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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 for their interests.
But then along comes Magazine Decay.
Some exec 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, housewives like George Clooney, so why not combine them?
Much like Network Decay, the magazines will usually succeed regardless, but there will always be that contingent that misses the good ol' days.
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:
- Game Players magazine started as a straightforward game-reviewing mag. Eventually, the reviewers gained personalities and jokes were made about them. Then they started adding whacky humour and gag letters pages, then 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 on the Internet 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.
- And, of course, 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 have bit the dust thanks to the rise of free walkthroughs and previews on the Internet. Electronic Gaming Monthly was recently bought out by another company and they immediately axed all the staff of the magazine and then canceled the title.
They will be back, however As of 2010, they're back, as the original founder of the magazine bought the rights to it back and has 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 chests and butts.)
- 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. In my opinion, it's almost exclusively about gaming, even as it proudly lists "iPhone" and "iPad" as the consoles it covers.
- 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.
- This was welcome for N64 Magazine, which slowly pushed its N64 coverage out, in favour of coverage 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 re printing 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- giving 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-orientated online content.
- Official Playstation Magazine dipped into this briefly, when it started giving increasing coverage to other products. DVD reviews made sense (as the PS 2 was the first DVD player many people owned), but did enough people really use the PS 1's music CD playing function to justify a page of album reviews? 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 PS 2.
- 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.
- And to add insult to injury, they got rid of the regional program listings that were part of their format from the beginning.
- The Mexican version can be best described as a gossip magazine with TV listings.
- This is true of most British listings magazines, too. With the exception of Radio Times (which is obsessed with Doctor Who), they're all 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.
- Same happened to the Finnish used-to-be-TV-magazine Oho — in under a year.
- 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.
- I think it has less to do with decay, and more that printed tv listings just became obsolete in the wake of digital TV listings.
- 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), thanks to 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. 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 an issue back in the '90s 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 gras 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.
- Inverse: 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). As the years passed, however, it narrowed its scope to the point that it became yet another facet of Disney's marketing department. Then it got cancelled.
- 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. Again, much like the TV version's Network Decay, Disney stopped including Disney stuff in their Disney magazine so that they could advertise more.
- Sadly, Mad Magazine. It's been a very slippery slope ever since they started adding real ads. Now they're even making articles plugging other people's comedy, stuff they would have gleefully derided in their glory days. The magazine itself sometimes makes fun of this.
- 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.
- It doesn't help that not only has it "sold out" to a big corporation in Warners, it's now a sister to DC Comics.
- Warner Bros. has owned MAD Magazine and DC Comics since the '70s. Nothing new.
- This has been said of the magazine for decades, and they've made several jokes about it in their 400th issue: "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." However, an actual sign of its decay is a budget cutback, forcing a recent move to go from a monthly magazine to a quarterly, and dumping its two sister mags "Mad Kids" and "Mad Classics".
- 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.)
- The website incarnation 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.
- Brazilian magazine Mundo Estranho. Originally a spin-off of Superinteressante, and packed full of trivia, 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.
- Hell, 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 become 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.
- Jesus and Nazism? Personaly I'd rather they stopped trying to blame everything on genetics. Kid suicides over videogames: His genes made him lose sight of reality. Hitler had bad genes that made him evil. Scientists try and find the genes which may or may not make people lazy. I could go on.
- While we're in Brazilian magazines, SET is the most popular movie magazine in the country. 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), excessive comic book movies covers. But the real decay came after problems led to a change of publisher and staff. It's pretty indicative when in a month with the second Transformers, the sixth Harry Potter and the high profile Public Enemies, the new team put in the cover... Drag Me To Hell. And a Revista+ SET+ Julho+ 2009.jpg badly designed work! (image will certainly scare you and might 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.
- More from Brazilian magazines, the Info magazine about computers and technology. In the 90s? Programming hints, tips for power users, review 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 which has computer-themed interests beyond gadgets and games.
- In a word: Penthouse. In more words: It 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 latter part of the 90s, Penthouse 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).
- Wizard, 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 are frequently little more than blatant toadying to comics writers.
- It's also becoming measurably thinner with each issue, literally wasting away. Older issues, as far back as 1999, were thick as dictionaries. Even as late as 2007 there were issues thicker than the current one...the current ones though? They're about twice as thick as the game manual for Gears Of War. Maybe. Including ads, of course, remove those and it becomes about even. It's actually quite disturbing. It's like watching the end of the "Incredible Shrinking Man" happening to a magazine.
- "Wasting away" is right; they've fired nearly everyone. One comics review podcast claimed that the only evidence there was still anyone working there at all was that they kept on firing people, long after you'd have expected them to have run out...
- Wizard's sister publication, Toyfare began a slump around mid-2006, when their head writers Matthew Seinrich, Tom Root and Doug Goldstein left to focus more on their work on Seth Green's Robot Chicken.
- Similarly, 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 add more and more content about computer games. And now it's dead.
- Probably didn't help that their nickname could have been "Another Pokémon picture Cover Monthly" by about 2001 or so.
