, the current pet project of bouncer-around and failed CNBC talk show host Tina Brown, which is considered a highly inferior competitor to The Huffington Post. Not surprisingly, every name writer with the magazine fled anywhere else upon seeing the blood on the wall and facing Brown's diva reputation.
- The Magazine Decay of both Time and Newsweek is made all the more ironic with the success in the past two decades of The Economist, which so far averts this trope pretty hard.
- You wanna see Internet Backlash? Just have writer Ramin Setoodeh write an inflammatory article about how he thinks "out" actors Sean Hayes, Jonathan Groff (who was Lea Michele's very convincing love interest in Spring Awakening), and other gay men come off as self-hating, artificial, and too gay in straight roles. Now see a nice majority of the LGBT community, many others who are straight and offended, the kind-yet-very-protective-of-gay-rights Mama Bear Kristin Chenoweth, Ryan Murphy, and many others tear Setoodeh and Newsweek a new one at the worst possible time — when their parent company wants to sell them to anyone else due to building withering indifference for news magazines.
- This◊ is an actual Newsweek cover from a couple years back. There are covers for The Onion's Weekly Magazine (a satirical newspaper) that offend and make no sense just slightly less than this one did.
- The New Zealand Listener, since Pamela Stirling took over as editor in 2004. Its focus on serious current affairs was diluted in favour of an increased consumerist-lifestyle approach.
Politics
- Maclean's is roughly the Canadian equivalent of Time, and while it's always had a fairly prominent editorial board, it was seldom overt in its politics. Accompanied with a questionable aesthetic makeover (very quickly dropped after many reader complaints) were fairly sensationalist headlines and some genuinely controversial articles from a source that simply wasn't known for it. Its treatment of Stockwell Day practically finished any respect a lot of Western Canadians had for it.
- Time-freaking-magazine. As recently as the 1980s it was purely politics, and was arguably superior to The Economist in its heyday. Now, it runs celebrity gossip with sensationalist headlines and much of the good political analysis sucked out in favor of humorous ranting about being in a gang leader's posse for a day. Simply, sad.
- The Onion skewered the dumbing-down of Time in their video feature "Time Announces New Version Of Magazine Aimed At Adults".
- Time's annual Person of the Year award could be said to have undergone its own form of decay. The award was not originally meant as an honor, but was given to the person whom the magazine deemed to have had the most influence on that year's events — it was given to Adolf Hitler in 1938, for example. The choices were often Americentric (every US President since FDR, apart from Gerald Ford, has won the award), but that was a given for an American newsmagazine.
However, the choice of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 proved to be hugely controversial, and was responsible for most of the award's decay — many people were disgusted with the magazine for "honoring" an enemy of the United States (even though Person of the Year was never meant as an honor), and so Time stuck with safer choices from there onward, such as giving the award to Rudy Giuliani instead of Osama bin Laden in 2001 in order to avoid a similar backlash. This, of course, only reinforced the false perception that Person of the Year was meant as an honor instead of its original intent. And then came some of the stranger choices, such as giving the award to "You" (representing the rise of the online community) in 2006. So not helping is that these days, the Person of the Year cover is now unveiled either on CNN or Today as if they're naming the nominees for the Academy Awards.
- Time once artificially darkened the photo of OJ Simpson to make him seems scarier and were called out on it. John Stewart declared it the day Print Media "Jumped the Shark".
- They also lost credibility after they published their (in)famous cover story "51%" (% of American women who aren't married), claiming it was the death of marriage now that the majority of women are choosing to remain single. Exceeeept... they started counting women as single at 15 years old, and they included widows.
Pop Culture
- Radar magazine was intended to be a title about a smart and sarcastic look at pop culture when it launched in 2005. It attained that goal, but very few subscribers and newsstand purchases beyond the hip Manhattan and DUMBO fringe. Three issues later it was gone, then relaunched a year later with a different look but the same focus. This version did much better and attained accolades, but the economic meltdown doomed it from building any momentum, and thus petered out in November 2008.
Sadly, this has an ending nobody beyond very desperate housewives and gossip shows wanted. Nobody bought the print rights, but then the owners of the National Enquirer and Star bought the magazine's Radar Online website and were interested in launching a competitor to Perez Hilton, Jezebel, and Gawker. The result is a site that's now your official and authoritative source to all things Octomom, Jon and Kate, non-political coverage of Sarah Palin, everything regarding Mel Gibson and his feud with his former girlfriend, and all the paparazzi footage even the staff of the Enquirer finds poisonous to their circulation, Completely Missing the Point of the magazine's creation.
