History Main / MagazineDecay

* Once upon a time, most comic books were anthologies with a number of different features in them in a variety of genres. As the superhero genre took over the comics market, most of them were cancelled, except for the ones that ''had'' superheroes, in which case the superhero would take over the book. Sometimes the book would be renamed after its star; other times, as with ''ComicBook/DetectiveComics'' and ''ComicBook/ActionComics'', the old name would be kept as an ArtifactTitle (as Batman and Superman, respectively, by that point already had long-running series of their own). In the case of ''ComicBook/AdventureComics'', while the star was originally ComicBook/{{Superboy}}, eventually the ComicBook/LegionOfSuperHeroes took over the title, then proceeded to be swapped with ComicBook/{{Supergirl}} (which had been a backup in ''Action'' since her creation), who became the star from then on. The same thing happened with ''ComicBook/SupermanFamily'', which was supposed to be an anthology featuring ComicBook/{{Superman}}'s secondary characters before Supergirl took over the title. In a related phenomenon, at the end of UsefulNotes/TheGoldenAgeOfComicBooks, as superheroes fell out of favor, many former superhero books underwent sometimes-drastic and sudden shifts in genre (for example, ''All-Star Comics'', the original home of the ComicBook/JusticeSocietyOfAmerica, was renamed "All-Star Western", and ''ComicBook/CaptainAmerica Comics'' became ''Captain America's Weird Tales'' for two issues before being cancelled). Of course, these days almost all comics have only a single story in each issue, and oftentimes it's only a part of a longer story (see the bit about WritingForTheTrade above).

* ''ComicBook/{{Tiger}}'' originally comprised a mixture of sports and adventure comics. Under Barrie Tomlinson's editorship, it shifted to focus entirely on sports stories. This was perhaps for the best, because it allowed ''Tiger'' to forge its own identity and adventure fans were already being serviced by ''Comicbook/{{Lion}}'.

** This goes for ''Family Computing'' Magazine as well. It started as a magazine with topics for the whole family, with a focus on educational titles and games for the kids, and productivity for parents. Over time, especially in the aftermath of UsefulNotes/TheGreatVideoGameCrashOf1983, the focus on gaming and educational software declined, and there came a greater emphasis towards the home office (a rising trend in the late 80s). It changed its name to ''Family and Home Office Computing'', then completed the shift when it renamed itself again to ''Home Office Computing''. This was less a decay, and more a shift in audience trends, since by the 1990s, computers were no longer the mysterious boxes that families wouldn't know what to do with. The publication has a longer publication history in its home office version than the family version.

* The UsefulNotes/ZXSpectrum magazine ''Your Spectrum'' was once a magazine discussing all sorts of software- and hardware-related issues, with type-in listings for every kind of application from games to business programs, and always a subtle undercurrent of subversive humour. When it was renamed and relaunched in 1986 as ''Your Sinclair'' (a change made due to reports that the replacement for the ZX Spectrum probably wouldn't be called a Spectrum — turns out it did), it became a magazine that occasionally discussed games and spent the rest of the time being completely off the wall (one issue came with a free copy of ''ComicBook/{{Viz}}''!). The kicker? Most people think these changes were for the ''better''. The rot set in for good around 1990 when Future Publishing bought the mag and prices started spiralling, page numbers fell, and the system itself was on the wane...although it took a further three years to finally fold, by which time the main discussions in the magazine were about [=PCs=] ''emulating'' it!

* This was welcome for ''N64 Magazine'', which slowly pushed its N64 coverage out in favour of the UsefulNotes/GameCube. Rather than go to all the hassle of launching a new magazine, the publisher just renamed it ''NGC'' and continued the issue numbering.

* ''Giant'' started out as a men's magazine which, unlike the rest of its ilk, was presented intelligently, featuring interesting articles (one of its staff writers was Kevin Allison of ''Series/TheState'') and good interviews, including one where rock musician Music/{{Beck}} announced the existence of his then-upcoming album ''Guero''. Then in 2006, it was bought by the former editor of a hip-hop magazine, who essentially turned it into an urban ''Maxim''... but not before he fired all of its writers and canceled all subscriptions. The magazine folded in 2009.

