Here’s a good article in the LA Times about some of the shelter-mag closings I’ve been talking about lately. The gist is that “most magazines find it hard to stay connected to readers via a publication that takes months to produce, print and mail — at a cost of $2 per copy, in some cases — when design bloggers can put out instant news with minimal overhead and no expense to the reader.”

Compared to the frenetic pace of home design blogs like Apartment Therapy, Design* Sponge, Remodelista, poppytalk, Design Milk, etc, our bi-monthly magazine seems to move at a glacial pace. In the time it takes me to write a couple book blurbs or a gallery profile, download and convert images, then lay them out on a page that won’t go to press for a month, 10 or 20 great new things have been posted on my feeds. These sites, which don’t usually have to layout their work or mess around with Quark or InDesign before their stuff gets published, have a serious edge in the time department. And since everything was originally compiled for the Web, keeping your archives accessible to readers is a breeze. Not so much when everything you’ve written was originally designed for print. For example, I spent an hour this morning resizing high-res tif images intended for the page to low-res RGB jpegs that we can post on the site. It’s a massive pain, since we have several years of articles to go back and convert like this. If everything had been in a more internet-friendly format, the work would already be done and I could have spent that time scouting for new features. Better for my sanity and readers’ enjoyment.

When you add in the fact that a lot of younger readers prefer typing in “chinoiserie” on a couple different blogs to cutting out pages from years’ worth of shelter magazines, you have a serious situation. Perhaps the prestige of Web-only publishing is somewhat lacking, but most people in my generation don’t care, especially if you have kept the great photography and lush homes. In fact, copying images and bookmarking links makes it a lot easier to make our own “cut books” of stuff we like, and track those products down as well. It’s almost more enticing on the screen, and a well-linked blog post saves us the trouble of having to call the magazine and get shunted through a trail of editors and designers, only to find out a particular lamp has been discontinued. (I get these calls all the time: “I’m looking at page 67 of one of your magazines and I want that blue rug, but I don’t know which issue it is because I cut out the page three years ago!”) And finally, Web publishing mitigates the a lot of the so-called eco-guilt that consumers are feeling. Even if Dwell is printing on recycled paper with soy-based inks, it’s still considered an unnecessary use of resources by an increasingly larger segment of society.

This is not to say that print magazines will die. A lot of people still like the tiny thrill of a new magazine in the mail and reading it over a cup of coffee. But the smart ones are hedging their bets, continuing to provide slick cover shots and beautiful graphics, while simultaneously producing web-only content, including slide-shows and guides that combine the flexibility of the web with the types of articles that blogs sometimes lack, like themed galleries that have been accumulated and compared over a longer period of time. Domino has great examples of these that they’ve culled from their archives. Here’s where print magazines have an advantage over Web-only publishers: they usually have the overhead to put these articles together. The rapid-fire nature of posting, the low profit margins and the rigidity of most blogging software makes this kind of editing a more unwieldy prospect for blogs, so readers need a masterful use of search keywords to find what they’re looking for. Most people are willing to do that work, which makes a really well-organized web component of a print magazine the only way they can compete online.

So, yeah, there are a lot of reasons why publishing Darwinism is hitting the shelters hard. I haven’t even touched on the economic downturns which are making people a lot less forgiving of indulgences like this, pretty as it is. Time to batten down the hatches and hope I manage to stay gainfully employed!