Did you get your Parade magazine in the Sunday paper yesterday? If not, you missed out on some big news:
An interview with Benazir Bhutto before the former Pakistani prime minister was assassinated was important enough to keep on the cover of Parade magazine, the magazine's publisher said Sunday — even though the publication had already gone to print when Bhutto was killed.
Randy Siegel said Parade went to press on Dec. 21 and was already on its way to the 400 newspapers that distribute it when Bhutto was killed in a Dec. 27 shooting and bombing attack at a campaign rally in her country.
The Web version of the story was updated, Siegel said, but it was too late to change the magazine. He said the only option other than running the outdated article would have been asking newspapers not to distribute the magazine at all.
"We decided that this was an important interview to share with the American people," he said.
Nice attempt at a save, but not terribly convincing. This isn't evidence for the abandonment of print, but it does illustrate that not enough people have rethought how to use print. The longer the lead time, the less tied to current events a print article should be. We need to be thinking in digital terms for immediacy and print product for backgrounders and analysis.