* Pleasant Company and its daughter magazine, ''Toys/AmericanGirl Magazine'', focused heavily on the Historical Characters, with select articles about modern day situations relevant to tween girls such as fashion, crafts, stories about modern girls, or personal problems. This also included excerpts from various full novels and never before published short stories about the characters. Around the year 2000--after Mattel fully owned the company--the Historical Character emphasis was removed fully and more emphasis was placed on the tween girl-focused articles. The magazine eventually terminated in early 2019.

[[folder:Dolls]]
* The Pleasant Company toy company and its daughter magazine, ''Toys/AmericanGirl'', primarily focused on getting young girls into American history. Then Mattel bought Pleasant Company, and ''American Girl'''s articles on historical events and characters were replaced by more typical tween-girl-oriented articles about fashion and crafts. The history angle still exists in the toyline, but there's far more marketing towards contemporary aesthetics.
[[/folder]]

* Speaking of Gawker, it used to cover primarily New York media, earning it exactly the audience you'd expect, but after several successive editorial changes — A.J. Daulerio taking over and explicitly saying the site would focus more on "traffic-whoring" and "SEO bomb-throws", hiring ''Daily What'' editor Neetzan Zimmerman to write significantly less snarky posts, etc. — it's now more comparable to a slightly meaner Buzzfeed. This is happening to most online news/pop culture magazines, but Gawker's the most open about it.

* The Pleasant Company toy company and its daughter magazine, ''Toys/AmericanGirl'', were once fun, interesting ways to get young girls into American history. Then Mattel bought Pleasant Company, and ''American Girl'''s articles on historical events and characters were replaced by manufactured crap about cutesy hair, nails, and arts and crafts designed to appeal to "tweens". The original intent of the company was pushed to a back shelf, leaving a lot of dedicated history fans and doll collectors rather annoyed.

* Speaking of which, ''Magazine/{{Playboy}}'' once held as much of a sense of sophistication as it was possible for a magazine featuring naked women. It was once genuinely possible to say "I only read ''Playboy'' [[IReadItForTheArticles for the articles]]" ''and be dead serious''. It's really quite astonishing to see some of the articles ''Playboy'' ran in the 1960s and '70s — interviews with UsefulNotes/JimmyCarter, UsefulNotes/MartinLutherKingJr, Albert Speer, and Creator/VladimirNabokov; short stories by John Updike, Creator/PhilipRoth, and Creator/UrsulaKLeGuin; political and cultural commentary by the likes of Creator/WilliamFBuckleyJr, Creator/NormanMailer and Norman Thomas — basically, half the great American writers of the late 20th Century. And some non-Americans, too: Creator/ArthurCClarke and Creator/PGWodehouse published a few stories then, as well, and two of Creator/GeorgeMacdonaldFraser's ''Literature/{{Flashman}}'' novels were serialized there (admittedly, the latter's a more comfortable fit). Hugh Hefner even half-jokingly told a group of Playmates, "Without you, I'd be the publisher of a literary magazine."\\\

* ''Magazine/{{MAD}}'' itself was accused of suffering from this at least since the late 1990s, relying only on [[RefugeInVulgarity gross humor]] when it's not aiming {{Take That}}s at almost AnythingThatMoves; the former is rather factual, while the latter fits more to [[WesternAnimation/{{MAD}} its animated adaptation]], itself LighterAndSofter than ''WesternAnimation/SouthPark'' or ''WesternAnimation/RobotChicken''. One major milestone of shame was the addition of actual advertisements in 2001, which were previously the subject of vicious lampooning. The pivot to political satire beginning with the 2016 election, has been credited with hastening the publication's demise (which all but occurred in 2019) instead of reviving it, though a last-ditch attempt at a reboot got [[ScrewedByTheNetwork Screwed By DC]]. Since then, it has switched to mostly reprints of older material.

