E-zines have been a thing for almost 15 years and I want to say the pioneer was Time Inc. They produce Time, Sports Illustrated and People magazine among other titles.

When the bottom dropped out of the economy in 08 I was working a BS retirement job at a magazine factory. We did titles across many segments - the Time weeklys above, Family Circle and it's mirror Parents, W magazine (big glossy fashion mag), the biker trilogy (V-Twin for PG audience, Biker was more R rated, In the Wind could have been Hustler with some tweaks) and a bunch of other stuff including Car and Driver, LMC catalogs, some huge musician supply catalog, etc, etc.

It took maybe 6 months to trickle down to the production floor but probably 40% of the work went poof. It started as all the same titles and the same number of monthly books but the page counts were way down because advertising dollars went elsewhere. Time and Sports Illustrated was a big job for us and they lost a lot of pages just from GM going bankrupt. Less ad revenue for the publisher led to squeezing the printers for better prices. When the efficiency experts showed up, that's when I knew the grave was being dug.

The big players in the industry started buying up the smaller ones just for their print orders. The physical assets that were part of the purchase (buildings, equipment, labor) got scraped. Take excess production capacity out of the market to prop up supply based pricing in the face of dwindling demand. By the time I got fired for my attitude problem the only thing keeping the lights on was the one million plus junk mail Coupon Clipper rags we did every week. It was deja vu for the idiots running the place as they had been big dogs in the paper catalog business before the rise of ecommerce and on line shopping. At least I got out before they got bought and shuttered a year or so later.

At the time one reality show I watched was Swamp Loggers. The premise was basically Axe Men in the bayou. Harvesting low grade lumber from flooded tracts and kinda interesting in the way Gold Rush is - the machines and the process. Almost everything they cut down went to pulp mills for making paper. The main drama element over the last couple seasons was the companies going broke because the paper companies were going broke and not buying as much raw material. Magazine printing companies buy paper by the train load. Subscription vs news stand is about a 90 / 10 split so the US Postal Service took a hit too.

On a brighter note, my next pointless retirement job ended up being internet proof. I got a gig in distribution center for Kelloggs. I can't imagine them coming up with a way to email pop tarts and corn flakes anytime soon.