postliteracy

[Jeffrey Fisher]

On Monday, April 1, 2002, at 08:06 AM, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:

> '"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."'
>
> 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.
>

um, that would be, "*have* a much harder time . . ." sheesh. another 
reason not to write in anger . . .

j

>
>
>
> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>