- Newtype USA's last issue was February 2008, to be immediately replaced with a magazine PiQ which covers not only anime and manga, but also American comics, movies, gaming, and similar subjects. While it's technically a separate magazine, Newtype subscriptions continued on 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.
- To be fair to both NTUSA and PiQ, the former was canceled because 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.
- Comic book example: DC Comics's 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.
- That's not exactly "decay," though. I mean, can anyone even name a character featured in the Detective Comics anthologies not named Batman?
- Slam Bradley. That was easy.
- Who the hell is Slam Bradley?
- If The Monk counts, still easy. Slam Bradley was, in terms people nowadays might get, a '30s-style white Shaft with more brawling.
- Dragon Magazine, the official mag of Dungeons And Dragons, slowly added more and more features relating to non-D&D Tabletop RPGs, but then "recayed" by dropping all non-D&D content in what many considered a golden age. And now it's dead. :(
- Dragon actually started as a general RPG culture magazine, with ads for many systems, but went to a just D&D mag during the '80's. The same could be said about White Dwarf. It started out featuring all different RPG and strategy gaming stuff, but now is Games Workshop products only: Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, and Lord Of The Rings.
- After Wizards Of The Coast bought out TSR, they contracted the writing of Dragon and its sister-magazine 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.
- 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 '90s. 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.
- Details was originally a independently owned gay activist magazine. It was bought out by Condé Nast, relaunched and turned into Vogue for straight guys.
- Playboy once held as much of a sense of sophistication as it was possible for a magazine featuring naked women to do. 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.
- It's really quite astonishing to see some of the stuff Playboy ran in the 60s and early 70s. (No, not that.) Interviews with Jimmy Carter and Martin Luther King. Short stories by John Updike and Phillip Roth - hell, half the great American writers of the late 20th century. Now it's a slightly racier Maxim.
- Believe it or not, it was once possible to say, "I only read Playboy for the articles," and be dead serious. It also used to be one of the highest-paying markets for short fiction (including some very good science fiction).
- It may shock some to learn that at one time, Rolling Stone was actually a magazine about music. But hey, a lot of people who like rock 'n' roll are politically on the left of center, right? Now, the magazine is almost entirely leftist political punditry, even going so far as to have one of its recent covers be a painting of Barack Obama looking more noble than any living human being could while surrounded with a Christ-like corona of holy light.
- Objection! Rolling Stone has covered both music and politics from the beginning. Or are we forgetting that, as early as 1972, they endorsed George McGovern for President, ran Hunter S Thompson's famous Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 series of articles, and have had P.J. O'Rourke on their masthead for the last thirty years? Besides which, they still have at least 50% music coverage in every issue.
- Let's not forget the infamous magazine with The Jonas Brothers on the front cover. There are those who would argue that that cover was proof positive that the magazine was no longer about music.
- Rolling Stone started out as a rock version of older genre-specific magazines (Down Beat, Sing Out), with some pretensions toward being a hippie version of Newsweek. By the mid-'70s, it became a corporate rock fanzine (they were notoriously slow to jump on the punk bandwagon), and by the '80s, it was pretty much People for pretentious folks. The success of Spin kind of forced them back into a music-heavy format, but the rise of the Web forced them to look for another hook — and they found it in politics. Your Mileage May Vary as to whether this is a good or bad thing.
- Whatever one thinks of it being/not being decay, you have to give the recent RS its due: the political reporting ain't bad. Matt Taibbi in particular is becoming something of a significant name in journalism. It's blatantly left-wing, but at least they're honest about it.
- Rolling Stone has actually been cutting down significantly on the length of their news coverage, which draw charges of magazine decay from the opposite direction: Many readers enjoyed the depth of their coverage, which often exceeded even "legitimate" news sources in scope.
- This blog post complains about Soap Opera Weekly devoted most of its cover that week to American Idol. Which is not (despite the cover) a soap.
- White Dwarf, the magazine dedicated to the tabletop battle games Warhammer and Warhammer 40 K, 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 And 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 magazine decay proper didn't set in until Guy Haley left as editor. Soon after that White Dwarf became a glorified catalogue 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). It's also worth noting that 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.
- 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 and doll collecting fans rather annoyed.
- 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, and 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 it petered out with the November 2008 issue.
- Sadly this has an ending nobody beyond very desperate housewives and gossip shows wanted. Nobody bought the print rights, but someone bought the magazine's Radar Online website, and whom was interested in launching a competitor to Perez Hilton, Jezebel and Gawker. The result is a site that is now your official and authoritative source to all things Octomom, Jon and Kate, non-political coverage of Sarah Palin, and all of the paparazzi footage even the National Enquirer wants nothing to do with, Completely Missing The Point of the magazine's creation.
- 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, such as 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 Nińo season and a 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. 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.
