What Happened to People Magazine?

The thought's occurred to me recently that television (OTA broadcast, networks, and cable) are about to get, or are in the process of getting, newspapered. In the sense that the evisceration which hit newspapers from ~2000 to 2020 is about to hit the video sector. Mostly because of advertising flight and audience shifts to elsewhere.

I don't know what the end result will be. Maybe the situation in the radio industry, where increasingly there's little more than hit-driven track-programmed pop stations, increasing dominance of Spanish-language broadcasts, and at the left end of the dial (in the US) a smattering of public, religious, and college broadcasters. Rock radio is all but dead. Classical all the more so. What TV's analogue to this might be I'm not sure, though I suspect it's already somewhat represented by present offerings: shopping networks, non-English broadcast (particularly Spanish), and highly-automated syndication, all chasing smaller ad spend and, likely, less lucrative audience segments.

Having largely avoided TV for the past four decades I'm really not positioned to observe what's happening here, though I'm seeing increased general signs of stress from articles and news reports.

People actually started as a column in Time Magazine itself. Someone had the brilliant idea of doing a spinout, that as this article implicitly points out, ultimately outshone the parent.

Parasocial relationships are remarkably powerful.

I mean, not while you're on the train to work, or sitting in a waiting room - but actual dedicated time for reading?

I know that ever since I became a parent, I basically have zero time to do that anymore. I used to read lots of magazines, tech or other, in the afternoon. Books, not so much during the day, but usually in bed before turning off the lights - but even this has pretty much come to a halt: my habits have changed, and now I go to bed when I'm too exhausted to stay up anymore, and wouldn't be able to actually read something.

But I know that lots of people love reading books (it's not that I don't...), and you know, there's the whole curling up on the couch in the winter with a hot chocolate and good book kind of stuff...

The notion of "Most Important Celebrity Magazine" is begging the question so hard that the question turned over its house keys and moved out. People has always been a magazine about things that don't matter whatsoever. Now it's a website about different things that don't matter. It evolved from a waste of paper to a waste of electrons, and I can't think of a single reason we should care.

Am I the only one who likes this? I was looking for a new smartwatch and had no idea what was out there. I took the top 100 results, which from inspection were clearly all SEO optimized as mentioned, and ran them through ChatGPT to pull out the unique features and most important considerations when choosing a smartwatch. I took the search results again and ran them again through ChatGPT but this time asked it to pull out the different smartwatches and rank them on all the features previously identified. Voila, a detailed comparison table of smartwatches. I went back and checked and no individual site (even what this article says are "actual" review sites like the WireCutter) went into as much depth on features or different models as my table. Like no, I would not read each article by itself, but if life gives you lemons, it's a great time to make lemonade.