Magazine Quality Matters
When I was 13, a university student lived with us for a while, watching my brothers and me after school. An avid Glamour magazine subscriber, she would pass her old copies on to me. I devoured it, imagining the styles on myself (in real life, at school I was always the last to catch on to a trend, if at all). I read about being a career woman, and dealing with boyfriends--things I had little use for at the time. I drew braces on all the models in one issue to see if their beauty could be marred. While models with braces, I discovered, still shone like models, when you scribbled a headgear like the one I wore on them, they didn't look so hot. That was depressing.
My dad had little respect for Glamour magazine. Once he leafed through it, pointing out how everthing was so colorful and in ebulliantly large type, as if the women who read it were too stupid to understand words printed in small black serifs. In retrospect, his Playboys and the like (hidden, of course, but my brothers found them) were not exactly the New Yorker either. Indeed, nothing, at least for a long time, was like the New Yorker--until, years later, the New Yorker became much more like everything else.
As a result of my father's disdain, I stopped reading fashion/beauty magazines, though they remained a guilty pleasure. Attending Bryn Mawr College further cemented my feminist/literary rejection of Glamour (I remember a student waving a fashion magazine and screaming in class, "High heels are a trap! Makeup is a trap! Everything a woman is forced to wear is a trap!"). Of course, I don't begrudge the breakup with beauty during my short stint in college--reading George Elliott and Wallace Stevens was worth it.
Fast forward a few years to my first job at Miller Freeman, a large San Francisco trade publishing company whose roots went back to the Gold Rush (rather than a pickaxe, the founder had wheeled a printing press out West and published a magazine for miners). My boss, the editorial director of several medical magazines, had a number of strict rules to which we adhered (how to crop headshots, how to write headlines, how to set up and attribute quotes). My small, quarterly magazine was in Spanish and Portuguese; despite the language barrier, he still critiqued its layout. I never wanted to cut copy to fit, but he would insist: "You have to put subheads and pull quotes on every page." "But what about the New Yorker?" I'd retort, recalling its gray pages. "No one reads the New Yorker, all they do is look at the cartoons."
Peter (the editorial director) used to circulate examples of good trade journalism with a few comments scrawled on a memo. When we attended conferences, we were expected to churn out daily copy that turned the nearly impenetrable talks on magnetic resonance and positron emission tomography into highly readable vignettes. We worked long hours and were totally isolated from the sales staff.
Three years later, I transferred to a large software magazine as its editor in chief. What an exciting contrast! We were sold on the newsstand, so I met with the circulation manager to learn how to improve our covers. We received letters to the editor every month (previously, I'd had to solicit letters myself), so I resolved to publish them every month and make that section of the magazine nicer rather than an afterthought (think of how many letters Harper's gets--they're good, and they're free copy!). We had a team of widely respected columnists and a conference and an art budget and a cover photographer. While the publication was significantly more flush than the one I'd cut my teeth on, it lacked the journalistic practices I'd learned--so I applied them, adding an advisory board and staff-written conference coverage.
Setting about a redesign of that publication showed me how much the magazine world had become like my old Glamour over the years. While Glamour was not a paragon of design like Texas Monthly or National Geographic, women's magazines did pave the way for flashy layouts that competed for the reader's attention with words and pictures--and then Wired took that concept to its extreme, making advertising and editorial indistinguishable from each other.
I worked exactly a decade at Miller Freeman/CMP, which, coupled with the time before that spent freelancing for Miller Freeman, gives me nearly 15 years' experience in writing and publishing. Over that time, I've observed the age-old--and perhaps unavoidable--battles that editors wage with their financial bosses.
The "content is king" concept is everywhere now--and nowhere more than at trade publishing companies. But it is now taken to mean that generating reams or screens of unedited text pulsating with key words is more important than assembling articles into a periodical and presenting them all to their best advantage. As often happens, the craft is being discarded as new technology--the Web and multimedia, primarily--takes precedence over old. Whether or not the magazine as a medium will last is not a debate I'll get into here. Media come and go (see 8-track, LPs, CDs), but the skills of journalism, information presentation and graphic design are widely transferable.
Indeed, as bandwidth widens, websites begin to look more like magazines. Even Slashdot's starting to look snazzy. Gee, are those pullquotes and subheads and sidebars I see in CNet's articles? The pendulum will swing back, I believe, and the craft of journalism will return as we settle into this new mix.
In the end, the cynicism of some publishing houses is simply short-sighted. While they're firing writers and spending millions to have Bangalore pimp their websites with reader-tracking technology, institutional knowledge about how to make information exciting is being lost. It's true, many subscribers will never notice the (sometimes) subtle difference between edited copy and crud scraped from an email without fact-checking.
But let's take Runner's World as an example (man, if Rodale was in the Bay Area, I'd work there in a heartbeat). Now, this is a magazine about jogging and long-distance running for amateurs and professionals. What could they possibly have to say, month after month, on that topic? It turns out there's plenty. What's more, this magazine, since its redesign a few years ago, is simply spectacular. The writing is flawless and literate, and the photography is inspirational without ever sliding into celebrity or beauty mag territory. I can hear some publishing cynic now: "They're runners. What do they care about the writing? Why waste the money?" (At my old company, they substituted "software developers" for "runners.") I believe there are millions of runners, hikers, bikers, babes, travelers, drivers, developers, decorators, musicians, scientists and animal lovers out there who notice high-quality writing.
Ever plebeian, I'm holding the July 2006 issue of O: The Oprah Magazine. The issue is dedicated to summer reading; in addition to lovely bookmarks on cardstock with quotes on them, it offers a tie-in with Amazon, printing a discount coupon for recommended titles. It's beautifully done, including:
-- a typically entertaining Anne Lammott confessional;
--"microfiction" by Suart Dybek, Anna Deavere Smith and John Edgar Wideman, among others;
--"How to Read a Hard Book," covering Moby Dick, War and Peace, In Search of Lost Time and The Man Without Qualities;
--"The Reader as Artist" by Toni Morrison; and
--a letter to Oprah on the joys of reading by Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird.
It may be aimed at the masses, but O does not stand for "opiates," as this list demonstrates. This is what good publications are all about: intellectual theme and variation, knit together with enthusiastic writing and exhilarating eye candy. Bless you, Oprah, for keeping it alive.
