04/23/2010 2:15 pm
Culture
Will Print Die? Observations From the National Magazine Awards Ceremony
© Steve Friedman 2010
Stylized copper elephant stabiles designed by Alexander Calder, they’re nicknamed "Ellies" and they’re the "Oscars" of the publishing world. At a Lincoln Center ceremony Thursday night 35 of them were presented for outstanding work in magazines. Established in 1966 when Look Magazine received the single award, the Ellies have expanded to categories, honoring essays and criticism, fiction and public interest, personal service and leisure activities and general excellence.
From merely the industry celebration honoring a sing
le magazine, the ceremony has escalated to an evening of cocktails, red-carpet introductions and celebrity presenters, albeit on a "read" carpet scale of its own. "Who’s that?" a reporter asked about an attractive young man smiling through the barrage of flashbulbs. It was "the Editor of Garden and Gun." A towering model in a stretchy pink frock towered over hockey-player/sometime-guest-editor Sean Avery and, although the final episode of "Project Runway" was scheduled to be broadcast within an hour, Nina Garcia refused to divulge the winner.
Hall of Fame Editor Martha Stewart opened the ceremony, presenting the first Ellie to Texas Monthly for an article about a man and his caretaker mother confined to their home. Shimmering in green sequins, countless-cover-girl Brooke Shields presented photojournalism prizes to the National Geographic’s series "Shattered Somalia" and to "Portraits of Power" in The New Yorker. New York Magazine Editor Adam Moss accepted four awards for creative approaches to practical topics from Neapolitan pizza to circumcision.
Besides picking up his customary multiple awards (three this year from ten nominations), the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, was pinch-hit presenter to Hall of Fame inductee Anna Wintour of Vogue. Explaining that her brother was grounded in London — "and even Anna can’t control the weather," Remnick stepped in, apologizing that his own fashion sense is based on "what doesn’t itch," and showing off a new red silk dotted tie he’d bought for the occasion.
Described as a combination of Irving Thalberg and Cleopatra, a professional who’s clear and knows what she wants, Anna joined past Hall of Fame inductees ranging from William F. Buckley to Helen Gurley Brown. Wearing a sparkly suit with her T-shirt and suit collar charmingly askew, Wintour acknowledged her mentor Alexander Lieberman and thanked the staff and professionals she works with.
General Excellence awards, presented in six categories based on circulation from under 100,000 to over two million, cited two city magazines (San Francisco and New York), two men’s magazines (GQ and Men’s Health), Mother Jones and, finally, 100-year-old National Geographic for its up-to-date mastery of graphics.
What do the citations indicate about current lifestyles? Separate titles for men and women are holding their own against general interest magazines, and "men’s" magazines are showing their softer sides with oft-nominated GQ’s "recipe for Brussels sprouts following a guide to cologne." Even Field and Stream was nominated for a food article, "America’s Meat." There is still a place for the substantive reporting of Foreign Policy, The Economist, The New York Times Magazine and, for smaller reviews, Technology Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review. Forward-looking design, from the edgy photo portfolios of W to the innovative graphics of Wired, point toward the future.
The final Ellie went to Magazine of the Year. Besting The Atlantic, Fast Company, Men’s Health and New York, it was Glamour that took the prize with Editor Cynthia Leive citing the importance of her magazine’s Web component in "starting a conversation with readers which takes you into their lives."
And clearly it is a time of transition. Outgoing ASME President David Willey assured the crowd that while continuing to deal with the future, print remains alive and well. Yet one winner mentioned the "tough last 18 months" and more than one acceptance speech thanked the business side for selling essential ads because "great reporting is expensive." Accepting the honor for Fareed Zakaria’s foreign policy columns in Newsweek, Editor Jon Meacham stressed the importance of informed commentators in a world where anyone can go on cable or the Web. Even the very contemporary mystery issue of Wired was lauded for pages filled with puzzles to solve.
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Print is not dead but it is transitioning. Magazine subscriptions are often free to inflate circulations. How many paid subscriptions is probably not actually tracked?
Google Inc alleged developing a "copyrite" alternative in NY for all "copyrites" that did not opt-out. All the printed newspapers in Arkansas are owned by one publisher and that publisher is loosing money. Magazines have a slightly better prospect to remain but not without changing.
Google Inc faces actually finally losing money as a result of 5:09-cv-05151 and another case in NY.
The AdSense profit scheme of "parked domains" will soon be found fraudulent. Domains licensed and existing exclusively to sell Google Inc "AdSense for Domains" is attempting to convert web surfers to just click ads and every ad sold online is another ad not sold in "print".
