by * Before the Internet!
Nov 8, 2021
The second installment of Excellent Media Experiences covers magazines — and the broader case for physical media before it lost the argument.
Here’s Part I — Buying an Album.
Note: The journey back to these lost-era bits of nostalgia is not to declare all advances in media technology “bad” and all old-school components “good.” The intent is to home in on the core ingredients, the enablers of Excellent Experiences before the Internet, to maybe raise appreciation of both worlds.
Is physical media dead?
Apps and connected devices have certainly swept physical media aside.
In 2007, not long ago, publishers and studios packaged their information in physical books, CDs, and DVDs shipped to retailers. Today we acquire those same experiences without the package.
With digitization we enjoy real advantages. We stream movies at home and acquire new music instantly.
But convenience comes at a cost. The “24-hour news cycle” of cable TV trained us to expect immediacy. Social media brought that, but stripped out the editing. Unlike the edited pages of Time or Newsweek, today’s digital content lacks the level of gatekeeping that helped ensure accuracy and depth.
The 24-hour news cycle of cable TV trained us to expect immediacy. Social media accelerated this, but it cut out the editing. Digital content today lacks the gatekeeping that once ensured accuracy and depth, the kind Time or Newsweek once provided.
The video store, the newsstand, catalogs and the beloved magazine, arriving in your mailbox a full day before it hits newsstands, have all faded into memory.
When was the last time you bought a magazine?
Fragmentation across countless channels means more choice but less of a shared experience. Mobile devices are intimate wonders of innovation, yet I miss albums, pagers and even fountain pens, even as I embrace the speed and quality of new tech.
We can’t go back. Nobody misses the horse once the car arrives. Print magazines will likely become a premium product, small runs for those willing to pay. Display-ad revenue, dropping since the 1980s, will never recover. We may see print editions return as special treats but that’s about all.
Weekly publications: Time, Newsweek, TV Guide (maybe bi-weekly), Sporting News, etc.
Value Today: A reminder of the strengths of the 24-hour news cycle, the cable news era, and its heir, the endless scroll of social media and smartphones. And a warning sign of the deep flaws we now see in each.
Magazines formed part of the week’s rhythm during the 1970s and ’80s. Your parents subscribed to several; you’d see others at newsstands or in waiting areas at the doctor’s or dentist’s. The barbershop stocked sports titles, and for slightly older patrons, Playboy. (A rite of passage came when you were finally old enough to reach past the sports weekly for the girlie mag.)
You knew which day magazines arrived, and a postal delay that cost you a day made you irritable. Carving out time to skim magazines mirrored today’s digital news loop.
Post-event analysis was magazines’ great strength. In 1980, Newsweek and Sports Illustrated gave readers the context to understand John Lennon’s murder or grasp the weight of the US Olympic hockey team’s defeat of the Soviets.
These weeklies moved through editors whose job was to push back on a writer’s assumptions, tighten the argument and kill what didn’t hold up. That layer of friction produced better work.
Writers and readers of a certain age or experience agree: we miss this now. It’s a real loss, and nothing on the horizon promises to fix it.
What it gave us: Anticipation and deeper appreciation of content, plus blessed respite from information overload once you’d finished. The newsweekly format’s brevity left you wanting more, building excitement for the next issue, something today’s instant deluge can’t offer. Those editors sharpened writing and thinking with a rigor missing from social media’s unfiltered noise.
Downsides: Brevity. But magazines’ measured capsules feel like a luxury now.
Deeper profile/reflection: It was our only option.
You could read the big story in the next day’s paper, then the columnists’ takes over the following days. What you couldn’t do then that we can today was binge photos, videos or instant reporting minutes after an event. The best you got was “breaking news” on cable or network TV for major stories. No real-time social reactions, useful sometimes, but often inaccurate, incomplete or misleading.
Content back then often felt like an eagerly anticipated treat. These days, I occasionally grab a magazine at the airport — that’s my entire magazine consumption.
One of my mowing gigs growing up was the Greenfield Road lawn of my grandparents, Virginia and Jimmy Wade. Grandmama Virginia was a “subscription specials” junkie who took many titles.
After I mowed, she often sent me home with a six-inch stack of Newsweek, Time, U.S. News & World Report, People, LIFE, Sport and Sports Illustrated, plus titles for Mom and my sister such as Redbook.
One humid Saturday afternoon when I was 15 and mowing their Greenfield Road lawn, the current Rolling Stone waited for me on the kitchen table at mowing ‘halftime’ (along with a large ice water). Awesome: Grandmama Virginia had added RS to the list. She later added Esquire and Warhol’s titanic-scale Interview.
An aside: The tactile appeal of handling a brand spanking new magazine copy, newspaper edition or book runs deep. Few things compare to cracking open a well-made hardback for the first time. Dona Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) hardcover edition comes to mind; it was slightly taller and more narrow than the typical hardback and used a font, Cloister, that was likely custom-made. Cheesy fun from around the same time, Griffin and Sabine was an interactive, coffee-table-sized “scrapbook” fiction with postcards and letters readers could handle and remove.
The same tactile truths apply to a pristine Chicago Tribune sports section or a Sunday New York Times no one else has yet read. I still get a small thrill from the odd vacation purchase, but it’s “chasing.”
The trade-off is clear: digital media offers unmatched access, physical media delivers potential depth and the 3D ability to share story assets.
My current book-consumption pattern: Audible.com first, then buy the physical book. The Kindle edition runs a distant third. Writing this, I realize how much I miss books and magazines — and will make an effort to return to both.
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