Magazines!
I miss them. Don't you?
I recently finished Graydon Carter’s memoir When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines (Bookshop.org affiliate link), and it made me so nostalgic. I want to hope that he used “last” to mean “most recent”, but the reality is that magazines will soon be a thing of the past.
Carter launched the hugely influential Spy (archives available on Google Books, and worth your time if you missed it the first time around), edited Vanity Fair, and enjoyed the glamour of the 1990s on Condé Nast’s expense account. Then came the internet and Craigslist, sucking up classified ad revenue from the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Staten Island Advance, the basic dailies that funded the ritzy, glitzy Condé Nast empire.
Years ago, when I used to write for trade magazines, the philosophy was that those publications would never be anyone’s first choice, but if a subscriber was going on a flight and took a stack of things to read on the plane, a good story would get the attention it deserved. Unfortunately, business travelers were early adoptors of Kindles and smart phones, and no one wanted to read about trends in tire recycling when they could play Sudoku on demand.
I still get a few magazines in the mail, mostly because Hearst Media added me to their comp lists when I was freelancing for them. I am a massive fan of my library’s Libby app, in part because it offers access to a ton of magazines from all over the world. (Click on “Shelf”, and you’ll see “Magazine Rack”.) I love reading publications from the UK because the writers have such a playful approach to language, and I can practice my Spanish with Vogue España.
Magazines are typically arranged with front-of-the-book departments, a feature well where the stories and photography go, and then some kind of snappy back-of-the-book item like a puzzle or essay. With print dying out, there are plenty of places to find great stories, images, and puzzles.
We’ve lost the departments: those pages of helpful hints, product roundups, and recommendations for upcoming events that were researched and tested. Online sources don’t do research or testing, leading to Pinterest fails and questionable TikTok food hacks.
When I was imagining The Whatever Years, I thought it might turn into a daily publication with front-of-the-book departments on Monday, articles on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and then some kind of humor piece on Friday. I quickly realized that this would be way too much work. I think there’s probably a way for Substack proprietors to band together and do a version of it, but I’m still not sure what that would look like.
In the spirit of those erstwhile front-of-the-book departments, I present two helpful tips. First, I have a denim shirt dress that I really like, but it had those annoying tabs on the sleeve that supposedly make the sleeves easier to roll up.
So one evening, I got out small scissors and removed the buttons and tabs. It took about ten minutes while watching TV. Now I have the sleeve of my dreams.
Maybe my dreams are smaller than yours, I don’t know.
Here’s the second: recently, I was looking for a super lightweight backpack to carry a notebook and a few other items. I wanted something exactly like a giveaway item I received when I covered New Orleans Enterpreneur Week a few years ago, but without all the branding:
Then I realized that all I had to do was flip it over. I tied on a bandanna, and viola!
So there you go.
Do you miss magazines? Do you have helpful hints to share? Please, leave a note in the comments:
I miss magazines SO much! I used to relish getting InStyle in the mail and delving in with a glass of wine on a Sunday afternoon. I wanted to treat myself to a big magazine before a flight last month, and I was so dismayed by the lack of options at the airport. :( I still get (and deeply cherish) the New Yorker, and I get HGTV and Better Homes and Gardens, too, just for the print experience. They're so much slimmer than magazines used to be, but they're better than nothing. I really can't bear to read everything on a screen (still get a print newspaper on the weekends, too).
I need to start going to my library to read the magazines they have (sorry, I'm a physical product gal--I can't get used to reading everything on a screen). The only magazines I get are the AARP ones that come with my membership and Smithsonian. Sometimes I subscribe to Reader's Digest. However, I have instilled in my 12-year-old grandson a love of magazines. From the time he was tiny, I gave him subscriptions for birthday and Christmas--first Highlights and Ranger Rick Jr. Now, he still wants Ranger Rick but we dropped Highlights and added Oyla, a science-themed magazine for older kids. He reads every article, and loves getting something of his own in the mail.