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Remix This: Magazines as Media for Stable Narratives of Dissent

5 Sep

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!

Research Ideas: Digital Magazine Publishing for the Masses

26 Jan
Collecting Magazines

The bin of leftover magazines...its days are numbered in the digital age.

I’m contemplating the best angle for a new research project about the world of digital magazine publishing. I’m including here not just the magazines that have released iPad and other mobile apps, but also web-based publishing like that offered by Zinio, Yudu, Texterity, NoLayout, and others.

I’m interested in to what degree these digital magazine publishing opportunities are democratizing magazine publishing. Though I find print-on-demand a fascinating trend as well for magazines whose content and design implies the value of a lasting hard copy, the high cost of purchasing many of these publications means that they will likely be restricted for some time to a more affluent audience. But the opportunity for small publishers to whip up a magazine in PDF format, then post it online, seems to open up a whole realm of possibilities.

No longer are independent publishers relegated to blogs or mere websites; the ability to publish a polished, slick, easily accessible digital magazine is now within reach. Any magazine can be available on the web or even on the iPad using a newsstand app like Zinio, or through HTML5 using a service like NoLayout (though the latter concentrates on fashion and art topics).

So who is taking advantage of this opportunity to present a polished look at their subject matter? I’d like to know the breakdown by size and topic of the independent publishers who are crafting new projects online. I’d also like to know, more specifically, whether and how many activist or politically oriented digital-only magazines there are. An initial exploration of just Zinio’s listings suggests, interestingly, that there are many more ethnic or international magazines that might fit the “activist” label than English-language publications of this variety. As someone interested in how magazines affect or enable various social and political movements and identities, I also want to know whether and how digital magazines are playing a similar role to print magazines’ role in past movements. (I did a study on the role of National Review in mobilizing the conservative movement, though mine is just one of numerous studies in this area.)

I’ve previously explored the role of social media in adding to political/activist print magazines’ engagement of readers in this MediaShift story. The research study I’m anticipating now would likely examine the role of smaller, exclusively online activist publishers in directing, enabling, or mobilizing the causes they’re associated with through this new medium, as well as the reasoning behind their decisions to use digital magazines for this purpose.

If you have thoughts or suggestions along these lines, or suggestions of specific digital magazines I should explore, please leave a comment. I am excited about the opportunity to have some dialogue around this topic before I set out a concrete plan for the project.

Memorable Moments with iPad Magazines

10 Sep

A sample magazine shown in the Zinio iPad app.

What moments stand out most in my first few weeks of magazine reading on the iPad?

  • Positioning the iPad carefully against a pillow on my stomach while lying down, then carefully moving a fold of shirt out of the way so the pages wouldn’t hit it when I turned them. Yes. Really. Old habits die hard.
  • Flying immediately to jump pages, rather than getting lost in a jumble of un-numbered ad pages at the back. In the Zinio app, I tap the blue-outlined link to the continuation of the article, and I’m magically there. Ah.
  • Buying digital single copies of magazines I don’t subscribe to, just because I want to see how they look.
  • Trying hard to find digital subscription options for all my favorites, with about 60 percent success.
  • Being annoyed by digital subscriptions that cost more – sometimes far more, even double – than the discounted faculty print edition subscriptions that have spoiled me. (Economist, I’m looking at you.) Come on – help me be greener, without bankrupting me.
  • Wanting to tweet articles from digital replica magazines with no means of doing so easily. If magazines want to replicate the solitary experience of reading print, they’re doing a good job with these digital editions…but I’m used to social reading now, and I miss it when it’s not available.

My transition into digital reading has been an interesting experience, and it’s really just begun! I’m trying to be aware of my physical, psychological and intellectual reactions as I proceed further into the world of digital magazine readership. Have you noticed any side effects or unusual responses in yourself?

The Definition of a “Magazine”

29 Apr

I’ve recently come across a number of projects that are called magazines, and yet don’t seem like what we normally think of as magazines. For example:

  • Pop-Up Magazine: “the world’s first live magazine, created for a stage, a screen, and a live audience. Nothing will arrive in your mailbox; no content will go online. An issue exists for one night, in one place.” It’s a 75-minute program, organized like a magazine with short pieces up front and a “feature well.” Its contents include photos, writing, live interviews and more on a variety of topics. It’s had three issues so far, most recently on April 16, and has hosted an impressive line-up of participants.
  • Rotary Magazine (info here; view it here). Its creators bought 200 random slides from eBay and edited them into an organized experience, including themed sections and typography. They showed the magazine in an “old audio visual shop” in Bath, England, for a week, and it also is available online. The editors note that many people could view the magazine at once at their own preferred pace, and that the lack of paper made the magazine more sustainable.
  • 48 Hour Magazine. Though it will result in a print product likely resembling a standard magazine in some ways, this project is not following a traditional magazine production process. Instead, after announcing a theme, writers, photographers and others worldwide will collaborate on a magazine that will be edited, designed, printed and shipped within 48 hours: “No long commitments. No pitches. No grinding editing process. You make good stuff fast; we publish it with other good stuff.” The leaders of the project say that though they “don’t have a ratio in mind…people from outside the industry are essential to the vision.”

