Magazines: The Editor's Art

A reminder of how good Time magazine used to be: they described Jack Kerouac back in the early Sixties as "Latrine laureate of Hobohemia ... ambisextrous and hipsterical." They'd never write like that now. Doesn't fit with what the marketers say. Magazines can be great, can have a profound influence on a culture, but it usually lasts just as long as one gifted editor, and when he or she is gone, it is gone.

Although the magazine usually lives on on sheer reputation for years.

And oddly, the great magazines are the ones that break all the rules. Like the old Time Magazine, that used to always, expensively, show artwork on its cover. Every marketer knows you have to show a photo of someone's face to sell a magazine from a newsstand.

But genius and scientific marketing do not mix.

That quote above, similarly, would fry any fog index. Would not be allowed today, because Time magazine, to increase its potential readership, is now pitched to a fairly low reading level.

Some other magazines that have been great:

Reader's Digest. A great idea for a magazine. But it really did depend on the good taste of one editor, to select the best articles from elsewhere. And it used to really be for readers: it actually ran its table of contents on the cover. It was also a model of editing craft: everything was chopped at least a third. But it is now of little interest.

Playboy. It used its pictures to foster really high quality writing, and paid well for it. As a result, it probably did a lot forAmerican culture for some years, no matter what one thinks of the "Playboy philisophy." Its interview feature was also once a matter of record: something that often could not be missed.

The Economist. Maybe still is great, but not what it was just a few years ago. I knew it had copped out when it went to colour inside. I loved the gall of a magazine that was all black and white and ran pages full of dense text. Most magazines these days "know" you have to keep pieces short and cut up the page into smaller pieces to tease people into reading anything. The Economist obviously pitched to people who had read before. But since it went colour, its captions aren't nearly as funny as they once were--this, in the first place, something they got from Time in its glory days. And some of the more interesting and quirky columns are gone--like Johnson, which was, in a magazine on economics and current events, about language.

National Review. It was enormously influential in the US for a generation. But it depended entirely on the talent and the inherited fortune of William F. Buckley Jr.

Mad Magazine. William Gaines _was_ Mad Magazine. It went spectacularly against all received wisdom by runnig no ads, and getting all its revenue from newsstand sales. Everyone knows both of these things are impossible.

Harrowsmith. Much too high production values for its presumably small market as a Canadina special-interest magazine. And extravagantly great writing. My favourite head was "Still Waters Run Jeep."

The New Yorker. Some say Harold Ross of the New Yorker invented modern editing.

There are "great magazines" now on the web, in the same way. "Arts & Letters Daily" used to be great; but it has now been abandoned by its founder, and is pedestrian. "The Drudge Report" continues to be something special.