Religion
- Guideposts for Teens was once essentially filled with stories of a religious bent, but didn't come off as heavy or preachy about it. The interesting stories were slowly devoured, and it took on a more and more teenybopper-oriented bent. It's so decayed now that one can almost smell the festering.
Science
- Omni started as a magazine combining science fiction and science fact. The portion dedicated to science fiction started to shrink, however, until it was mostly science with only a little bit of fiction. Then it became more and more dedicated to the paranormal, with actual science being squeezed out. Then it died.
- Brazilian magazine Mundo Estranho. Originally a spin-off of Superinteressante packed full of trivia and answering scientific questions, now it's full of articles about sex and other things that would catch the eye of a teenage boy. There's still trivia in it, and for the most part it's an enjoyable read, but female readers complain a lot about the shift towards male interests.
- Superinteressante itself! In its origins, it was a magazine devoted towards explaining scientific discoveries, be they new or older, with a user-friendly approach (similar to the American Science News, with plenty of diagrams and illustrations). Lately, however, it's nothing more than a magazine devoted to random, useless trivia, ridiculous conspiracy theories, and harebrained pseudo-science. However, most articles are still worthy (even if subjects such as Jesus and Nazism have been overused to death), and it's more reader-friendly than most science magazines in Brazil.
Tabletop Games
- Dragon Magazine, the official mag of Dungeons & Dragons, started as a general RPG culture magazine with ads for many systems, but went to a just-D&D mag during the 1980s. They then slowly added more and more features relating to non-D&D tabletop games, but later "recayed" by dropping all non-D&D content in what many considered a golden age.
After Wizards of the Coast bought out TSR, they contracted the writing of Dragon and its sister Dungeon to another company, Paizo. Around the time the new edition of D&D was announced, Wizards ended their contract with Paizo and relaunched the two magazines as online-only, as it exists right now. Paizo launched their own magazine, Pathfinder, which has everything they used to put in the other two magazines.
- White Dwarf, the magazine dedicated to the tabletop battle games Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000, used to include such things as original stories, comic strips, pages on modeling ideas, strategies, and other original content with an appendix at the end that dealt with listing the new releases. It still has those things now, but in a much reduced quantity as most of the magazine is dedicated to simply advertising that month's new releases up the ying-yang. They also ran articles with material for Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop games (indeed, a lot of White Dwarf articles were adapted into D&D sourcebooks), but along the line cut down to Warhammer, Warhammer40000, and their Lord of the Rings game, with an emphasis on the latter two.
Even then, the decay proper didn't set in until Guy Haley left as editor. Soon after that, White Dwarf became a glorified catalog with even the editorial pieces previously used for a bit of humorous commentary given over to telling you what the new releases this month were (in case you missed the ten solid pages of them). Not only has the magazine become increasingly content-free, but it's actually been getting much slimmer, so the number of pages given over to advertising the latest shinies increases even while the total number of pages decreases. It's like magazine decay squared. Oh, and the price has been going up all the while.
In White Dwarf's defense, though, the cover does read "Games Workshop's Monthly Hobby Supplement and Miniatures Catalogue". It also seems to be improving with the recent Spearhead expansion.
- This isn't just limited to GW's tie-in house magazines, where you'd expect that sort of thing. The nominally independent Wargames Illustrated magazine, which serves the wider wargames hobby outside GW, always appears to tie its major illustrated features into extended advertisements for one or two favoured figure and accessory manufacturers.
Technology
- More from Brazilian magazines, Info was about computers and technology. In the 1990s? Programming hints, tips for power users, reviews of useful and high-quality hardware and software, and ads for pretty much anything computer-related you might need. Now? The internet made the magazine pretty much useless and boring for anybody with computer-themed interests beyond gadgets and games.
- PC/Computing's decay from an irreverent hobbyist publication that featured Penn Jillette's industry satire on the back page to a more straightforward computer magazine was probably inevitable as computers became mainstream in the early 1990s. Much less so its abrupt switch from hardware and software reviews to buzzword-filled puff pieces on the "new economy" in 1999, especially considering how the "new economy" went belly-up a few months after the switch.
- This was pretty much universal for hobbyist-oriented computer magazines in general from the time they first emerged in the 1970s; each of them would start drifting away from hobbyists, geeks, and computer enthusiasts into the more lucrative corporate business computing market, but most would fail at this and go defunct, to be replaced by a new generation of magazines following a similar trajectory.
- The ZX Spectrum magazine Your Spectrum was once a magazine discussing all sorts of software and hardware related issues, with type-in listings for every kind of application from games to business programs, and always a subtle undercurrent of subversive humour. When it was renamed and relaunched in 1986 as Your Sinclair (a change made due to the reports that the replacement for the ZX Spectrum probably wouldn't be called a Spectrum — it was), it became a magazine that occasionally discussed games and spent the rest of the time being completely off the wall (one issue came with a free copy of Viz!).
