The Internet: It's gotta be evil. It's just gotta be.

The Atlantic turned its first profit in at least a decade, largely thanks to embracing the Internet. The owner of longtime rival magazine Harpers—who hates the Internet with burning fire of 10,000 suns and is, thus, not at all likely to be biased in his assessment of Internet-based business plans—reportedly told his staffers that he thinks The Atlantic is lying.

• [RyanH]

  And I actually agreed with a few of his points. Not many, but a few.

  In many ways he’s not wrong.

  To a large extent we are in the middle of disassembling all the traditional media distribution and funding channels and replacements are still on the horizon. The general hope is that those replacements will mature fast enough take the load as traditional methods start failing. However, in many cases this will not work out the way we might hope. Even a year or two spread between a general collapse of traditional funding models and a rise of robust new methods will spell the doom for a lot of good businesses and content.

  And the truth is that even if he wanted to, you can’t just throw something like Harpers raw online and magically make money. At best you can try and create something that retains the feel and atmosphere and stick the Harpers name on the banner. At the moment there is no path where any publication as it currently exists isn’t doomed. The smart and lucky ones will have a metamorphosis like the Atlantic but I can’t fault the others for refusing to go quietly into the night.

• [Jack]

  The golden age of print media profits from print ads is dying.

  Sadly no truly viable model exists for electronic publishing.

  Yes there are ways to make money, but nowhere near the level of print.

  That is the dilemma.

• [MadDuck]

  Seriously, Harpers has to be called to task for their abuse of quotation marks in that article.

• [Xenu]

  Just don’t sell your web division to a separate company, like Wired did back in the day. That’s the opposite of what makes sense.

• [David Llopis]

  I pay for a Consumer Reports online subscription, and I donated to Glen Greenwald’s fundraising campaign earlier this week. I really enjoy being the customer instead of the “eyeballs,” but how many people are willing & able to pay for good journalism? And why am I offended by even the word “paywall” while simultaneously having no problem paying my Consumer Reports “subscription?”
  The future of journalism is quite hazy. I’m hoping enough people will be willing to pool their money to buy the same kinds of journalism I want, and—ideally—that journalism would somehow be accessible by those who can’t afford to contribute.

• [wsst1000]

  I’m not surprised that Harper’s hates the internet. I let my Harper’s sub run out in the 90′s when I subscribed to Yahoo! Internet Life.

  Before the internet, Harper’s Index provided the quirky information that thousands of web writers do today, while Harper’s Readings provided access to obscure and ephemeral items that are also easily accessed on the web.

  The web ended my need to subscribe to Harper’s. I bet it did for a lot of former subscribers. So if I was the editor you bet I would have a blind resentment against the web and everyone who likes it.

  • [Anonymous]

    Harper’s does not hate the internet. Maybe its owner does. I think that Harper’s approach to the web is quite unorthodox, but pretty good in the end. and it’s the least obnoxious paywall that there is. If you live in the US, you can get a yearly subscription for a ridiculously small amount (I myself am a european subscriber), and then have instant access to 160 years worth of (well) archived articles online.

    Sadly, the guy who ushered in Harper’s web policy, Roger D. Hodge, was fired a year ago by the above mentioned MacArthur. Ever since I have been fearing that what Hodge established will be eroded slowly.

    Interesting that you’re saying that you cancelled your subscription because the web provided a substitute. For me it was exactly the other way around – I found stuff in Harper’s that I had not been able to find on the web.

    • [wsst1000]

      Thanks for the reply Anon. I haven’t read Harper’s for years. After reading your comment I might do so.

• [adamnvillani]

  A friend of mine just got laid off today from his gig as a film critic for a newspaper. He doesn’t know where to even start looking for new work; he fears his days of getting paid to review movies are over.

  And so it goes. The market of people willing to pay money to read quality journalism just isn’t as big these days. Things are lost and things are gained. The transition’s easy from the consumer’s side, but not so much from the other side.

  • [TakeThatSubspace!]

    That’s bad news. A similar thing happened to a friend of mine. He’s thinking of gathering a few like-minded types online with a view to making something at least from advertising click-throughs.

    ++++++++++++++

    One thing I do know though is that no one connected with The Atlantic or Harpers is confirming or denying that Lazar, Akiva & Yagoubzadeh were sued, or that Lazar, Akiva & Yagoubzadeh were sued repeatedly, or Lazar, Akiva & Yagoubzadeh are unethical, or Lazar, Akiva & Yagoubzadeh are stupid, or Lazar, Akiva & …

  • [toyg]

    “The market of people willing to pay money to read quality journalism just isn’t as big these days.”

    B*llocks. People have never been “willing” to feed overpaid self-important hacks (a category which might well include your friend, sorry), but they never had a choice.
    Now they do have a choice; for example, they can decide to trust some pompous critic from a random newspaper (and pay him for the favor) or trust “collective knowledge aggregators” like Rotten Tomatoes (for free), or ask some moviegoers’ group on Facebook, or or or… Art-reviewing was hardly “journalism” at the best of times anyway.

    It sucks for your friend, but hey, it sucks for Ben Ali as well.

  • [davejenk1ns]

    Adamvillani, your statement “The market of people willing to pay money to read quality journalism just isn’t as big these days.” might be true, but I would rephrase it this way:

    “The market of people willing to pay for access to quality journalism has been subsumed by the Internet’s distribution model. Those customers may be willing to pay, but there is no reason for them to pay when they can get it for free.”

