speaking of cant . . . i've always found that printing the words of an arrticle on the page conveys a quite satisffactory "editorial experience" . . . as long as the writing is good. i've been working for the last couple of years in the midst of what the internet consulting biz calls "experience design," a sound concept, in priciple. but when writing is being called "editorial experience" by designers, you're seeing e-business jargon take over the "content industry," and graphic/visual designers take over writing at the behest of editors and publishers who can at least measure an employee's skill in photoshop, illustrator, or quark, but has a much harder time deciding how to measure the quality of writing.
jeff
On Monday, April 1, 2002, at 07:50 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> [Right after reading this article, I unmuted CNBC to hear fratboy stock
> tout Joe Kernen introduce Regis Philbin as a "true Renaissance man,"
> for a long interview about Greenspan, stocks, and Wall Street analysts.
> Reg was very angry at Greenspan for fiddling while the stock market
> burned.]
>
> New York Times - April 1, 2002
>
>
> Magazines Push Images Over Words
> By DAVID CARR
>
> At the end of this month, the National Magazine Awards will celebrate
> great narrative by handing out awards for reporting and writing the
> kinds of stories that thrill readers with every turn of the page. There
> are plenty of good candidates, but fewer than in years past. As more
> magazines default to a visual rather than literary palette, the
> 4,000-word article has become a relic, first replaced by the 800-word
> quick take and then further boiled to a 400-word blurb that is little
> more than a long caption. In most magazines on today's newsstands,
> words are increasingly beside the point, mere graphic elements that are
> generally used to frame pictures.
>
> Magazine buyers have always been divided into readers and lookers. But
> consumers who actually open a magazine at the front and commence
> reading are becoming an increasingly rarefied demographic group. In a
> medium that has atomized into niche after niche, the long-form
> narrative may become just one more fetish, no more or less worthy of a
> magazine than Sub-Zero refrigerators or B-list starlets.
>
> There are still great articles being written, of course. The attacks in
> September sparked a burst of long-form excellence, and The New Yorker,
> Esquire, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic and Harper's are packed with
> wondrous, where-did-they-get-that insights into the human condition.
> Some of them are even doing well on the newsstand. Vanity Fair, a
> magazine that mixes the long and short, adds readers every week, and
> even daunting bricks of text like those in The Atlantic and The New
> Yorker are finding success in a very tough marketplace.
>
> Those magazines, however, are a relatively small slice of the glossy
> pie. The rest of the industry has gotten the picture - and it does not
> include spellbinding narratives. Celebrity-driven publications like
> People and Us Weekly are becoming fashion flip books. ESPN: The
> Magazine, which received a general excellence nomination for the coming
> magazine awards, has more DNA from MTV than from traditional sports
> journalism.
>
> And the smaller magazines that serve as a laboratory for publishing
> innovation - chic downtown magazines like City and Nest - are pushing
> graphic rather than linguistic boundaries. Mag-a-logs like Lucky, the
> shopping magazine, do not generate much more text than what would fit
> on a price tag. The men's magazines that continue to storm the
> newsstand - Maxim, Stuff and FHM - are unapologetically formatted for
> people who do not read.
>
> Publications that exalt the visual have always done well. But the vast
> middles of many magazines - the feature wells, where the reading matter
> used to be found - have morphed into annotated photo magazines.
>
> In this world, everything can be objectified and rendered desirable. A
> $2,200 faucet gets the kind of lavish lighting and styling treatment
> that used to be reserved for skinny 17-year-old models.
>
> "It used to be that we used to have to fight with the writers and
> editors to get the pictures in," said one designer who has worked at a
> number of glossy magazines. "Now the design challenge is to take very
> little text and making it big enough to convey an editorial experience."
>
> Much of the editorial message is carried in display text, the "deep
> captioning" that has replaced the traditional profile. Consider this
> caption last week in a People photo feature deconstructing the fashion
> choices at the Oscars: "Janet Jackson worked too hard for those abs to
> hide them, even on Hollywood's choicest night of the year. At the
> Vanity Fair party, the singer stayed true to her renegade style,
> donning hip-hugger jeans, coat and sparkly bikini top." In the
> tiny-speak of contemporary magazine publishing, the caption says it
> all. Ms. Jackson is still in shape and likes to flaunt it, and she
> remains hot enough to go places that the reader never will.
>
> The shorthand suffices because the great majority of readers are up to
> date on the handful of luminous beings that constitute the raw material
> in most mass magazines, whether the focus is entertainment, fashion,
> music or sports (or more commonly, some mix of all those things).
> Celebrities have become the people that everyone has in common, and as
> long as images give the hoi polloi a sense of intimacy, the readers are
> more than happy to supply both text and subtext.
>
> There are magazines that run counter to the trend. Teen People can be a
> deeper read than its parent, and Esquire and Sports Illustrated
> continue to offer the kind of powerful narratives that give the lie to
> jokes about the attention span of the typical man. But they are being
> overpowered at the newsstand by much less literate brethren. And the
> women's side of the magazine rack lacks literary nutrition, now that
> Mademoiselle is gone.
>
> "I hear the word `package' a lot more than I used to at women's
> magazines," said Judith Newman, a longtime magazine writer. "It means
> that you have to package everything into McBite-size nuggets. It is sad
> that women writers look to men's magazines as something to aspire to."
>
> With articles in retreat on every corner of the newsstand, much of the
> editorial message in magazines is carried in the marginalia. Editors
> who were nourished by Spy magazine, "Seinfeld" and "The Simpsons" -
> rather than the Esquire of the 1960's - know that they have to come at
> the reader from all directions.
>
> "What we do is much more like movies than traditional magazines," said
> Greg Gutfeld of Stuff magazine. "We are utterly of the moment and
> utterly disposable. If readers of traditional magazines were honest,
> they would tell you that they don't read more than the first 10 percent
> of those long articles. We give them the best 10 percent."
>
> The assumption is that readers raised on a media diet in which they are
> presented with a new image every few tenths of a second are not about
> to wait 3,400 words for the upshot. The glossy publishing industry will
> continue to serve as the back fence for mass culture. But in these days
> of postliterate publishing, few in the neighborhood seem to have time
> to stop and tell stories.
>
>
>