* ''Materidouska''[[note]]translated as "thymus" or "thyme"; Czech speakers can identify that the herb's name means "mother's breath" etymologically[[/note]] is a Czech magazine for children founded in 1945. It's supposed to be ''for youngest readers'' -- children from 7 to 10. It was initiated by poet Frantisek Hrubin and included lots of original illustrations, funny rhymes and poems, short comics, fairy-tales, and stories. The cover usually featured a picture by an illustrator, sometimes a renowned artist. In the early 2000s, the focus shifted and Hollywood blockbusters (usually CGI-animated movies) graced the cover, never mind it didn't go too well with the original gentle-looking logo ([[https://web.archive.org/web/20160311092259/http://www.mediatimes.cz/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/casopis-materidouska-1945-2010.jpg Compare]] the covers of the first issue and an issue from 2010). One issue caused a major "what the hell"-level uproar by featuring [[{{Literature/Twilight}} Edward Cullen]] on the cover (along with a blurb about "Vampiric Ten Commandments"... and Halloween is not even a well-known holiday in the country). Considering that we're talking about a romantic-horror film with abusive relationships and an infamous biting birth/miscarriage, this was not just held as a breach of good taste, but of common sense.

* ''Wizard'', once the most well-knowncomics magazine, went from a title with reviews and an actual focus on comics to "''Maxim'' For Nerds", and their reviews were frequently little more than blatant toadying to comics writers. It became measurably thinner with each issue, going from issues that were as ''thick as dictionaries'' (as late as 1999) to issues in the late '00s that were only about twice as thick as the game manual for ''VideoGame/GearsOfWar''. Maybe. Including ads, of course; remove those and it becomes about even. The magazine fired nearly everyone, to the point that one comics review podcast claimed that the only evidence there was still anyone working there was that they ''kept on firing people'' long after you'd have expected them to have run out. It finally died in January 2011.

* ''ComicBook/{{Tiger}}'' originally comprised a mixutre of sports and adventure comics. Under Barrie Tomlinson's editorship, it shifted to focus entirely on sports stories. This was perhaps for the best, because it allowed ''Tiger'' to forge its own identity and adventure fans were already being serviced by ''Comicbook/{{Lion}}'.

* Beginning in January 1924, ''The American Mercury'' was a world-class literary journal edited by Creator/HLMencken and publishing and promoting the likes of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Saroyan, Sandburg, and Dreiser. Although the ''Mercury'', like Mencken himself, maintained a fairly consistently conservative editorial line, in particular a proto-libertarian suspicion of government involvement in the economy, it was also open to other ideas (it merged with the democratic socialist-leaning ''Common Sense'' in 1946) and was suspicious of any form of hysteria. After [[TheGreatDepression the Stock Market crashed]], the magazine began trying to keep with the times, and did so admirably; its most lasting influence came in 1945, when it debuted ''Series/MeetThePress'' on the Mutual Radio Network.[[note]]The show moved to Creator/{{NBC}}-TV on November 6, 1947, and remains a network stalwart.[[/note]] Unfortunately, in August 1952 it was sold to Russell Maguire, the owner of the Thompson Gun Company and a virulent anti-Semite, who turned the journal into a vehicle for extreme-right politics and neo-fascism.[[note]]While Mencken himself was prejudiced against Jews, this was more from the values of his day than out-and-out hate.[[/note]] George Lincoln Rockwell, future founder of [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin the American]] [[ThoseWackyNazis Nazi Party]], became editor in 1956, while Creator/WilliamFBuckleyJr, a onetime writer, quit the magazine and founded ''National Review'' (a more anti-fascist and pro-Jewish conservative magazine) in disgust at what the ''Mercury'' became. Circulation and respectability plunged, and by June 1966 (after changing hands twice to other neo-Nazi and hard-right figures in the intervening years) the ''Mercury'' was a quarterly hardcore white-supremacist rag with 7,000 subscribers...and it only got worse as the years wore on. It finally ended in 1981 and, per Website/TheOtherWiki:

* ''Maxim'' took a distinct drift from the fratboy targetting of its 1997 to 2010s circulation peak after its acquisition by Sardar Biglari in 2015, attempting to rebrand as a high-fashion prestige magazine of the ''GQ'' style. Perhaps it wouldn't have aged well during the cultural shifts of the 2010s as it was, but removing the humor definitely sucked it of its edge.