The kicker? Most people think these changes were for the better. The rot set in for good around 1990 when Future Publishing bought the mag and prices started spiralling, page numbers fell, and the system itself was on the wane...although it took a further three years to finally fold, by which time the main discussions in the magazine were about PCs emulating it!
- From 1993-96, there was a magazine called CD-ROM Today which shipped with a CD full of demo software. It was one of the only computer magazines to target both Mac and PC users. Come the magazine's last year, it was starting to feel a little tired, so they split it into two magzines — MacAddict and boot, both of which also shipped with CDs. While boot dodged this trope by renaming itself Maximum PC after only a few issues, MacAddict became more and more formal, losing its hip, edgy, fun style well before it finally ditched the CD and rebranded as Mac|Life in 2007.
- In the early MacAddict era, they would do "fun" things like Photoshop the entire staff's facial features into a "new" person, video-tape themselves destroying PCs, review children's games with actual children, allow users to write in their own "reasons why the Mac is better than a PC", and include funny stories and pictures in the letters section. They also had a stick-figure mascot named Max who was also used in their ratings system (Freakin' Awesome!, Spiffy!, Yeah, Whatever, and Blech!), and even included a full cartoon page in the back. By 2002, pretty much all of this was gone and literally every page was plain text on white backgrounds, with virtually no humor to be seen; in short, a magazine version of Cerebus Syndrome.
- Computer Shopper started as a phonebook-size magazine with advertising from just about every computer-based company in the United States. Once the internet made it irrelevant, the magazine slimmed down and became a generic computing publication.
Teen Interest
- An uncountable amount of teen magazines went from dealing with significant health and social issues that many teenagers have to deal with...to focusing only on the latest fashion and makeup accessories.
- One notable example is Twist. In the 1990s, it was more varied; sure it discussed celebrities, but it also had real-life stories and other various features. Nowadays, it's a Tiger Beat clone.
Video Games
- Game Players Magazine started as a straightforward game-reviewing mag. Eventually, the reviewers gained personalities and jokes were made about them followed by wacky humour and gag letters pages. After that, they started going completely nuts — often having video game characters do reviews or Gazuga the three-eyed demon monkey answer letters. Eventually, the craziness hit a peak and they suddenly turned to Ultra Game Players and became way more serious. They didn't last another couple years.
- Most gaming magazines have gone through a form of proto-decay over the last decade, particularly since the rise of GameFAQs, IGN, Gamespot, and similar sites. Magazines that used to focus mainly on game strategies, tips and tricks, and whatnot have shifted more towards the review end of things ever since the information they provided was put up online for free. Things like exclusive strategies printed very close to the game's release date and maps that would be otherwise difficult to put online delayed the change, but even that content has found its way onto the Internet. Nowadays, most of the magazines' content is reviews, previews, and interviews with the actual tips and strategies relegated to a few pages. Oh, and Fanservice; Nintendo Power, we're looking at you. And looking, and looking...
- It's also safe to assume that at least a few gaming magazines bit the dust thanks to the rise of free walkthroughs and previews on the internet. Electronic Gaming Monthly was bought out by another company which immediately axed all the staff of the magazine and canned the title. In 2010, they returned when the original founder of the magazine bought the rights to it back and rehired a bunch of the writers, as well as other respected game journalists.
- EGM itself was also a victim of this Trope before its cancellation. It began as, essentially, "Famitsu America". However, as advertiser dollars dried up, the magazine employed numerous Maxim-like gimmicks to keep reader interest that were only tangentially related to video games (such as interviews with Henry Hill and various E3 "booth babes" who clearly didn't know how to use the medium they were advertising on their T&A).
- Amusingly, after it was canceled, it was replaced by Maxim. Without giving subscribers much notice.
- The magazine also got thinner and thinner over time, although a lot of this was probably the decrease in advertisements. Someone on the interwebs somewhere did a comparison — for some magazines, pagination has increased...but thickness has decreased due to using thinner, cheaper paper.
- Averted in the reincarnation of EGM. It's almost exclusively about gaming, even as it proudly lists "iPhone" and "iPad" as the consoles it covers. To be fair, mobile gaming is getting rather big, so long as EGM only focuses on the gaming part of it.
