Cognitive dissonance. Photo by me.

I’m not sure I’m completely ready for this, but I’m going to try it anyway.

I’ve been slowly making a significant transition in my life: I let each of my print magazine subscriptions expire, one by one. Only two have a couple of issues remaining, as best I can tell from those obfuscatory subscription reminders and mailing labels. Print editions have nearly stopped arriving in my mailbox, and a few more trees have kept on breathing.

I’m making the switch to digital magazines. All of them. Starting now.

I subscribe(d) to quite a few magazines: at least 14 within the last year. I have found it increasingly difficult to keep up with the flow of paper magazines, finding that they pile up in a basket in my study at home far too quickly. I also increasingly dislike tossing most of them into the recycle bin immediately after finishing them.

Part of my dissatisfaction with print has to do with the lack of enduring, lasting content in most magazines today, or at least in those I’ve patronized. There’s just no reason for me to keep paper copies. Even my fiber arts magazines (about knitting and weaving, for example, including patterns and references) rarely feature articles that I wouldn’t be just as happy to have in digital form — or would indeed prefer in that searchable format.

Part of it is my changed reading habits, which have more and more focused around the iPad and Kindle, with which I can comfortably delve into numerous blogs, Twitter, e-books, and a constantly refreshed Instapaper collection of long-form journalism. The capacity to instantly share and bookmark material is also something I now crave when I’m reading print. (Not every digital magazine will offer those features, but some do.)

I have been frustrated by the difficulty of switching print to digital subscriptions — so much so that I even wrote an article about it for PBS MediaShift. I understand now why the process has been difficult for publishers and their customer service providers. However, it seemed easier to wait for my print subscriptions to end and then re-evaluate my commitment to each one and the best digital format for obtaining it.

Some of the magazines are available as replica editions, some as standalone apps, some through Apple’s Newsstand for the iPad. I’m more inclined to get magazines on the iPad than on my black-and-white Kindle Touch because I love magazines’ color and photography.

However, given my budget, some of my format decisions (and, actually, whether I renew at all in some cases) will be determined by price. For example, Runner’s World is available as a replica from Zinio for $25/year; a one-year subscription through the magazine’s own app is $14.99, and apparently offers added features. It’s $1/month for Kindle, as it is in print. I think I’ll go for the iPad edition.

I think I’ll be OK with this transition. But perhaps I’ll miss stuffing a magazine into my purse on the way out the door to an appointment, or will find reading on the iPad less enjoyable in the long run. I’ll report back and let you know how it goes!

Well, that whole “weekly posting” thing hasn’t exactly materialized. I’ve been teaching a fast-paced January term Intro to Mass Communication class, so things have been a bit busy. However, I did have a chance to learn more about the new user-generated content experiment at Ladies’ Home Journal, and wrote about it for PBS MediaShift.

I asked editor Sally Lee if she thought working with inexperienced writers was going to be challenging for her editorial team, and she noted that working with experienced writers isn’t always a piece of cake either. Moreover, the “amateurs” bring something different to the magazine:

 ”We’re getting fresh, clear voices that don’t fall into the trap of thinking that they have to write a certain way for a women’s magazine … One of the wonderful things about working with so-called amateur writers is they don’t have preconceived notions about what the magazine should be.”

Recipe.com, Hickey said, reflects a “360-degree approach,” better accommodating today’s value-seeking and technologically savvy shopper.

“It’s really kind of desktop, to store, to checkout, to countertop, to table. When we think of recipes, we think, ‘I’ll go find it and print it out.’ But we knew the [meal-planning] process was much more involved,” Hickey said.

As a geek who was once a diligent meal planner – and could never find the right software to make it work – I find new tools like this especially intriguing!

I have a new story up today at PBS MediaShift about Once Magazine, an iPad magazine that focuses on visual storytelling, especially photography. It’s great to see experiments like this one that help photographers find new ways to use their work and earn a living from their art.

Read more at MediaShift!

Borders, Tigard, OR, 9/10/11.

Here’s a magazine rack for sale at a closing Borders location.

Will more magazine racks be offered up for sale as the industry undergoes further changes?

I could probably use one at my house — but not for long. I’m migrating to iPad subscriptions as my print subscriptions expire. When will the magazine rack be obsolete, or used only for those few publications who truly need and justify the print medium?

