Shift Calls it Quits

MCS writes "Shift Magazine announced that it is closing down after 10 years. Biggest reason is that within this 10 year period they only turned profit on one issue. I remember at one point that they even had their own TV show -- the magazine was different then it competitors (Wired) as it focused more on the impact of technology and the social generation of those who lived in it. This can be seen in such issues as 'The Simpson Generation' and 'Seven Days without Tech'. Many of these articles are available online at their website Shift.com "

Comments

No Wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never even heard of them...

Re:No Wonder

[someguyintoronto]

This is because it's a Canadian publication, and unfortunately our publishing industry faces far too intense competition from our southern neighbour.

Canadian magazines, books, etc not only have difficulty breaking into the states, but they can barely maintain recognition in Canada.

The competition comes from southern cultural import (infestation) into Canada. Additionally, our population is too small and cannot support special interest magazines.

Any Canadian publication, book, film, band, musician, actor, etc that makes it in the states generally succeeds, but unfortunately there is great talent just buried away and hidden in our igloos;)

BTW, Shift was a well put together magazine (that threw good schmooze parties to boot;), that with American backing probably would have done very well. It's a shame to seem them go. Go look at their web site to see what they were all about.

Shift?

[Mononoke]

If I'd ever heard of it, I might have bought a copy.

No, this isn't a troll. I can't say that I've ever seen this mag. I've never seen it referenced anywhere. I've just plain never heard of it.

Sorry to hear they couldn't make it.

Defining Moments in Digital Culture

[KiahZero]

Doesn't it make you feel all warm and fuzzy?

3. The Slashdot Effect: Everyday netizens revolutionize newsgathering "Happens anytime Slashdot links to your site - "It's like getting hit with a tsunami," as a sysadmin once told us. When geek-news website Slashdot puts up a link to an interesting news item online, the rush of visitors can savage even the most heavily fortified servers -- producing millions of hits in a few hours. Stephen Adler's "The Slashdot Effect" paper, released in February 1999, found it caused ten-fold surges in traffic -- producing temporary, floating audiences that could rival CNN in size.

Which is precisely the point. Slashdot's arrival in 1997 wasn't just another high-tech community; it was the future of newsgathering. With thousands of techies scouring the net for stories, Slashdot's volunteer base is bigger than any major media outlet-helping them regularly break news, such as Transmeta's super-secret Crusoe chip or Microsoft's anti-Linux memos. "

Too bad they couldn't forsee their immienent doom.

So from the description...

[jht]

Shift was apparently a Canadian version of Wired. I couldn't tell from their website, of course, because it was already slashdotted, but the article about the failure and the comments so far seem to point in that direction.

Of course, Wired's been a huge money sink for most of it's existence - and that's with the much larger US market to work with and bigger circulation numbers. Shift never seems to have made any real run south of the border, never was profitable, and appealed to a small segment of a small market in a small country.

I think it's amazing they survived this long, quite frankly. It's been tough enough for media companies to thrive anyway, especially one as limited as they seem to have been. There's a number of Canadian magazines that I'm aware of - some I even read occasionally. I never heard of Shift, though. That may say a little something about what their chances were right there. But at 10 years, they predated the dotcom boom and bust alike. Not many other media properties would have been allowed to lose money that long.

There goes my plan for shitf.com

[lamz]

I have been a Shift subscriber for around 8 years -- almost since the very beginning. I have also hated the magazine all along. Why keep renewing and reading it? I guess the attraction was similar to other people's fascination with camp. I was continually fascinated by how bad the magazine was, and how adored it was by the left.

If anyone has a pile of Shift magazines, flip through them and find how many times they complained about the fact that the Atari 2600 version of PacMan sucked. Seriously -- it's been covered more than once. The writing seemed to be stuck in some kind of time-loop, like they were always looking back to the 1980s from around 1994. And smug? Don't get me started.

Anyway, I often mused about creating a parody publication called "Shitf", but now I guess I'll just let it go.