- Game Informer used to point out games that were bad on their own merits. That is, before 2006...in which the reviewers suddenly began driving Bias Steamroller and begun to target the "Casual Hating" demographic, not finding any games bad on their own merits, but finding them bad because they're casual games. The review of FarmVille was arguably the worst, and makes one wonder if they even played it. Many Eye Toy games (like Eye Toy Play) were actually "casual" by their standards; yet they had no problems giving some of those games a 9/10. However, the magazine may have reversed the decay (in recent years) by putting a strong focus on getting world-exclusive features, to the point that the announcement of a new issue with a highly-anticipated game on the cover has caused widespread anticipation. Partnering with Game Stop (and offering cheap subscriptions) has also seemed to help.
- For that matter, they used to be pretty good about actually playing the games, even delaying the review for World of Warcraft Burning Crusade specifically so they can play it more in-depth. Nowadays? You can spot their low-budget reviews/games whose publishers didn't drop enough advertisement money...their Tales Of Legendia review was practically trashing the game because it wasn't Tales Of Symphonia and barely mentioned what it was about. Their Halo reviews also pretty much only mentioned Multiplayer, or mentioned Single Player for a bit and then spent the rest of the review heaping praise on the Multiplayer.
- Averted by Gamefan, which only had one botched scoring in its long run, they apologized for it, and then they died out due to oversaturation prior to the internet, though when they began adding an anime section there were fears of this. (Which turned out unfounded; the editor personally wanted them in to drum up sales of anime he liked/warn people about those he found terrible.) As costs grew so did the amount of ads, but they tried their damnedest not to lose pages to the ads. Also, they had a comic series which starred the avatars of the reviewers, which caused cries of this when it ended as it put a handful of game refs in sequential order with what they were reviewing. Nifty idea.
- Like EGM, Gamefan returned in 2010 when the original owner bought back the rights!
- This was welcome for N64 Magazine, which slowly pushed its N64 coverage out in favour of the GameCube. Rather than go to all the hassle of launching a new magazine, the publisher just renamed it NGC and continued the issue numbering.
- However, if you want to consider Super Play -> N64 -> NGC -> N Gamer as a Verse, you could argue that the decay from an import-and-japanophilia centric games magazine to the straighter product it is today is worth mentioning.
- Some argue that IGN has seen a certain amount of website decay — what used to be a purely games website is now a general entertainment site aimed at men, covering gadgets, film, music, and so forth. However, the front page is almost entirely about games, and given how departmental the site's overall navigation is, coupled with the fact that being online means they can expand with their focus, rather than having to cram it into the same number of pages/hours of airtime it's not immediately obvious that this has come at the detriment of the (quantity of) games coverage, if it has at all.
- Daily Radar, however, is a different story- beginning as an IGN lookalike for the US market, the site closed, but not before extending the brand to the UK, which remained open. Eventually, the UK site rebranded to Games Radar, and reduced its original content in favour of reprinting content from Future Publishing's print portfolio. After Future acquired Computer And Video Games, it took on the "all reprints" mantle, and GR re-focused to light-hearted features with the odd review to give Future three games sites — CVG in the comprehensive coverage IGN space, jokey Games Radar, and Edge doing industry news. Daily Radar soon re-emerged as an aggregator site for Future's male-oriented online content.
- Official Playstation Magazine dipped into this briefly, when it started giving increasing coverage to other products. A couple pages of DVD reviews made sense (as the PS2 was the first DVD player many people owned), but did enough people really use the PS1's music CD playing function to justify a page of album reviews, even if all the albums were by artists whose songs were featured in skateboard games and the like? And two or three for toys, many of them not related to video games? And a page of weird weblinks? And a page or two on general movie news? Luckily, this decay was reversed a few years into the run of the PS2.
- Online magazines count! The Escapist, best known as the home of Zero Punctuation and Unskippable, has gone wildly off-topic lately. The News page (already known to some readers as the "why-is-this-news page") now features many stories about movies and TV shows considered to have geek appeal. They also have two video series by MovieBob, and neither of them is "The Game Overthinker".
Western Animation
- Jetix Magazine. The Italian version, at least. (Don't know if there are other magazines like that in the rest of the world.) It started as a magazine about the cartoons aired on Jetix during that period and other stuff. Starting from Issue #5, the whole magazine was written using only Xtreme Kool Letterz and started to expand the "and other stuff" part. The only Jetix toons they talked about were Sonic X and Dragon Booster, the mail section was filled with letters asking stuff like "Why Dragon Ball isn't aired on Jetix?" or "Can you make a Kingdom Hearts anime and air it immediately?", and they added a Detective Conan section. The video game section stopped to use votes and replaced them with one-word comments like "Cool" or "Great", and the articles about villains screwed up adding dangerous animals in it (they said that a DUST MITE is more powerful than Sephiroth!)...and then it stopped at Issue #8.
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