UH OH! Doesn't sound like things are going too well over at WWD! They decided to cut print completely and move to just an online magazine weekly. The way print has been going recently, I am not shocked at all. I am actually surprised this didn't happen sooner! Times are changing and now everyone is moving their magazines to just online content. I think unless you have a spectacular magazine that catches peoples eyes (once monthly really) than you are going to have a huge struggle surviving. Check out the letter from the editor-in-chief Edward Nardoza: #BYEWWD
This is the final newsprint edition of WWD. We pause to acknowledge this scrappy newspaper and its 105 years of chronicling an equally scrappy industry.
Decades ago, anxious reporters smoked at their desks, manual typewriters clacked, Linotypes pumped, Teletypes hummed and pneumatic tubes (the latest miracle technology at the time) carried wire reports from floor to floor through the old Fairchild building on East 12th Street. When deadline descended, colossal presses in the basement cranked up and thundered through the floors. Old-timers still talk about how the presses shook the entire building, quite a romantic coda to a day's work of reporting inside the daily news cycle. At one time, newsboys even delivered an afternoon edition of the paper.
Today, there's nothing cyclical about news. It's Instant Media. A global Niagara of information in a river of technology. Linotypes and Teletypes have given way to silent servers and an alphabet soup of functions and utilities, SEO, URLs, PDFs, CMS, APPs.
We all know how technological leaps have rattled traditional business models across all industries. Facebook has a bigger market capitalization than Coca-Cola. But for anyone in the news business, the two most exhilarating transformations are speed and immediate global reach. We plan to use these tools to the fullest, and we're not retreating one inch from daily journalism. In fact, we're now hyper-daily via WWD.com (open 24-7), a digital daily PDF edition (sign up now!) and our social outposts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest.
Nor are we deserting the print business. We're launching a weekly edition of WWD on April 29 with deeper context, timely analysis and compelling graphics. And, as our late Inspirer-in-Chief John B. Fairchild would insist, a touch of silly.
Find us everywhere, whenever and wherever you choose. Although a daily printing press no longer shakes our floors when the sun sets, we guarantee our servers will be stressed to the max.
– WWD editor-in-chief Edward Nardoza, April 24 2015