** They also lost credibility after they published their (in)famous cover story "51%" (% of American women who aren't married), claiming it was the death of marriage now that the majority of women are choosing to remain single. The count included 15-year-olds and widows.

* Most of the earliest ''Entertainment Weekly'' readers remember it as the magazine that covered major hit shows like ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'', ''Series/{{Seinfeld}}'' and ''Series/TheXFiles'' since they brought the magazine the most success (along with ''Franchise/StarWars'' stories as TheNineties wore on). But it also stood out from other entertainment industry-focused weekly mags (like ''People'' and ''US Weekly'') with its in-depth coverage of movies and TV, treating celebrities as real people/artists rather than gossip fodder, and nurturing of under-appreciated hits like ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'', ''Series/ArrestedDevelopment'' and ''Series/TheWire''. But since a major administration change in 2008, the magazine got a bit wonky. With the decline of printed media, ''EW'' began to focus much more on their web content, and the mag's usual depth diminished as a result. Compare a 1990s issue to one from TheNewTens, and the difference is noticeable. The TV coverage is mostly limited to longtime TV writer Ken Tucker, for instance. The ''coup de grace'' to many longtime readers, which coincided with the 2008 changeover, was an infatuation with ''Literature/{{Twilight}}'', presumably to attract its fanbase into purchasing the magazine. While their borderline manic coverage toned down after 2010, the multiple covers and articles turned off non-fans before then -- in the second half of '09, covers seemed to alternate between those and Music/MichaelJackson retrospectives. Recently, it seems like the magazine's editor-in-chief (shared with ''People'') is more obsessed about getting himself on television (an appearance by him on ''Series/{{Younger}}'' with an accompanying editor's note in the magazine about how awesome he was could have been filled by literally anyone else) and about the People/Entertainment Weekly Network (an online attempt at bringing both magazines to television) than about the content of ''EW'', and with how the election turned out, also took to political comments not really needed in an entertainment magazine. Sometime in June 2019, ''EW'' announced that it will become a [[ArtifactTitle monthly magazine instead of weekly]]. It was then announced in February of 2022 it would cease being a print publication and online only (which apparently was a surprise to the people ''putting together'' what they had no idea was going to be the final issue).

* Originally starting as a scientific vulgarization publication, the French magazine ''Science & Vie'' became less and less rigourously scientific since being bought by Mondadori on 2006, said fall becoming noticeable by mid 2010s. After being bought by Reworld Media on 2019, the issue became important enough to see, by November 2020, the redaction voting an illimited strike to protest against on-line publication of content without being informed.

All of this changed in 2019: now the magazine doesn't promote at all the new releases (the most you see is a line mentioning that this or that army was recently introduced or got new pieces - but at least a month or two after the actual release, and there is not a single mention of prices) and the focus got back on the gaming, with each issue featuring a supplement for either 40k or ''Age of Sigmar'' featuring new stratagems or warscroll batallions representing certain subfactions of armies plus multiple additions for the other boxed games Games Workshop makes like new characters and missions for ''Warhammer Quest'', additional factions and characters for ''Kill Team'' and ''Warcry'' (including sinergy between them - such as rules for using ''Quest'' terrain and characters in ''Kill Team''), short stories written by Black Library authors, painting and modelling suggestions (usually about tying your army to a certain kind of landscape or situation) and so on.

