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!
I have a new post up at MediaShift today on the innovations in sensors for mobile devices and what they might mean for the future of digital magazines. I thought “sensor publishing” was a particularly fascinating concept:
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.
