The sad but inevitable end of The Magazine

Glenn Fleishman’s (and originally Marco Arment’s) The Magazine was a pioneering app.

While ‘traditional’ media companies were filling your iPad with hundreds of MBs of PDFs, Arment and Fleishman were trying to do something very different.

Digitally native, cleanly designed, cheap and genuinely a good read week after week, The Magazine was heralded as the start of a new publishing era.

Two years on, however, and the outlook is quite different. Writing in this week’s issue Fleishman says…

The Magazine will cease publishing its regular every-other-week issues with the December 17, 2014, edition. We don’t see this as a failure, but as the right time.

And even though I’m a massive fan of the product (I’ve been a subscriber since early on and was a Kickstarter backer this time last year) and will miss it when it’s gone, I’m inclined to agree with him.

Newsstand was a key feature of iOS5. It was seen by some as the digital solution for all of print’s problems and came with some special APIs and in-app purchase options that weren’t available for ‘normal’ apps.

By by iOS7 things had changed…

No wonder things had become a struggle.

This was abetted in part by Apple’s decision to hide Newsstand apps, a constant complaint by readers who simply forgot when we had new issues appear.

Apple isn’t solely to blame for the end of The Magazine though. Ultimately the internet has changed quite a lot in the past couple of years. There are now several sites that regularly publish longform journalism for free and treat it with the same care and attention that The Magazine has since 2012. The social web is also even more important to the distribution of content than it ever was and the ‘app with paywall’ model basically just create barriers to sharing (despite efforts to make certain pieces available through the website for free).

So sadly all good things must come to an end, but if you’d like to help them to have one last hurrah you can always back their final Kickstarter and follow Glenn on Twitter to see what he’s up to next. In the meantime I need to find something else that’s good to read.