The Mediashift blog interviewed John Scalzi and the editors of two leading SF magazines about whether the blow that digital media has dealt to pulp magazines is fatal. They’ve been losing readers for the past 20 years, and there are now only three speculative fiction pulps still in production.

Scalzi compares the magazines’ inability to adapt to the new digital landscape to AOL’s loss of market share in the late 90s.

“And then people started migrating to the web, and AOL started doing a bunch of me-too initiatives,” he explained. “It was member retention. They were like, ‘Look we’re doing this too, so you don’t have to leave us.’ Eventually people went ‘Yeah, there’s other stuff out here, and it’s cheaper or it’s free or it’s more interesting,’ and they leave anyway. What eventually happens with those retention efforts is that perhaps they delay the inevitable for a little while, but eventually the inevitable is inevitable. It eventually comes.”

Given recent speculation that a combination of the poor economy and pervasive digital media might kill off print newspapers, is there any hope for pulp magazines? Should they try to transition entirely to the Web? (I seem to recall OMNI trying that, with poor results.) Could such a transition be done gracefully, or would radical changes be necessary?

Link (via BoingBoing)