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Hello. My name is Rex Hammock and I’m a magazine geek.
How do I know? On Thursday, when I found myself with 45 free minutes in Washington, DC, I passed up exhibits of works by Goya and Degas to spend time viewing an exhibit of magazine covers. Bobby Stark (another magazine geek) and I were early for a business meeting near the White House so we detoured to a new show in the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History, “July 1942: United We Stand.”
The exhibit is a three-room gallery of July, 1942 magazine covers, all featuring the American flag. During that month “some five hundred publications waved the stars and stripes to promote national unity, rally support for the war, and celebrate Independence Day,” according to the exhibition notes. Putting the flags on the cover was an idea of Paul MacNamara, a publicist for Hearst, and grew into a nationwide collaboration between the National Publishers Association (now the Magazine Publishers of America) and the U.S. Treasury Department (which still has its original 1789 name).
For an un-recovering magazine geek like myself, the exhibit is straight tequila.
While I’ve never been a flea-market collector of old magazines, the exhibit made me grateful some folks are. Viewing nearly 200 covers of a wide variety of time-frozen covers gives one a renewed appreciation of the role magazines play in recording and shaping our history and culture. (The full collection contains over 300 covers.)
The displayed magazine covers, of which around 65 are framed “originals” and around 100 more are digital scans, are hung by categories, helping the viewer understand the intentions of the cover designers, illustrators, photographers, editors and publishers.
If I had been “blogging” the exhibit, here are some of the thoughts I would have recorded:
For years, I’ve been telling anyone who would listen that custom publishing is not something new…my usual example is John Deere’s hundred-year old dealer magazine, The Furrow. Now I have several new examples (DuPont, U.S. Steel, GM, New York Life Insurance, Merck, Harley-Davidson, Dutch Boy and others) of earlier-era corporate magazines featured in the exhibit. One such corporate magazine, the Merck Report, won the “Patriotic Service Award” for its cover.
The exhibit masterfully displays the way magazines touch every facet of our lives: work, play, free-time, really free time, and time of worship.
All magazine art directors should view a wall full of how their predecessors tackled one seemingly cliched theme hundreds of creative ways. Someone please, please start collecting all the magazine covers which appeared after September 11 for an exhibit 60 years from now.
Seeing Readers Digest, National Geographic, Harpers Magazine, and others break their cover treatment conventions to participate is surprising. It was Time Magazine’s first cover of an “inanimate thing” instead of a famous person.
There were some great designers in 1942 and some not so great ones. Like today, I guess.
The range of business-to-business titles was as broad then as it is today.
In 1942, I doubt editors and art directors were troubled by any conflicted thoughts regarding the propaganda implications or press freedom issues raised by the campaign. Rather, I think they appreciated the chance it allowed them to participate in the early days of the war effort.
Magazine brands are transient. Only a small fraction of these titles still exist. And fewer still (less than 10?) are published by companies with the same ownership, then as now. One of my magazine friends has a title in the exhibit that’s still in the family.
Personal favorites: Poultry Tribune, Harpers Bazaar, Glamour, and Captain Marvel.
I recommend all magazine geeks visit the exhibit, or at least spend some time on the excellent website accompanying it.
Hello. My name is Rex Hammock and I’m a magazine geek.
How do I know? Well, on Thursday, when I found myself with 45 free minutes in Washington, DC, I passed up exhibits of works by Goya and Degas to spend time viewing an exhibit of magazine covers. I was early for a business meeting near the White House so I detoured to a new show in the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History, “July 1942: United We Stand.”
The exhibit is a three-room gallery of July, 1942 magazine covers, all featuring the American flag. During that month “some five hundred publications waved the stars and stripes to promote national unity, rally support for the war, and celebrate Independence Day,” according to the exhibition notes. Putting the flags on the cover was an idea of Paul MacNamara, a publicist for Hearst, and grew into a nationwide collaboration between the National Publishers Association (now the Magazine Publishers of America) and the U.S. Treasury Department (which still has its original 1789 name).
For an un-recovering magazine geek like myself, the exhibit is straight tequila.