- In the 1920s, The American Mercury was a world-class literary journal, edited by HL Mencken, publishing and promoting the likes of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Saroyan, Sandburg and Dreiser. After the stock market crashed, the magazine's ownership began changing hands, each time passing to a crazier anti-Semite (though during a period with a sane publisher, the magazine would launch the NBC stalwart Meet The Press in the mid-1940s). Circulation plunged, and by the late 1970s, the Mercury was peddling a hardcore white supremacist format to 7,000 subscribers. It finally expired in 1981. 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."
- 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 version of Maxim, but not before he fired all of its writers and canceled all subscriptions.
- Guideposts for Teens was once essentially filled with stories of a religious bent, but it 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.
- The Source can be called the GamePro of hip hop. There was a time when this magazine 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.
- 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.
- And then there's Seventeen itself: It started 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. Nowadays, it might as well be The Twilight rag, and all that jazz about loving your body whatever its shape? Pfft. * plays "Taps" while recycling my old, more noble issues of Seventeen."
- 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-metal magazine. Though worthwhile articles pop up occasionally, it hasn't been worth subscribing to in a long time.
- The dreck they cover ain't even metal. They'll occasionally cover a metal band, but most of the time, it's generic hard rock crap.
- 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 (that was 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.
- 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 the manufacturers of gadgets, 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.
- OMNI magazine started as a magazine combining science fiction and science fact. The portion of the magazine dedicated to science fiction started to shrink, however, until it was mostly science with only a little bit of fiction. Then it died.
- 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 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 complete with a free copy of Viz!). The kicker? Most people think these changes were for the better. Of course, 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).
- 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 cancelled, and finished with an issue containing an index to the entire series.
- How can it finish without being cancelled?
- 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. It has sensationalist headlines and much of the good political analysis has been sucked out in favor of humorous ranting about being in a gang leaders posse for a day. It is simply sad.
- Likewise, US News and World Report, which was even more hardcore hard news than Time in its (above referenced) heyday. But it too succumbed to the banal and shallow (and in particular regularly will put out a Special Christianity Issue every few months...).
- One of Johnson Publication's flagship books, Jet Magazine, used to clock in at a decent 80 or pages, and was chock full of interesting national news about black Americans and civil rights. It also had a bikini centerfold page, usually on page 43. Nowadays, the centerfold pretty much appears anywhere near the back of the issue 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.
- in recent times Newsweek 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 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.
- The Economist has wobbled a little of late, though they're fighting valiantly compared to the other news magazines.
- How so? The magazine basically does 3 things: multiple page, in depth analysis of some subject like a country or an industry; longer-than-average analysis of news around the world in their various sections; and the columns. As far as I can tell, they haven't changed any of these in the past decade or so, they haven't tried to water down any of their writing for a bigger audience, and they haven't started to branch out into different subject matter, so, if anything, they seem to be averting this trope hard.
- Newsweek has been starting to resemble a print version of Slate ever since the Washington Post Company (which has owned Newsweek since 1961) bought the latter from Microsoft, with staff writers like Daniel Gross and Dahlia Lithwick brought over from the Webzine.
- Newsweek essentially became Barackweek for a long time, causing Stephen Colbert to joke recently that they liked the iPad so much that it became "their first non-Obama cover in over a year!"
- You wanna see Internet Backlash? Just have writer Ramin Setoodeh write an inflammatory article about how he thinks out actors Sean Hayes, Jonathan Groff from Glee, who was Lea Michele's very convincing love interest in Spring Awakening and other gay men come off as self-hating and too gay in straight roles, along with artificial. Now see a nice majority of the LGBT community, many others who are straight and offended, and the kind yet very protective of gay rights Mama Bear Kristin Chenoweth (a Christian woman with a sane view of TheBible, mind you), 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 trope has been active for a long time. Cosmopolitan used to be a sophisticated magazine that would cover a variety of topics, and also included short stories (it was 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"
- 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 do 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 have added a Detective Conan section. The videogame 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, seriously!), and then it stopped at issue 8.
- 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 and has celebrities on the cover.
- The focus on relationships is absolutely astonishing! It's hard to find a single section that isn't devoted to dating/guy problems these days. It's aimed at 10-14 year olds now, so a small amount of articles devoted to boy problems would be understandable, but devoting nearly every freakin' article to it is insane. It makes it seem as if all pre-teen and teen girl is boy-crazy. The only redeeming quality is that they now feature an article about real issues in society in every issue. They recently did one about texting while driving.
- 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.
- Star Wars Insider used to have interesting articles that really were considered to be "insider" (concept art, exclusive features on the Star Wars expanded universe, BTS features on the "Lost Cut" of Star Wars 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, including 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 its name to Star Wars Galaxy Collector, and most of the content was jettisoned in favor of appealing to toy collectors. The "new" magazine ended up being canceled after eight issues.
- 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.
- When the American edition of Shonen Jump was first released, it featured about nine manga series with only Dragon Ball Z and Yu Yu Hakusho being the only ones whose anime were already aired on television. Now? It only runs four series, Naruto, whose anime version is the most popular anime in the west, Bleach, the second most popular anime in the west, One Piece, whose anime is doing quite well in the west despite 4Kids and Karakuri Douji Ultimo, the only serialized series without an anime adaptation.
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