The parody New Yorker cover produced by the Church of Scientology.

I recently noticed an interesting magazine-related story on the New York Times site regarding the Church of Scientology’s publication and distribution of a new parody magazine. It attempts to counter The New Yorker‘s reporting on the church:

…the church has produced a 51-page glossy magazine and an accompanying three-part DVD that try to discredit The New Yorker, its writers, editors, fact-checkers and sources.

“The New Yorker: What a Load of Balderdash,” reads the cover headline on the publication, Freedom, which is registered as a copyright of the church and bills itself as offering “investigative reporting in the public interest.”…

The church singles out editors, fact-checkers and other New Yorker staff members who worked on the article by name and prints their photos. The church also uses what appears to be a surveillance photograph taken of Mr. Wright while he was conducting an interview at an outdoor cafe in Texas.

This strategy is creepy, ridiculous, and probably ineffective. However, the desire to create a magazine to spread an unusual (to say the least) perspective is intriguing. Why go to the expense and bother? Why not just use the Internet to mount a campaign against The New Yorker?

Maybe it’s that Internet campaigns are just too commonplace these days. Maybe the Scientologists thought the act of handing out paper magazines in front of the Condé Nast offices might garner more media attention. (I find only about 20 articles about the event in Google News Search, however.) I’m beginning to wonder if there is something else about magazines that makes them appeal to people seeking to propagate an unusual and easily modified (or even widely ridiculed) message.

My interest in this issue stems from a study I recently conducted on the Al Qaeda magazine Inspire, which unlike Freedom is entirely a digital publication, but is decently designed, and which co-opts many popular culture themes and styles in its content. Though its topic is vile, the medium used to present it is interesting. Why create a digital magazine, instead of continuing to use YouTube videos, message boards and the like to distribute digital terrorist recruitment materials?

I think that in this age of user-generated content, print and digital magazines may find a new role due to their ability to present what I’m calling “stable” narratives of dissent. Their paper form (or, when digital, unitary design) makes their content more difficult to modify and remix.

The benefits of the magazine form are probably valid for all activist or fringe groups. Some groups’ particular goals may intensify the risks of losing message control that accompany digital materials, making the magazine form even more useful. These advantages are added, of course, to magazines’ physical nature, which permits pass-along readership and confers a sense of legitimacy on their topics.

Scientology and Al Qaeda have different goals, to be sure, but the ability to present their own version of reality in the magazine format offers different opportunities from those provided by other lower-cost media. This unique, emerging sociocultural role and potential of magazines in our digital age is something I plan to explore further in my writing and research.

More ideas for me? Comment, please!

When I was a senior at Trinity University, I took both the Magazine Writing and Magazine Production classes offered in the Department of Communication, even though I was an English major. I still have copies of my production class’s magazine, of which I was the editor.

Those two classes, taught by Sammye Johnson, had a major impact on the path of my education and my later career choices. While I was in grad school, I was fortunate to return to Trinity as a part-time instructor and to teach the production class myself. It was a great challenge, but was also lots of fun.

I was impressed and excited to learn, in the process of writing my latest MediaShift story, that some magazine classes are no longer producing print magazines, but instead have gone all-digital. Though I’m a little sad that the students won’t experience the anticipation and thrill of receiving their freshly printed magazines at the end of the semester, the new directions of these innovative courses are well-suited to today’s changing industry.

Read the full story here!

Photos and Photoshopping by me, with guest appearances from the When Words Collide textbook, the AP Stylebook for iPhone, Backpacker’s iPad edition via Zinio…and even a few print magazines, including Afar, Wired, Portland Monthly, and New Scientist.

Another reason I'm excited to go to Wales: family heritage. This is the seafront in Porthcawl, in south Wales, where my mother spent every summer as a child.

It may be a holiday in the U.S. today, but I’m busy doing the final edits on the paper I will be presenting at the “Mapping the Magazine 3″ conference this week at Cardiff University in Wales. This conference is going to be incredibly interesting. Check out the paper abstracts, and watch for tweets with the hashtag #mtm3 once we get started on Thursday.

The research I will present is, at last, a fulfillment of my January blog post about my interest in digital activist magazines and how activist publishers are using digital platforms for their work. (I also looked at this topic in a MediaShift story.) It took me a while to complete the project — and the paper itself is still very much a work in progress — but I’m excited about it, and so grateful to the 15 individuals at various publications who agreed to be interviewed. I’ll provide an update on the project as it develops.

