• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, August 27, 2009

Gil Schwartz, the other PR guy who writes a weekly column (in Fortune under the pen name Stanley Bing) says that one of his Internet pals declared magazines dead. Writes Bing: "So I thought, okay, magazines are in pretty tough shape all right. But dead? You go to an airport and all you see is magazines. Even the books look like magazines. There are at least seven separate magazines still interested in Jon and Kate. A bunch more seem to be about boats and cameras and computers and sex. I generally buy one about cars. Dead? Magazines? Who says so?

"The Internet."

Gil (Stanley?), that's what we do here in Internetland, we go around saying that all other media are dead (while keeping a nervous finger on our own carotid artery). We do that because we want more advertising money. It really pisses us off that networks like yours (Gil ((Stanley?)), works for CBS) have been losing audience yet, until this last upfront, have been charging marketers higher rates to reach smaller and smaller audiences. Moreover, your audiences can't click on ads that take them to websites that can answer potential buyer questions and maybe even offer to sell them that product RIGHT NOW. That can't happen in a magazine either. Or in a newspaper.

We get hyperbolic (DEAD - maybe not, but looking kinda like Ben Hur's mother and sister at the leper colony) because we want advertisers to shift their spending away from offline to online media before we run out of venture capital. Or fail to get bought. Or before somebody invents a better way to do what we do, only cheaper and easier to understand. Like your friend, we take no schadenfreude, in the demise of other media. Most of us grew up in those industries and cut our teeth in magazine or network ad sales.

We watch as much TV as the next guy, but only because cable picked up the ball dropped by the cash strapped networks and started producing some cool adult shows with naked women, explicit violence and guys who say fuck every 13th word (god, I miss Deadwood). By the way, good luck with 5 nights of Leno.

We grew up reading magazines and newspapers. This was back when sneaking a peek at your Uncle Randy's Playboy was THE adolescent rite of passage and cable news hadn't killed the news magazines with more timely and dramatic pictures. We also listened to terrestrial radio pulling those "50,000 watts of power from New York" into our bedrooms all over the country. Rating the Top Ten was a widespread high school obsession. We fought over who got to read the Sunday newspaper comics section first and believed earnestly in the world according to Abigail Van Buren. Somewhere we have saved newspapers sitting in a drawer with headlines like "Kennedy Assassinated" and "Man Walks On Moon."

But here in Internetland we can't afford to be sentimental about the past. Things move far too rapidly. Just when we think we have it all figured out, some big West Coast company launches something weird like "search" advertising and we have to scramble to adapt. We are really sorry about TV and magazines and radio and newspaper (and we thank each for contributing content that some engineer in India will help us figure out how to monetize) but not so sorry that we don't feel like we have to keep calling them dead in hopes that it will generate higher ad revenue for us.

Dancing on your grave? Yep, a little bit.