BILL: You bring up an excellent point here. You see, I felt we could knock out gamefaqs easily by putting up our strategy guides in PDF form (with no magazine-induced limitations on length), placing our massive cheat code database online and supplementing it with actual content.
It's a shame the revamped site that Christa McCarthy created is no longer up because it was a small sample of what we could have done with videos, individually verified cheats and walkthroughs that were professionally written and illustrated with our own screen captures -- as opposed to wading through 20 amateur, unedited, ugly, html-format strat guides.
As for the future of print, that was my reasoning behind the "lifestyle" articles. These were niche areas of considerable interest (from game-based movies, action figs and music to articles on game schools and pro gaming) that I didn't see being covered anywhere else.
You can't beat the Net for immediacy, not with print's lead time, but you can do analysis and many other things that do work better in hard copy format. In fact, our AD Lisa Beattie had what I thought was a brilliant idea: produce an edition of T&T in Spanish.
But by then I guess Larry F didn't want to hear any more ideas for saving the magazine. The sales drop was constant and becoming impossible. You'd be shocked at how few copies were selling by the time the May and June issues -- which were really strong issues -- hit the supermarkets.
I began to seriously wonder if adults were still interested in gaming magazines.
Ah well, I maintained my position with Running With Scissors throughout my LFP employment and am EIC of PostalNation.net. Am currently negotiating with an European game magazine, and still plan to write some new Kunkel Reports for DP.