magazines
The Atlantic rides again (again)
Back in college, the Atlantic was basically my introduction to the world of ideas. I still remember reading this classic article by James Fallows and feeling whole new lobes of understanding come online. This was policy, not politics. Macro, not micro. Oh. That’s how the world works.
(As an aside: I have a vivid memory of reading a printout of that Fallows article in my freshman year dorm room. But that’s not possible; it was published during my senior year. Harumph.)
I also loved Robert Kaplan’s tales of global unrest—and even though he sometimes creeps me out these days, there’s no denying that his super-macro view was hugely influential.
Anyway, I haven’t read an issue of the Atlantic in a long time, and I am only an occasional consumer of the Atlantic’s site—usually thanks to links that Tim and Matt post here. (There have been a few exceptions.)
But the Atlantic is resurgent. I feel it. They’ve got a credible web strategy that manages to leverage the physics of the web without sacrificing sophistication, and it’s paying dividends:
On top of that, they just hired Alexis Madrigal. What a coup.
On top of that, they got Frank Chimero to illustrate this year’s Ideas issue. Another coup. (Check it out at full-size. Isn’t the End of Boredom, at the very bottom, amazing?)
Their hair is clean; their shoes are on
Lois Beckett’s narrative of her experience helping to create 48 Hour Magazine last weekend is just absolutely A+ great. Really fun and funny:
The documentary film crew shows up.
This is not totally crazy. The 48 Hour project is a Twitter sensation. More than 6,000 people signed up to potentially contribute to the magazine’s first issue, some from as far away as Brazil, Rwanda, and Japan. The project had been covered that day by the L.A. Times and the Wall Street Journal.
But when the filmmakers arrive to document the drama and the glory, they find a handful of people working quietly around a conference table.
Their hair is clean. Their shoes are on. They are not visibly intoxicated.
The film crew retreats to an empty conference room to regroup
Love it. Of course, I also love the magazine itself, which I’ve ordered. You should, too! (There’s a short piece of work from Robin Sloan waiting for you on the very last page.)
News, opinion, analysis, identity
Ezra Klein tries to figure out why The Economist and NPR are doing so well while so many other traditional news organizations are doing so poorly:
The first is that they both situate themselves firmly between news and opinion, in that netherworld I think of as analysis. This is a hobbyhorse for me, but my grand theory of the media right now is that the rise of online media made newsgathering an extremely crowded and quick marketplace. That’s left a lot of publications that either aren’t used to the competition (think newspapers) or aren’t suited to the pace (think newsweeklies) a bit confused about their identity.
Some of them have responded by embracing opinion. That’s also a bad move. The opinion marketplace is, if anything, more crowded than the news marketplace, and it’s hard to really break through in it unless you’re willing to travel pretty far along the partisan continuum. But because news stories move so much faster and opinion is so much louder, there’s actually more demand for media that explains what those fast-moving stories are actually about. This is a need that is going largely unmet. Both the Economist and NPR are imperfect products, but that’s fundamentally what they’re doing. It’s not quite newsgathering, and it’s not straight opinion, though there’s occasionally opinion in there. It’s analysis. It’s how to understand the stuff that other people are reporting and opining.
Meanwhile, both brands have morphed into statements. For better or worse, carrying the Economist is sort of like wearing a shirt that says “I’m smart and worldly and interested in knowing things about Ghana.” But unlike a shirt saying all that, it actually works to convey that impression. An NPR bag, for its part, is a signal of a particular brand of non-confrontational, college-educated, sightly-crunchy liberalism. Is that a stereotype? Sure. But it’s working for the station’s merchandise department.
This makes me think about the early history of newspapers — how big metropolitan dailies (and radio/television) eventually displaced extras and evening editions, minority and ethnic papers, more sharply political papers, and other variations that were more suited to either a faster pace of news reporting or a closer tie to readers’ identities. What emerged, especially at the national level, was something that was both denser (in terms of information) and looser (in terms of identity).
Meta-Tilley
Oh. Wow. This is intense: the hidden Eustace Tilley in the New Yorker’s 85th anniversary covers. (Via Waxy.)
The third vision
Now here you go! Take the best bits of that Sports Illustrated interactive magazine demo and Pictory, mash them up, add attractive depth-of-field and you get BERG’s vision for the future of the magazine:
I actually feel like it’s hard to judge, because there are two very significant confounding variables in the mix:
- the warm, cinematic production, and
- the device! I mean, look at that e-reader. I don’t care what kind of magazine you put on that thing—I’ll take it.
However, I’ve done the regression, and even when those elements are factored out, it’s still excellent. In particular, I love the concept of “heating” content. When content is cold, it sits on the page, crystalline and beautiful. When it’s warm, it bubbles and steams and you can pull it apart and push it around. Wonderful!
The strength of the video is really that it speaks—well I mean, specifically that Jack Schulze speaks. Compare it to this, the Microsoft equivalent, which is all mute gloss. What are the animating ideas? What can I extract from it, lacking wall-size screens and paper-thin LCDs here and now in 2010? Not much.
I do disagree with one premise of BERG’s, which seems to be that magazine-style content is generally Quite Good and just needs to be presented in a useful, modern way. I do think there’s demand for depth and design, of course. But increasingly, when I shift from screen-reading to magazine-reading it’s more than just the interface that stops me cold. It’s the voice. There’s a tone and distance to non-fiction magazine writing—even very good non-fiction magazine writing—that seems increasingly old-fashioned in 2010. If I was advising a magazine on strategy, I’d tell them to crack open the black box of content, of writing, and redesign that, too. (More to say about that at some point, but for now, scope out the BERG video.)
But really: this is all a side-show, because the star of the video is that table, isn’t it? I want one.