The New Yorker On-Line Archives: Utterly Useless. Can this Magazine Make the Transition to Digital?
January 9, 2009
Today, I made my first and last purchase of an old issue of The New Yorker. It is the September 1990 issue. It contains an important article by Robert Heilbroner, "After Communism." In it, he admitted that, with respect to the impossibility of socialism, "Mises was right." Socialist economies cannot be as efficient as free market economies. He also suggested that socialism's future will depend on whether it can ride on the coattails of the ecology movement. I read it when it first appeared in 1990.
I used my credit card to gain access to this issue for one year. I only needed one minute to know I had wasted $4.99.
I was given two on-screen choices: small print or large print. The small print page contains two pages on one. They are both unreadable. I printed out this page. It is unreadable, filling half of a standard 8.5-inch by 11-inch sheet.
The on-screen image is worse that the printout. There are black marks at the bottom of the page. These are in fact boxes: publication date, search, contents, print, e-mail, issue archive, and ... most notably ... help. I can read them in the printout. They are cut off on-screen.
I use the most popular screen setting, 1024 x 768.
I do have the option of enlarging the screen. I get only one size choice. It is large. It is so large that part of the article is cut off: bottom, right side. There is no up-down scroll bar on my screen. It prints out with the right-hand column cut in half.
I found on my own that I can move the large screen around with the cursor. I was unable to move the page down far enough to read the last lines of each column. One on a page in expanded mode, the only way to get to another page, as far as I could tell, is to click the minimize button. This takes you back to the log-in page, where you start over.
In short, it does not work.
Take a look at my two choices. Then read my wrap-up on why print media are steadily going bankrupt. They cannot make the transition to digital media.
Note: the blue line at the bottom of each page is the bottom of my screen.
Why don't they fix this? Why do they think anyone regards this as a product worth paying for? Who approved this in the first place?
Print-based magazines and newspapers are dying. The bankruptcy of the Chicago Tribune on December 8 is the wave of the future.
People with skills in paper-based publishing are going the way of people who were skilled in buggy-whip production. They don't know how to adjust to the new market.