After I return from Wales, I’ll be packing, moving to Oregon and getting ready for a new academic year (oh, and also attending the AEJMC conference in St. Louis in August!) so I expect things may be a bit quiet here on the blog until August. Have a great summer!

Users of sensor-equipped mobile devices could serve as passive authors of projects that gather, analyze and present data from these sensors. Esposito calls this “sensor publishing” to distinguish it from crowdsourcing because it doesn’t require participants’ active involvement.

Digital magazines and other media applications could collect sensor data — such as location, temperature, ambient light or other readings — and find ways to incorporate the data into stories, or to make them stories in themselves.

Check out the rest of the story at MediaShift.

Also, an observation: that’s my ”Health” apps folder from my iPhone in one of the screenshots with the story. It seemed oddly personal to use that, somehow. They’re just apps, after all. But evidently I’m not the only one who feels like the phone is such a personal object, given some of the discussion I’ve seen of how smartphones are perceived as quite intimate objects by many of their users. I guess that does include me after all.

An lovely picture by RTMoynihan on Flickr, taken at Euston Station in London, where I'm headed next week as part of my trip to the Mapping the Magazine conference in Cardiff.

It’s great when your research interests line up with your personal interests. I was always curious about the Maker Faire, an event sponsored by Make magazine in San Mateo, California, and other cities around the U.S. The Faire seemed like a great place for someone with both crafty and geeky tendencies to hang out. I had been reading Make occasionally and enjoyed the magazine, too.

As a journalism researcher, I was also aware of other trends in the magazine industry — specifically, the increasing popularity of real-world magazine events that reinforce the magazines’ brands and unite the “imagined community” of magazine readers by bringing them together at events. I was curious about this trend as both a business strategy and a growing cultural phenomenon. So, this geeky crafter headed to the May 2009 San Mateo Maker Faire ready not just to learn some new skills, but also with a participant observation research mindset fully in place.

What I found at the Maker Faire was so compelling that I ended up conducting an entire research project around the event and the magazine’s content. I was fascinated to see the nationalistic and political references throughout the Faire, such as flags on posters and quotes from then-newly inaugurated President Barack Obama on posters and stickers. The Faire and magazine’s promise of self-actualization and community building through “making” was also evident in various ways. It was a heady mix that, well, made you want to make.

Making in itself isn’t problematic. It’s fun. However, a closer look at the Faire and the magazine’s content showed that there was another, subtler promise being made about making. There was a deeply rooted sense of “technological utopianism,” or the concept that humans can, through the savvy development and application of technology, create an ideal world.

Moreover, I felt something different developing when I looked closely at the Faire and the magazine: the representation of a possibility for “technological rehabilitation” — the idea that, having fully exploited our ecological world to the point of serious damage, we might find ways to rehabilitate it through the use of technology. Make and the Maker Faire suggest we can develop those rehabilitating technologies ourselves, on our own terms, for our own enjoyment and satisfaction, but also for the salvation of our entire (American) nation.

While this is a tempting narrative for those seeking hope in challenging times, I was forced ultimately to question whether a narrative of “technological rehabilitation” was a positive one for readers of Make and participants in the Maker Faire, and for our world at large. While individual makers’ innovations toward the goal of ecological rehabilitation would be positive steps, they are not necessarily as effective as Make would seem to suggest, given that the efforts of individuals to, say, build rain barrels or reuse plastic bags in interesting ways unfortunately pale in comparison to the constant injury done to the environment by larger political and economic forces.

This is not to say that “makers” shouldn’t continue to try to find new and more environmentally sound ways to do things, but that the story that Make tells about making is not necessarily the best story for us to hear about the role of technology in the world. Instead, we have to look at other ways in which technology has damaged the world and ways we may need to innovate non-technologically, to live with less or different technology, as our ecological systems have likely been damaged past the point of no return. Stories and events that help readers think in that direction might ultimately be more productive for ensuring the survival of humanity long-term.

Like Robert Jensen, one of my mentors whose writing helped inspire this study, I am curious about ways journalism can provide alternative narratives for our future — not just revise old ones for an increasingly desperate time. Stories and events that can unite people around those narratives could be powerful.