So, do we count these projects as “magazines”? Let’s note the qualities they’re keeping, deleting, and adding to the magazine concept.

Keeping:

  • Selectively edited content
  • An organizing concept or theme (i.e., a “content proposition”)
  • Specific sense of audience
  • Visual and text content

(Is this section enough to define “a magazine”?)

Deleting:

  • Print format (except for 48 Hour Magazine)

Adding:

  • Spontaneity and the opportunity for surprise
  • Audience participation (reacting live to Pop-Up, controlling pace of Rotary, contributing content to 48 Hour Magazine)
  • Fast turnaround and immediate relevance, rather than delayed information and experience

What can traditional magazines learn from these new projects? (Admittedly, 48 Hour Magazine hasn’t happened yet – we’ll see it in about a week – but the concept is instructive.)

First, these projects are not static. They break boundaries. They experiment. They can surprise us. How often does a magazine today really surprise anyone? I pretty much know what to expect from each magazine that comes in the mail – which is comforting in its way, and which keeps its identity consistent for advertisers, but is also a bit dull. Maybe some of the new digital experiments have been intriguing or exciting, but I haven’t found much that I’d call surprising just yet.

Second, these projects engage the audience in significant ways. If you attend Pop-Up Magazine, you’re buying a ticket* and committing to an evening with its performers and fellow attendees. You cannot access its content online later. If you participate in the 48 Hour Magazine project, you’re going to want to see its print edition. These are powerful methods of getting people to embrace your project. Yet most magazines demand little of us beyond our subscription payment. Even their uses of reader-generated content and ideas have been pretty minimal so far.

Finally, these experiences offer immediate satisfaction. True, not all magazine projects should be completed within 48 hours. There’s still a demand and need for carefully researched and produced journalism that takes months. However, is there really any reason today for magazines to stick to a rigid publication schedule? Why not feed content all the time to your readers, especially in digital formats? Today’s on-demand publication tools, such as those 48 Hour Magazine will probably use, could even create occasional special print issues as bonuses for subscribers. Certainly many magazine Web sites have embraced blogs and online-only exclusives, but bigger stories could be available more frequently than just once a month. I’m sure that would disrupt the standard schedules that magazine staffs use, but increasing readers’ sense of constant engagement with the magazine might be worth it, not to mention the more vibrant conversations about the magazine that would go on all the time.

I think it’s time for traditional magazines to learn from these projects that are on the boundary of our current understanding of a magazine. It’s time to consider all the new ways the essential qualities of “a magazine” can be expressed.

Edited to add: this post was inspired by this one by Elisabeth Soep at BoingBoing on Pop-Up Magazine; I couldn’t help but think about her challenging question, “What can print mags steal back?”

* I previously posted that the Pop-Up Magazine tickets were “costly” – turns out, they are quite affordable, so much so that even this lowly professor might be able to attend. An amazing value, considering the participants they feature. The notion of buying a ticket and “buying into” the magazine’s content, however, is relevant regardless of expense.

Magazines’ Paper “Gimmicks”: A Failure to Communicate

4 Mar

Will magazines' fancy paper tricks come back to bite them in the end? Photo by Flickr user epSos.de.

I recently read this magazine “print gimmicks” story from Folio:

“In this era, when everyone’s excited about new media, we need to do everything we can to make older media as exciting as possible,” says Granger, Esquire’s editor-in-chief. The magazine’s latest print gimmick was its May 2009 issue where it featured a mix-n-match cover. The facial features of President Obama, George Clooney and Justin Timberlake became interchangeable thanks to a tri-perforated cover.

The article also mentions 3-D covers from The Hollywood Reporter and Rolling Stone, pop-ups and bar codes in Hearst magazines, and innovative advertising inserts that try to catch readers’ attention. It describes the additional time it takes to plan and create these print “gimmicks,” as well as the additional cost for special inks, papers, and printing and folding techniques.

While it’s clever to come up with new ways to play with paper, I think these gimmicks are a misuse of magazines’ time and resources. You might gather a few more readers who pick up the magazine to play with its mix-and-match cover, or a few nerdy types (um, like me) who want to see how those barcodes work. (Hint: I never got around to doing anything with them.)

Ultimately, these gimmicks distract from what makes magazines special: the unique topic and voice of editorial content in the magazine, and the community that readers feel around that content.

I don’t think readers who might buy the magazine for these “gimmicks” are the long-term readers and subscribers magazines really need. Those aren’t the readers who identify with the magazine’s content in a deep and substantial way, who find a part of their own identity in the work of the writers, editors, photographers and artists in a magazine’s pages. Moreover, long-term readers of a magazine aren’t getting much added value with these techniques; if anything, they could be perceived as an unnecessary distraction.

My feeling is that if a magazine wants to secure a steady readership for its print edition – and for its brand, wherever it ultimately goes, online or off – it must invest in quality content, not meaningless and superficial tricks with paper that don’t connect with readers on a deeper level. The magazines that make that investment are the ones I want to keep reading and the ones that earn my loyalty.

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