The Internet Tail Will Come to Wag the Magazine Dog - An article by Jesse Kornbluth once a key AOL content thinker about magazines and their online counterparts.
Why does a guy who spent the better part of three decades writing for Vanity Fair, New York, The New York Times Magazine
and most of the slick monthlies turn against magazines? Because they're
just not relevant. The physical magazine is a beautifully designed,
artfully constructed monument to the Analog God. An artifact. A
time-capsule. A collectible.
Why don't I read the newsweeklies? Because they're a record of
everything that happened last week, ending Thursday. Newspapers—the Times, the Journal, and the Post
delivered to my doorstep, a great many more waiting for me online—have
replaced these magazines for me. In my hurry-up world, a newspaper is a
magazine.
Why don't I read the slick monthlies? Because production schedules
dictate that the editors had to plan them six months ago and close them
as long ago as last month. And also because they're increasingly all
the same: the same celebrities on the cover, the same editorial mix
inside.
At some conference around the turn of the millennium, I was on a
panel with an executive editor of a mega-successful monthly. "We serve
up surprise every month," she said. Really? I see something else.
There's the stock society crime story. There's the stock deadly earnest
foreign policy analysis that only the copy-checker read closely.
There's the stock celebrity profile that might as well have been edited
by the press agent. No, monthly magazines aren't surprising; they're
symbols of stability.
And isn't that the point? Your job is uncertain, the world is going
nuts—but here, month after month, is this warm bath of words and
pictures that assures you that you're in the right place in a society
that's fairly stable. This is not exactly an editorial decision. In the
slick monthly business model, the real needs of the reader come last.
The advertiser is king. The articles exist to keep the ads from
fighting.
Which isn't to say these magazines are doomed, just that they must
refocus if they're going to do more than fight subscriber attrition.
How could they do that? By adopting my mantra: "The Internet tail will
come to wag the magazine dog." Magazines must start to look at their
websites—those digital afterthoughts they built because someone said
they should—as their future. These sites can no longer be static; their
justification can no longer be "to promote the issue" or "lure new
subscribers." They need to be interactive and up-to-the-minute; they
need to reach out to the reader on a daily basis so the reader looks
forward to the monthly caress of the physical magazine. Because readers
are not just numbers; they're members of an untapped community. Tap it,
and you have a focus group, a band of citizen reporters, a gaggle of
consumers—and, oh yes, a place where advertisers can go to talk to
potential customers....
The one universal truth, for me, is the death of one-way, top-down
communication—monthly magazines as the print equivalent of
anchor-driven network news—and the rise of community-created content.
I'm all for star writers, I just think they'd be bigger stars if they
were accessible by email and responsive to reader suggestions. I'm all
for magazines too, as long as they make community-building an
obsession, with message boards, letters to the editor, reader-generated
story ideas and more. In short, I see the way for magazines to survive
and prosper is to transform themselves into conversations and
collaborations—I would put a stake in the heart of the notion of
magazine as artifact.
Read the article, I've already taken too much. (via Paid Content)
I get a trend watching e-mail once a month and it never fails to surprise. Not so much because of the things it shows but because of the ways it talks about items. 
Recent Comments
catbobcat (crossing a road in Redding, CT.) blogging