Spreading The Word is no longer the preserve of traditional media

The Word co-founder David Hepworth has written a piece for In Publishing about the magazine's demise earlier this year, noting that in the 40 minutes between tweeting a statement about the closure and arriving in the office "the story had gone further than it would have gone in an entire week in the old world [pre-social media]". This old world, he adds, would have involved "some mistrustful bargaining over exclusivity" with MediaGuardian over a press release about the closure – ah yes, David, Monkey remembers those days fondly. Way back in, ooh ... about 2007. He concludes: Here's what I learned through the closure of The Word. The speed with which this item of news spread and became a news event in which people could happily participate and the "disintermediation", to use a jargon word, of the traditional news outlets was a live demonstration of the same forces which mean you can't publish magazines, or indeed anything, the way you once did. The coda to this tale is that Word fans – always a committed and active bunch, even if there weren't enough of them to keep the mag going – have set up a website, the Afterword , offering "musings on the byways of popular culture", to keep the flame alive.