National magazines as they are now face much the same difficulty as daily newspapers. This difficulty being irrelevance. Print media either evolves or becomes extinct in much less than ten years.I give newspapers five years and magazines maybe seven. AdSense profit is why wowOwow exists and it should instead sell subscriptions.
wowOwow will not exist in ten years unless they sell subscriptions. Advertiser based profit schemes for search engines will be gone in twenty-five years.
I don’t see the demise of print media because you can read a book, magazine or newspaper anywhere. Not even the Kindle or Sony Reader will entirely replace a book.
Newspapers would be more competitive if they had reporters digging for news instead of printing it off the wire services. In some areas interesting local events get no coverage at all. Free weekly papers enjoy a huge readership as residents check out local happenings, new restaurants and interesting people. They will cover the man building boats in his garage, the local ASPCA domestic pet parade or the people with unusual talents. They are fun and informative.
Electronic media appeals to the educated but some people forget that not everyone in this country is computer literate. One out of three people in the US reads below a fifth grade level. Many adults read just enough to function but not enough to help their children. Children from non-reading families benefit from magazines and papers when an article catches their attention. Adult tutors sometimes use them as an incentive for their students to become literate.
Amen to that. And print does not become corrupted, unreadable because it was produced on an now-obsolete word processor, or erased in a power outage.
Print lasts and lasts. The Dead Sea Scrolls are still here, and pretty legible. I have books over 100 years old in my possession, and still just as readable as new. I don’t think we will say the same about electronic media 100 years from now. Shoot, probably 10 years from now.
MaggieW—I do a lot of reading on my back porch swing, too. There is intrinsic value in holding and reading a book in a quiet setting that is not duplicated by reading from a "screen", although I do read online magazines and newspapers, too.
I have a non-profit corporation that has for twenty years provided books to deserving children. Many of the people who make donations to our projects tell me that, as children, they found time spent alone with a good book gave them a sense of peace and respite from the sometimes harsh realities of their own lives. If their families didn’t value reading or couldn’t afford to buy books, hometown libraries were their source of reading materials.
Like you, I hope print does not die.
An insufferable article! Great Scott, Wowow, are you really trying to get rid of more of us?
Print will wane - but online publications (books) will last because they’re easily accessed, less expensive, and can be simply adapted to software for the blind! Re-reading will increase, as indivual libraries are cherished.
Not everyone wants to carry around an iPad or a laptop to read the latest headlines. The daily newspaper does a far easier job of that and doesn’t need batteries. Books, unlike Kindles, don’t need to recharge, and can be borrowed for free at the library.
I don’t think I am in the minority. I live in NYC and my local library branch always has lines because it is so busy. (And free!)
Oprah did a show the other day with the iPad, calling it "the newest gadget you didn’t know you needed" (paraphrasing). Nothing against Oprah, but as soon as she said that, I was determined never to own an iPad. I simply don’t need it. Need has become a misunderstood term.
Reality is reality. In ten years, most will be downloading books instead of buying them. As for print media, the only print will be what the reader prints. A good thing to some, it certainly will save some trees. A bad thing to some others, the IT people are now running the newspapers which are increasingly becoming nothing more than blogs with print editions. And journalistic standards have been tossed out the proverbial window as a result.
I disagree with the contention that advertising will not support the new media. It already is. And in media, advertising is all. And the perception the Google controls internet advertising through AdSense is nonsense.
No one owns the internet. And no one controls it either. As for subscribing most of the media has found we won’t unless it is to access full articles and stories from archives. And even that hasn’t proven very successful.
Banner headlines have been replaced with banner advertising. And advertisers do pay and are finding people respond the same way they always did. They don’t care about "hits" they care about how much they sell.
Magazines and coffee table books will survive. Gives us something to read in the doctor’s office and give an "intellectual look" to our coffee tables in the living room.
A laptop on the coffee table just doesn’t do it, you know?
Baby Snooks—You said, "In ten years, most will be downloading books instead of buying them."
I don’t wish to argue with you, but downloading books IS buying them. When people download books to their Kindle or iPad, they have to buy them.
Perhaps you meant downloading as opposed to buying them in the bookstore. Sorry.
Even now, with the explosion of the use of personal computers, many people use internet cafes because they do not own computers, or do not wish to incur the cost of DSL. There are many of these places in my neighborhood, selling coffee and snacks, always attractive and full, 24/7.
There will always be holdouts; these people just don’t get as much press as those with the newest gadgets. It is as if they don’t exist, according to the press. But it is for this reason I think print will always be around in some form.