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.
>>
>>
>>
>