Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/08/20/zombie-magazines-prestigi.html
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Related and dangerous as well:
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I saw that birther story come up on my flipbook feed as coming from Newsweek and I just could not understand why. Now I do. Thanks for that.
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The saddest one to me was National Lampoon, which got run by a succession of criminal ghouls who started cranking out shit comedy under the brand name.
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Zombies tattling on zombies…
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Well that explains the very shoddy and poorly written Newsweek article my usually source critical friend posted last week. It looked OK on the surface but there were no sources quoted and the headline was definitely clickbait.
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The “bait” in clickbait is tiny but irreplaceable shards of your publication’s credibility.
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NL’s situation early on certainly wasn’t helped by this guy:
(source: Straightdope)
In 1989, the magazine was acquired in a hostile takeover by a business partnership headed by actor Tim Matheson (who played “Otter” in the 1978 film National Lampoon’s Animal House). Matheson instituted a policy banning frontal nudity in the magazine, which had become a staple of the magazine’s content. After only two years, Matheson was forced to sell, in order to avoid bankruptcy due to mounting debts.
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Forbes, not so prestigious as Newsweek but still a known media brand, has basically become a pay-for-play content mill.
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It’s like a pedigreed LiveJournal these days.
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it’s a bit weird to see a discussion of the marxist dialectic on a site that once advertised itself as a capitalist tool.
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I know people who will cite something & say “it was in Forbes” - and I’m like no, it was hosted at Forbes with no editorial oversight at all, if it has /sites/ in the URL.
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That’s who I thought of first when I saw the headline. Even in the 70s, it hit the skids pretty hard–not long after I got a three-year subscription as a present, no less.
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There are zombie consumer brands as well, mostly just IP being sold when the original business failed (I wouldn’t call that a rescue, myself). I’ve seen them in electronics like TVs. My mom swore by canned foods from Del Monte, but now I only see them in dollar stores. And I lost a mail-order catalog brand I loved, Coldwater Creek.
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