* ''Seventeen'' began in 1944 as a fashion magazine for teen girls, true enough, but with enough intelligent content to separate it from its rivals. Creator/SylviaPlath got her start at ''Seventeen'' when they published her short story, "And Summer Will Not Come Again", in 1950. There was even a time when the magazine encouraged girls to be happy with the shape their body had taken, instead of shoving stick-thin models as an "ideal" down their throat. Even at the peak of the "valley girl" in the 80s, it was still highly-regarded--By the mid-1990s however, the rise of "bimbo" magazines in the vein of ''Tiger Beat'' led to a sharp decrease of circulation, leading to the "dumbing-down" of the publication. During the late 2000s and early 2010s, it became chiefly known as "the ''Literature/{{Twilight}}'' rag", while it later became obsessed with pop divas. All that jazz about loving your body whatever its shape? Pfft. Those real-life "it happened to me" stories that used to get featured and even blurbed on the cover? They've been reduced to a single page and less than 100 words. Fortunately, ''Seventeen'' stopped featuring Photoshop-retouched pictures of girls [[http://mashable.com/2012/07/03/seventeen-real-girls-petition/ after an internet petition in 2012]].

* UK magazine ''Bizarre'' started off as an uncategorisable melange of genres (the tagline was "For Humans", highlighting the fact that although it had a large amount of female fanservice, it was more about showing interesting things to everyone regardless of gender), usually with a common theme for the issue (e.g., the Crime issue would have articles on criminal slang, true crime photos, interviews with forensic crime scene workers, pieces on unusual laws across the world, plus [[MsFanservice an attractive woman clad in just a policeman's hat and a belt]]) along with other random articles about things you've never heard of and a healthy dose of anarchic humour. Around 2009 there was a change of staff, and it slowly became obsessed with tattoos, tattooed porn stars/pinups, and tattoo conventions. All sense of theming was lost, the interviews with the models devolved into soundbites to be posted next to their photos, and the sense of humour left with Chris Nieratko. Currently, it is essentially the same as lowbrow "Lad's Mags" ''Zoo'' and ''Nuts'', with more tattoos. It has been accused, with some justification, of being a tabloid version of ''Magazine/ForteanTimes'', focusing on the more sensational and sleazier forms of the Fortean with more pictures and a lot fewer words. Embarrassingly, it is a product of the same publisher.

* ''Wizard'', once the most well-known [[ComicBookTropes comics]] magazine, went from a title with reviews and an actual focus on comics to "''Maxim'' For Nerds", and their reviews were frequently little more than blatant toadying to comics writers. It became measurably thinner with each issue, going from issues that were as ''thick as dictionaries'' (as late as 1999) to issues in the late '00s that were only about twice as thick as the game manual for ''VideoGame/GearsOfWar''. Maybe. Including ads, of course; remove those and it becomes about even. The magazine fired nearly everyone, to the point that one comics review podcast claimed that the only evidence there was still anyone working there was that they ''kept on firing people'' long after you'd have expected them to have run out. It finally died in January 2011.
* Now that WritingForTheTrade is standard operating procedure, "mainstream" ComicBooks have turned into vehicles for shilling the graphic novels. Phil and Kaja Foglio came right out and said this when they converted ''Webcomic/GirlGenius'' into a {{webcomic}}.
* Once upon a time, most comic books were anthologies with a number of different features in them in a variety of genres. As the superhero genre took over the comics market, most of them were cancelled, except for the ones that ''had'' superheroes, in which case the superhero would take over the book. Sometimes the book would be renamed after its star; other times, as with ''ComicBook/DetectiveComics'' and ''ComicBook/ActionComics'', the old name would be kept as an ArtifactTitle (as Batman and Superman, respectively, by that point already had long-running series of their own). In the case of ''Adventure Comics'', while the star was originally ComicBook/{{Superboy}}, eventually the ComicBook/LegionOfSuperHeroes took over the title, then proceeded to be swapped with ComicBook/{{Supergirl}} (which had been a backup in ''Action'' since her creation), who became the star from then on. The same thing happened with ''Superman Family'', which was supposed to be an anthology featuring Franchise/{{Superman}}'s secondary characters before Supergirl took over the title. In a related phenomenon, at the end of UsefulNotes/TheGoldenAgeOfComicBooks, as superheroes fell out of favor, many former superhero books underwent sometimes-drastic and sudden shifts in genre (for example, ''All-Star Comics'', the original home of the ComicBook/JusticeSocietyOfAmerica, was renamed "All-Star Western", and ''ComicBook/CaptainAmerica Comics'' became ''Captain America's Weird Tales'' for two issues before being cancelled). Of course, these days almost all comics have only a single story in each issue, and oftentimes it's only a part of a longer story (see the bit about WritingForTheTrade above).
* ''Comicbook/{{Tiger}}'' originally comprised a mixutre of sports and adventure comics. Under Barrie Tomlinson's editorship, it shifted to focus entirely on sports stories. This was perhaps for the best, because it allowed ''Tiger'' to forge its own identity and adventure fans were already being serviced by ''Comicbook/{{Lion}}'.

