*This is a Conde Nast blog, by the way. So, if the empire perishes of viral economic decline, it's not real likely that this blog is gonna survive that.
*This is the first blog that WIRED magazine ever had, and I'm pretty sure it's the first Conde Nast blog, too, as the establishment magazines of that bygone era weren't all that eager to dabble. Student of media decay that I am, I remember thinking at the time, "Y'know, this experiment is quite dangerous; for a print magazine to create an Internet blog is rather like lighting a newfangled blowtorch inside a big paper library." But I was at peace with the risk; I figured that if anybody was gonna try it, it oughta be some flaky, expendable, semi-underground character, like, say, a sci-fi novelist.
*And I didn't mind doing it; I'm still keeping at it, though this blog is by no means dynamic and cutting-edge. I could go on blogging here indefinitely; I don't lose much by the effort, and I'm used to it. On the other hand, the condition of the Conde Nast publishing house is truly perilous now. They have the dodgy, cling by your fingernails lifestyle of a bohemian pulp writer; they're so badly off that if this wasn't plague season, you'd wanna invite them over, make them a grilled-cheese sandwich and let them sleep on your couch.
*And this is the New York Times checking their pulse and shaking their head here; the New York Times, itself a deeply threatened publication inside plague-stricken New York City.
*What happens next? I dunno. Former titans of media home alone, dressed in bathrobes, lamenting on grainy video to audiences of one another, maybe.
*Also: massive, historical transitions are not the personal fault of Anna Wintour, even if her chic hairstyle and sunglasses usually make some great copy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/26/business/media/anna-wintour-conde-nast-coronavirus.html
*Good luck with the NYT paywall there; truth to tell, I subscribe.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/26/business/media/anna-wintour-conde-nast-coronavirus.html
(...)
But the coronavirus isn’t that sort of crisis. It’s a more dismal affair, preying on older and weaker companies as well as people. The theatrical flourishes and lavish lifestyles of the great media figures of a generation — from Ms. Wintour to Donald Trump — seem ill suited to the moment. These days, even the most charismatic executives are doing Zoom calls in their sweatpants.
Paris, rather than becoming a moment when Ms. Wintour saved her two treasured industries — magazines and fashion — now looks a bit more like the last stand for her leadership style, for a personal brand larger than her company’s, and for Condé Nast’s long, legendary 20th century. The crisis is set to sweep aside the vestiges of a more luxuriant media age.
“There were trends that were already happening, some positive and some negative,” Ms. Wintour’s boss, the Condé Nast chief executive Roger Lynch, told me Friday. “And the crisis is just accelerating all those.”
The negative trends — the collapse of print and of advertising — arrived at Condé Nast in 2008, and haven’t relented since. Now they’ll hit Ms. Wintour and Vogue particularly hard. The fashion magazine is Condé’s most lucrative U.S. publication. But it is also almost entirely dependent on advertisements that Ms. Wintour, through sheer force of personality, has kept coming in from fashion houses as virtually every other print category collapsed. Clothing is now the hardest-hit sector of the devastated retail industry.
Mr. Lynch, 57, who spoke to me via Zoom from his house in Lake Arrowhead, Calif., is responding to the crisis with a mix of sharp spending cuts and some increased marketing for subscriptions...
