Magazines in a digital age
7th January 2010
What do readers really want from a magazine? What role do magazines play in the Digital age? Virginia Heffernan from the New York Times answers below….
Article from the New York Times, published 3rd January 2010.
But what is a magazine?
If you’re holding one, you can turn the page. But it’s very possible that you’re nowhere near a turnable page now. You’re reading on a computer or a hand-held device, even though this column was intended for a magazine — a Sunday newspaper supplement that started in 1896. Like hardcover books in Kindle editions and “Daily Show” clips on the Web, this column is produced in large part for a medium other than the one in which it is consumed.
That creates some dissonance. Magazine-making is a 20th-century commercial art, with time-honored conventions, protocols and economics. But the effort that goes into making a print magazine — lighting photo shoots, designing layouts, affixing page numbers — produces little value for those who find its elements deracinated on the Web. If you’re reading these words online, why should you know, or care, that they are meant to follow an illustrated cover, a table of contents and somefeuilleton pieces? You don’t expect it to precede a “well” of reported stories. Nor do you anticipate a first-person essay or a crossword puzzle.
And while magazine editors still attend to “the mix” — the sequencing of articles, the balance of text and images — online readers consider all that obsolete hocus-pocus. Magazine décor used to make readers feel protected, at ease and thus receptive to advertising — in their well-appointed New Yorker place, say, or their coffeehouse Nation place. But online we build lean-tos from whatever is around, often relying on the artless scaffolding supplied by search engines and browsers.
So what do readers want from magazines online? Fifteen years ago, Steven Johnson and Stefanie Syman, writers in New York, started Feed, one of the Web’s first magazines. As technophiles, they aimed to dose readers with links and multimedia. The tech-savvy could even customize a path through the articles by means of “objects” — 500-word chunks of text that could be read in any order. Feed was a cult hit, but the “objects” idea never took off, Johnson told me recently, because writers of the mid-’90s couldn’t figure out how to break up their articles that way. (Writers eventually figured it out. Blog blog blog.)
At the same time, Feed suspected that newcomers online would seek mementos of analog existence. Modeling itself on publications like Harper’s, Feed supplied cultural criticism by established or up-and-coming writers. Like a Congo encampment with damask and silverware, Feed served as an outpost where people could get their cultural bearings.
But e-zine readers wanted novelty as much as bearings. Salon, which also started in 1995, foregrounded its politics (“liberal”) rather than its formal similarities to existing magazines. This was a good move: self-identified liberals form an affinity group that easily migrated to the Web. (Harper’s fans just stuck with Harper’s.) What’s more, if the animating metaphor at Feed was the “feed” — the raw material — the metaphor driving Salon was the colloquium. While Web users like primary documents (The Smoking Gun started feeding this curiosity in 1997), they adore talking, writing and socializing online.
In 1996, Michael Kinsleydenounced a “conformity in the hipness of cyberspace,” to which he responded with a magazine of ungarish graphics and writing by people like Paul Krugman. Slate was born. Unlike the Feed editors, Kinsley was not a Webhead; he has claimed he used the word “online” only to attract Microsoft money for his newsmagazine. And unlike Time and Newsweek, Slate would not — he resolved at the start — abandon its mandate in favor of “features, consumerism, photographs, investigative reporting, health, sex.” Kinsley had the Internet’s number. The Web soon swelled with explanations of the news. Magazine-style features, full-dress photographs and investigative reporting are, by contrast, scarce.
But news analysis isn’t what makes magazines magazines. The X factor is the richness that Kinsley deplored — the lard and sumptuousness and heft that are the source of the “I’m home” feeling. You don’t get that online. No wonder magazine editors are enthusiastic about tablet computers, the reader-friendly devices that might appear this spring; maybe their size and functionality can infuse digital publications with magazineness.
In the ’90s, “magazine” was a pacifier — a word like “bookmark” to keep us quiet as we acclimated to life online. But now that we are here, Slate and Salon are communities and producers of influential articles; they’re not really magazines. Two online things — The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast — don’t call themselves magazines. HuffPo is “an American liberal news Web site and aggregated blog” and The Daily Beast offers “curated news aggregation plus original reporting and opinion.”
Maybe this means no one wants magazines anymore. Or maybe it means that those who do, those looking for that New Republicky or Voguey feeling, go where they have gone for 100 years. To the newsstand.
Posted by River, 7th January 2010