* ''Magazine/GamePlayersMagazine'' started as a straightforward game-reviewing mag. Eventually, the reviewers gained personalities and jokes were made about them followed by wacky humour and gag letters pages. After that, they started going completely nuts — often having video game characters do reviews or Gazuga the three-eyed demon monkey answer letters. Eventually, the craziness hit a peak and they suddenly turned to ''Ultra Game Players'' and became way more serious. They didn't last another couple of years.

** The outsourcing of ''NP'' also eroded some of the core features of the magazine. For instance, while ''Nintendo Power'' was originally famous for including mini-guides of recently released games (such as maps, [=FAQs=], walkthroughs of early levels, etc.), and the writers typically wrote the official game guides (which were outsourced to Prima after the shift), the twilight years of the magazine omitted this entirely to the point where a game was almost never mentioned again after being reviewed (aside from the yearly awards). Articles which were not strictly focused on a new release were also cut (for example, the mock scientific article on turning a new gamer into a pro on the Wii, or the attempts to merge cooking game logic into the real world [[HilarityEnsues with predictable results]], and community events like the monthly Caption Contest had disappeared. By the time that the plug was pulled on ''NP''[='s=] 24-year run, it had been reduced to a shell of what it had once been.

Another problem resulted from the magazine's increasing tendency to award collective "Persons of the Year," which began [[OlderThanTheyThink as far back as 1950]]. While early selections of this kind ("The American Fighting Man," "U.S. Scientists") were relatively uncontroversial, ''Time'' received a huge backlash for naming "The Inheritor" (i.e., the under-25 generation) as their "Person of the Year" in 1966. This, along with the 1969 award to "The Middle Americans," proved extremely controversial in the polarized '60s, while also generating criticism for seemingly missing the point of their own award. From there, such strange choices as "The Computer" in 1982, "The Endangered Earth" in 1988 and "You" (representing the rise of the online community) in 2006 proliferated. Which isn't to mention the creation of a hype machine around the award — the cover is now unveiled either on Creator/{{CNN}} or ''Series/{{Today}}'', as if they're naming the nominees for the UsefulNotes/{{Academy Award}}s.

* The Italian ''Jetix Magazine'' started as a magazine about the cartoons aired on Jetix during that period and other stuff. Starting from Issue #5, the whole magazine was written using only XtremeKoolLetterz and started to expand the "and other stuff" part. The only Jetix toons they actually talked about out of random mentions were ''Anime/SonicX'' and ''WesternAnimation/DragonBooster'', while on the other side they added stuff like a "how to become a great detective" section themed around ''Manga/CaseClosed'' (which, if you're asking, was NOT a cartoon aired on ''Jetix''). The video game section stopped using votes and replaced them with one-word comments like "Cool" or "Great", and the articles about villains screwed up adding dangerous animals in it (they said that a DUST MITE is more powerful than [[VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII Sephiroth]]!)...and then it stopped at Issue #8.

* Magazine/NickelodeonMagazine during the 90s and early 2000s featured lots of articles on things kids might find interesting or bizarre, interviews with popular stars at the time, comics, and content related to the channel. Approaching the end of their initial run in 2010, the magazine became a lot thinner and became 99% comics, not restricting them to one section of the magazine anymore and appearing more like the separate Nickelodeon Comics magazines. There was also lots of WolverinePublicity for ''WesternAnimation/SpongeBobSquarePants'' around this time, since it's the network's most popular series. This might be justified, as those issues sold better than the others.