I've been a magazine junkie for as long as I can remember. In Readers' Digest, National Geographic, Life, and all the other magazines I read as a kid, I always found subjects and ideas I didn't know I was interested in until a good writer or photographer showed me they were fascinating.
It wasn't just the articles, either. There were the photos of exotic places and people and adventures. There were the Norman Rockwell drawings that affirmed everything endearing and rock solid about the kind of community I grew up in -- at least until he broke loose from the racial constraints of The Saturday Evening Post and painted that unforgettable little black girl, walking proud and alone through a taunting crowd, protected by federal marshals. And there were the cartoons in the New Yorker that showed me a entirely different world, fraught with sophisticated attitudes and jokes and understandings. Magazines were all about showing us a world that was bigger and more interesting than we could have imagined. The ads were an intrinsic part of that, showing us that life could be push-button easy and luxurious.
Those were the days of the general interest magazine, when editors provided a mix of articles, some for men, some for women, some for the young, some for the old. It was a blend which survived until the 1970's because, fresh from depression and war, most new families wanted to buy the same things, so all kinds of advertisers clamored to support them. Look at any of those magazines and you see, side by side, ads for televisions, cars, appliances, furniture, cigarettes, convenience foods.
With competition from both television and niche magazines targeted specifically for their specific interests, though, the general interest magazines started dying as advertisers switched their allegiances to these new media. Advertising for women's products went first to the general "ladies' magazines," then to niche titles like Ms. and Working Woman and Working Mother and Cosmo. That was the first great magazine die-off.
We're facing another one now, and for the same reason: all popular magazines depend on advertising to foot the bills. Our subscription dollars pay only a fraction of the cost of publishing; in fact, the main reason editors want subscribers at all, given that we pay so much less than buyers at newsstands do, is that they can promise advertisers an exact number of eyeballs that will view their ads.
That's a model that works well enough as long as advertisers want to play. Unfortunately, they don't at the moment, or can't afford to. The first sign of distress was in the technology magazines, as industry sales began to contract after the millennium bug expansion. Some magazines, like The Industry Standard, died outright, and others merged. The remaining ones started a slow steady shrinking, because the "news hole" (articles and other editorial content) could be only as many pages as the advertising could pay for.
Newspapers are suffering from the same advertising down-market. If you pay attention to how thick the publications while you check them in, you can tell which ones are on the endangered list; I think it's a fair bet that at least one news magazine will fold in the next couple of years.
The cost of paper and unrealistic stockholder expectations for double digit return on investment every year have compounded the problem for both newspapers and magazines. Jim Romanesko's Media News -- http://www.poynter.org/medianews/ -- and MediaBistro -- http://www.mediabistro.com/ -- report story after story about mass layoffs of reporters and editors. Newspapers have even offered buyouts to established writers like Ellen Goodman (which she turned down, I'm happy to say). After a steady diet of such stories you might well conclude that, from a stockholder's point of view, the ideal publication is one that has one editor and one writer, unless there's a way to do without the writer.
The same thing is impacting Internet magazines and newspaper web sites as well, as the advertising dries up. Salon -- http://salon.com/ -- is desperately trying to line up enough subscribers to their premium content to stave off bankruptcy. Rupert Murdoch has severely reduced content on his Fox News web site (my weekly column on Fox News was one of the first casualties of his cost-containment drive), and now there are rumors that he's also going to close down the New York Post.
There are unanticipated side-effects that also have an impact on us. You may be aware that a while back, About.com was purchased by Primedia, a company that publishes general magazines like Seventeen and New York, and niche magazines like Cat Fancy and Civil War Times. As Primedia's ad revenue has gone down, taking its stock price with it, the company is laying hundreds of people off -- including many of the About.com guides. Tim Wojcik's Librarians' page is just one of the many abruptly vanished pages.
I'm not sure what librarians can do about the decline of magazines, but if we value them, we have to let the publishers know that we're willing to pay more for our subscriptions. We could also support our favorite magazines' advertisers; at the least, if we take an interest in a product because of an ad we saw in a magazine, we could make a point of telling the company, "I saw your ad in . . ."
* * * * *
NOTE: If this topic interests you, check out the column I wrote about old magazines, "The Look of Life," at http://marylaine.com/myword/magazine.html
* * * * *
COOL QUOTE
What makes life worthy and allows civilizations to endure are all the things that have negative financial returns under commercial rules of quick time: universities, temples, choirs, literature, museums, terraced fields, long marriages, slow walks, line dancing and art. Almost everything we hold dear is slow to develop and slow to change.
Paul Hawken. "Possibilities." In Imagine: What America Could Be in the 21st Century.
* * * * *
You are welcome to copy and distribute or e-mail any of my own articles for noncommercial purposes (but not those by my guest writers) as long as you retain this copyright statement:
Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies.
http://marylaine.com/exlibris/
Copyright, Marylaine Block, 1999-2001.
[Publishers may license the content for a reasonable fee.]
