SmartMoney: Hail and Farewell

The September issue of SmartMoney will be its last, on paper. Times are tough for magazines. As Rupert Murdoch takes The Wall Street Journal mainstream to compete with The New York Times, he may feel less need for a personal-finance publication.

SmartMoney hopes to continue online. Generally, web sites seem sorry substitutes for print publications.  Magazines on the iPad look more promising. A touch screen allows readers of, say, The Economist to leaf through articles and skip or return to ad pages much as print readers do. But judging from SmartMoney's announcement, the publication is destined to be little more than a web site.

SmartMoney launched in 1992. Seems like only yesterday to some of us. In reality it was a world without smart phones. Wall Street was a place where ordinary folks thought twice before going to the expense of buying stocks. At Schwab in 1991, SmartMoney recalls, the average price of a trade was about $76. And that was a bargain compared with "full-service" commissions.

Haven't read SmartMoney much since my working days. At its best the content had a bit of an edge. One of the last examples, perhaps, is this column from Brett Arends. Though Mitt Romney may have paid at least 13 percent in federal income tax for the last ten years, as he announced today, he probably paid more for investment management.