It’s yet another victim of the modern, digital age: Golf World magazine will no longer be available in print. The magazine, one of the flagships in sports, will be all-digital as of next Monday. Dating back to 1947, it was the oldest continuously running golf magazine in America. Sadly, watch for everyone else to follow suit soon.
Happily, they’ll still have the same staff of gifted writers. Guys like Jaime Diaz, Tim Rosaforte, and Jim Moriarty are the Gold Standard of golf journalism, (heck, two of the three of them alone are lifetime achievement award winners). So we can still expect the same quality work, we’ll just have to adapt to reading them on-line.
We’ve come quite a ways since a German computer scientist said, “Hey! as a by-product of my work, guess what? I can compress and send files along an electronic pathway!”
What came next? Napster! “We can bring about the death of the CD!” Sean Fanning said, to his significant detriment what the RIAA got a hold of his emails.
I have been giving this advice as an Internet and entertainment lawyer for 15 years: the ones who survive are the ones who change the fastest. But the OTHER ones who survive and survive longer are those who reject causal eyeballs and “clicks” as a way of monetizing. Had print media listened, they might still be around and a lot of people might still have jobs. In the mean time Global Golf Post thrives….Why? Because they don’t chase casual eyeballs – which are fickle eyeballs that don’t pay a cent! – and because they don’t rely on the utterly failed click-for-pay method.
In truth, nothing has changed. Golf World will still be Golf World…we’ll just have to tether ourselves even further to our devices. But it won’t make their work any less sterling.