    I think this is what Ruprecht Murdock and others are thinking with their paywalls: they think that people will pay for quality jounralism. Personally, I am very doubtful, with the exception of the WSJ: that’s high-quality financial data, and those readers with money will pay for two reasons:
    1. Readers are likely wealthy, and a subscription fee is relatively small amount to them
    2. The perception of exclusivity in the readership– this will now be given an aire of “inside info”, especially around company and market changes.

• [MrsBug]

  Mr. MacArthur sounds like he’s crying because some big bully is eating his lunch.

• [Antinous / Moderator]

  There’s still hope for Harper’s business plan.

• [pyalot]

  I think we should all just stop worrying and start loving change, unexpected opportunities and everything accelerated.

  /me spares an intense glare at oldskool businesses unable to reinvent themselves out of a corner

  • [hassenpfeffer]

    You know what else is characterized by unexpected, accelerated change? Cancer.

• [thatbob]

  Advertising has always accounted for something like 80-90% of journalism’s revenues. Paid subscriptions were just to subsidize the distribution model. I still don’t understand why advertising revenues went down in the internet age, instead of up, for the publishers of good quality journalism, which still draws the right kind of eyeballs, and many millions more of them. But kudos to the Atlantic for figuring out how to bring ad revenue back up by doing exactly the things that seemed obvious to me ten years ago. I’m so smugly pleased by your success that I’m going to go read your website now and click on all of your ads!

  • [Rob Beschizza]

    Here’s a quote from Harpers’ owner: “I’ll be vindicated, since clearly the advertising “model” has failed and readers are going to have to pay.”

    Whenever a print person says something like “The ad-supported media model is bad, which is why we have cover charges and the internet sucks,” this is the point where you can stop listening to them, because it’s ignorance or deception on an epic scale.

    The reason print has a cover price not because it’s a credible alternative revenue source to advertising, but because it radically increases the advertising rates they can command. Advertisers pay a lot more to buy an audience that paid to look at the ads, and that extra revenue dwarfs revenue from cover charges and subscriptions.

    There’s an organization that verifies Paid Circulation for advertisers. Harpers publishes their report from it here: http://www.harpers.org/advertising/pdfs-2008-10/Harpers_Magazine_ABCStatement_6-30-08.pdf

• [millie fink]

  Bummage, cuz a lot of Harpers content rocks.

  Go Mr. Fish!

• [yesno]

  “Business models” aren’t magic; you can’t expect businesses to just “reinvent” themselves out of oblivion, and it’s inhuman to expect them to just accept this with grace.

  Harper’s is excellent–a single issue of Harper’s is more worth reading than a year of most blogs.

  “The Atlantic Wire” is essential reading online, btw. If the Atlantic thrives online, it’s only to the extent it’s a good blogging platform and not really “The Atlantic” anymore.

• [hassenpfeffer]

  I wonder if I should tell MacArthur that it was Harper’s web page, particularly Scott Horton’s “No Comment,” that moved me to get a subscription to the print mag. Harper’s print subscribers also get *full* access to the 150-blah years of the magazine’s archives online. Wish NatGeo would do that, but instead my wife got me the archive on DVD-ROM.

• [hassenpfeffer]

  Oh, BTW, I don’t read the Atlantic’s web site. Watching Sullivan’s endless stream of logorrhea is nearly as painful as subscribing to @ThatKevinSmith’s Twitter feed. When I want stream-of-consciousness I read Faulkner and Joyce.

• [Ambiguity]

  The owner of longtime rival magazine Harpers—who hates the Internet with burning fire of 10,000 suns…

  That’s was kind of a fun read, but I felt a little dirty — or at least ironical — for reading it, for free, on the Internet. I wonder if he felt a little ironic for posting it there?

  Seriously, I think the world needs to occasional curmudgeonly rant to offset the over-the-top techno-sycophantism that sometimes crops up from the lovers of technology for technology’s sake. It provides a little balance, one that you won’t find much on the Internet, for obvious reasons.

  And I actually agreed with a few of his points. Not many, but a few.

• [eerd]

  I would subscribe to both the Atlantic and Harpers if they were offered for the Kindle in the UK. I find it bizarre they’re not – surely the cost of providing such an option would be minimal and the prospect of some more subscriptions would be appealing? Or, even, they could just sell electronic copies from their websites.

  Harpers offers a digital sub via Zinio, but that doesn’t seem to work on the Kindle.

  Maddening and perplexing.

• [Oskar]

  The union stuff is fascinating. Even this guy, staunch supporter of unions elsewhere, becomes shocked when his employees actually go and decide that they want to assert their rights. Good on him for funding the magazine (and I’ll take commenters word for it that it’s awesome, I don’t read it all that much), but if you say one thing and then act in a completely contrary way, it’s hard not to see you as a hypocrite.

  As for The Atlantic-thing, I wonder how much of that revenue comes just from their bloggers. Andrew Sullivan has to bring in a pretty penny, and he’s hardly the only one there.

  • [Anonymous]

    FTA: 1/4 of the unique daily hits…I read his blog myself, to get the Sane Conservative perspective.

• [razen cain]

  That guy is wacky and reminded me of this Onion article.

  http://tinyurl.com/2v62beu

• [dr. ultimately]

  macarthur is about to learn the real meaning of the term “bottom-up phenomenon”.

• [Pliny the Elder]

  Regardless of whatever silly things the owner of Harper’s said, it is a great, great magazine. It is so far ahead of the Atlantic that they shouldn’t be mentioned in the same sentence. The latter employs such “journalists” as Jeffery Goldberg and Meghan McArdle, for fucks sake.