Prompted by the folding of style magazine The Face, Simon Collison at collylogic.com writes an article entitled “The Monthly Style Magazine – R.I.P”

He says, amongst other things:

“The state of magazine publishing in the UK is in serious limbo. People simply do not need to pay four quid a month to find out what’s going on – not now we have the web at our fingertips.”

It’s a good point – I know that I used to buy far more magazines than I do now, and I won’t be buying the latest T3 as I know I’ll have seen it all weeks, if not months, before in Gizmodo or Mocoloco. But I think he oversimplifies the issue; mostly, the article is about how magazines can improve their web presence, as a means of competing with the "instant access, always on" availability of the web, with an eye towards eventually phasing out the paper magazine completely and being entirely web-based.

In terms of up to date information, I agree that magazines can’t compete with the web. They just can’t. Pictures of the Sony PSP, for instance, appeared on the internet long before I saw them in print in Edge. Where certain magazines improve upon the web, though, is in the quality of the content. Compare a game review from, for instance, GameSpy to one written in Edge – the Edge review is almost always superior. A better standard of writing, it will be more polished and professional. Leading industry figures have their own regular columns, and there are regular in-depth interviews with developers from the gaming and computing world, both past and present, that are routinely more intimate and exhaustive than the online equivalent

It’s not just games. A music magazine such as Comes With a Smile focuses on interviews with the artists, and also gives away a packed CD of music you’ve never heard of. Of course, with Kazaa and BitTorrent and various other means, you’ve never had access to so much music before, but it’s different – which would you rather do? Listen to a mix-tape from a music buff or just hoover up somebody’s ‘misc’ mp3 collection?

A website does not act as a genuine replacement for a magazine. I, and I suspect many other people, would rather sit out in the garden on a warm sunny day with a chilled Budweiser reading a magazine than in my bedroom reading a website on a dodgy monitor. And purely from a design perspective, printed publications just generally look better than websites – greater control over font sizes, kerning, high-quality glossy images, and no worries about default text sizes or unsupported browsers. Even the texture and feel of the paper should be taken into account.

He’s right about style magazines, though. They are tat.

Magazines and books will be with us for a while longer, I think. After all, who wants to read a laptop when they go to the loo?