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

A Damn Shame

[CrazyLegs]

This has been a pretty fine magazine; albeit a bit hit-and-miss at times. Where Wired and its ilk focused on being the People magazine for a tech generation, Shift found a voice in showing the practical effects of technology on how most of us live. It's a damn shame....

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.

Re:Shift?

[tmark]

You haven't heard of it because it's a Canadian magazine, which I doubt had much if any American circulation. I only know about it because I'm Canadian and would occasionally find a copy in a doctor's lobby or something. Even in Canada, the magazine was never as important or well-read as Wired, or Business 2.0, so why the closing of this magazine rates a story on Slashdot is beyond me.

Re:Shift?

[nfotxn]

That's right, we're only supposed to read about America on slashdot! Nothing important ever came out of Canada. How self-loathing is that?!

Ouch, that hurts

[Iesu]

Boy, I bet they love being Slashdotted, now that they're out of operating budget...

NOT the economy...

[MosesJones]

Before anyone bleats that this is "the economy" just think for a second.

10 YEARS and only ONE ISSUE turned a profit. This was a cash sink before .coms became standard, it failed to make a profit during the boom, it lost money in the dive, and it lost money at the bottom.

Maybe the "sad" reason is really simple....

Do you know anyone who _ever_ paid money for it ?

Re:Reminds me of Suck.com

[dirkdidit]

Because they don't appeal to the large amount of people. Most people now want to see magazines with beautiful women and the latest war that the US has gotten into. They don't care about how high-speed internet changed Joe Blow's life or about funny geeky cartoons. It sucks but its the way things go I guess.

part of the challenge

[Anonymous Coward]

Could have been it's Canadian heritage. While Candian's are inundated with American media, it's a river that tends to flow only one way.

While I was a huge fan of Shift from its inception, when it tried to branch off into the American market (1997?) I knew it was heading for hard times. It never took off in the States, and had too much investment to make it feasible in the smaller Canadian market. I for one think it's a terrible shame to see this thoughtful magazine lifted from shelves.

Can you dig it?

[slothdog]

Who's the magazine that's smooth with the ladies? I'm only talkin' about...

uh, what? Oh, sorry.

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.

No more Shift????

[LordYUK]

But then how the fsck are we supposed to get to the '@' symbol?? The future of email is doomed!!!

oh, wait, you meant the magazine that hardly anyone read because most of us didnt know it existed.

In other news that doesnt change your life, Borka-Morka.com shut down 7 years ago and I spilt some milk this morning.

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.

shameful but i have to say it

[thedbp]

print is dead. and not in the irrelevant way; its just not as viable anymore, especially with delivery mediums like the, ahem, internet cropping up everywhere.

i am a print designer. i own TONS (if stacked and weighed) of LPs. I love the feel of magazines and books and the album jackets and small stapled indie mags ... there is a realness to it, an ingrained sense of accomplishment. something that humans have not yet developed for a sterile medium such as the internet. although we can recognize accomplishments in these new digital mediums, it has not yet garnered that "coziness" that makes people sit under reading lamps, excitedly turning pages in a worn out copy of The Dharma Bumbs. nobody who curls up next to a fireplace with an e-Book on your Palm can deny that it is a wholly different experience even though the text is identical.

so there's the dilema. print has been made unreasonable in terms of cost vs. distribution capability - it is now a luxury, one supported by twice the contents' length in advertisements. but we just don't want to let print, in all its kinky and enticing forms, go.

if you don't believe me, ask joe somebody whether they want a printed computer manual or a manual stored in the OS via Help, etc. Even though the digitized version would be easier to update, with audio and video descriptions or tutorials, a highly integrated/linked system, etc. - most average people will tell you they want a nice big indexed print copy.

its going to be a while before this is bred out of us :)

Re:shameful but i have to say it

[Deacon Jones]

While getting your main point, I think the "print is dead" just doesn't apply everywhere yet.

Perhaps to tech news, which tends to update faster than the medium its on. But for me, and I'm 32, so take that as what you will, print will always be actually preferable for "longer" reads because of the fact that paper is easier on the eyes than a monitor.

I don't care what your resolution is, how pretty your fonts are, and what theme(s) you are using, a monitor will tire your eyes out much quicker than reading a book.

I'm sure this has to do with the fact that monitors project as opposed to reflect, but it makes a big difference to me.

So I'm one of those guys who still prints out the "HOW-To's" not b/c I dont' know how to find or read the digital copy, but b/c my optical senses prefer the printed one.

This is why we still have books, NYT bestsellers lists, and online booksellers.

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.