Laundry and Literacy

I now live in an apartment which has no on site laundry facilities so today I made the trek to my local laundry so that I may get back to wearing underwear and socks that do not look as though they have been crocheted. It was a treacherous walk as the laundry is up a hill which could be currently used as an olympic class luge and bobsled course.

Since I choose to only do laundry once I am reduced to wearing the three wolf moon sweater my aunt gave me for christmas, I looked somewhat like a sherpa. My duffle full of slowly fermenting clothes was roughly equal to my own body weight and made the ascent much more trecherous. This is where the kinship with sherpas came to an end as I share none of the sure footed qualities they are known for.

Walking up the hill, I became less and less sherpa-like and more and more like a drunken penguin with some strange bulbous growth on its back. After falling twice (much to the amusement of passing motorists due to my flailing like an overturned turtle trying to right itself), I finally made it to the laundry.

We now get to the real point of the story. After donning my hazmat suit and depositing my clothes in the machines, I decided to go to the book store and pick up a magazine to read. Many years ago, I remember buying the first issue of Wired magazine and thoroughly enjoying the expansive, well written articles therein. Over the years, I have purchased many issues of Wired and always felt that it was money well spent.

As I looked through the magazine section, I saw the familiar Wired logo and decided to pick up a copy as I had not done so in quite some time. After drunken penguining back to the laundry, I was shocked to see how much the magazine had changed. Gone were the long and interesting articles, replaced with factoids and lists. I was horrified to see that Wired had become Maxim for nerds (minus the soft porn).

While I understand that the internet is severely damaging the sales of magazines, I feel that this short attention span approach to publishing is completely the wrong way to go. I am much more inclined to buy a magazine if it is full of in depth and relevant articles. If I wanted a "pros and cons" comparison of bike locks, I will use online sources that are probably much better suited to providing relevant product knowledge. The publishing industry has the same sort of issues to deal with as the film and music industries and it disheartens me to see that they are just as ineffectual as the other two in proactively finding new ways to survive without dumbing everything down.

What is your opinion on this? Can electronic media and periodicals co-exist or are the days of magazines numbered?