While I’ve never been a flea-market collector of old magazines, the exhibit made me grateful some folks are. Viewing nearly 200 covers of a wide variety of time-frozen covers gives one a renewed appreciation of the role magazines play in recording and shaping our history and culture. (The full collection contains over 300 covers.)
The displayed magazine covers, of which around 65 are framed “originals” and around 100 more are digital scans, are hung by categories, helping the viewer understand the intentions of the cover designers, illustrators, photographers, editors and publishers.
If I had been “blogging” the exhibit, here are some of the thoughts I would have recorded:
For years, I’ve been telling anyone who would listen that custom publishing is not something new…my usual example is John Deere’s hundred-year old dealer magazine, The Furrow. Now I have several new examples (DuPont, U.S. Steel, GM, New York Life Insurance, Merck, Harley-Davidson, Dutch Boy and others) of earlier-era corporate magazines featured in the exhibit. One such corporate magazine, the Merck Report, won the “Patriotic Service Award” for its cover.
The exhibit masterfully displays the way magazines touch every facet of our lives: work, play, free-time, really free time, and time of worship.
All magazine art directors should view a wall full of how their predecessors tackled one seemingly cliched theme hundreds of creative ways. Someone please, please start collecting all the magazine covers which appeared after September 11 for an exhibit 60 years from now.
Seeing Readers Digest, National Geographic, Harpers Magazine, and others break their cover treatment conventions to participate is surprising. It was Time Magazine’s first cover of an “inanimate thing” instead of a famous person.
There were some great designers in 1942 and some not so great ones. Like today, I guess.
The range of business-to-business titles was as broad then as it is today.
In 1942, I doubt editors and art directors were troubled by any conflicted thoughts regarding the propaganda implications or press freedom issues raised by the campaign. Rather, I think they appreciated the chance it allowed them to participate in the early days of the war effort.
Magazine brands are transient. Only a small fraction of these titles still exist. And fewer still (less than 10?) are published by companies with the same ownership, then as now. One of my magazine friends has a title in the exhibit that’s still in the family.
Personal favorites: Poultry Tribune, Harpers Bazaar, Glamour, and Captain Marvel.
I recommend all magazine geeks visit the exhibit, or at least spend some time on the excellent website accompanying it.
(Permanent link: http://rex.weblogs.com/stories/storyReader$348)
Circulation Management reports the shakeout in newsstand titles speeds up.
Newsstand title erosion has been going on for at least three years, but this trend accelerated markedly during 2001. In last year’s second half, there were 589 audited newsstand titles–a decline of 5.2 percent from the 621 audited newsstand titles in second half 2000.
A day without web access is like a day without, well, come to think of it, it’s not that bad.
Nashville Scene writer Bill Carey is profiled in Today’s Wall Street Journal in a special small business section. Bill is one of ten people profiled as part of a package of stories called, “The Morning After: They took a chance, now how do they feel?” (Please, no email comments.) Bill was one of the founders of nashvillepost.com, which is still a well-worn link on my bookmarks. He also is the author of Fortunes, Fiddles & Fried Chicken, which is an excellent look at some of the high and low points of Nashville business history.
Quote:
But he was exhausted. He knew he couldn’t go on chasing stories while simultaneously running a business. On the day that state son Al Gore announced his running mate for the presidential election, it was midsummer, and Mr. Carey left his office to shuffle over to the news conference at the Capitol. “It was 98 degrees,” he recalls. “I hadn’t slept in days.” He gazed around at the relaxed press corps standing around, making jokes, no worries. “I thought, ‘God, this is horrible.’”
The Wall Street Journal reports that the New York Times is upping its investment in Newsstand, Inc., the company which allows the Times to offer digital versions that are exact replicas of the paper’s print edition “for as little as 64¢ a day.”
While the new investment may suggest that the Times is having some traction in selling this technology, I have my doubts. Can someone help me? Who exactly is the customer for this? I am a passionate producer and patron of both printed and digital media. I certainly can understand why advertisers would like this. And I can understand why publishers would like this. I can even understand why libraries or other research-oriented institutions would like to archive digital versions of the print version of a newspaper or magazine.
But what is the compelling reason for a customer/reader to pay 65¢ a day for content available free in a different, yet compelling and now maturing, format?
As a magazine publisher, I would love for this to have a customer base. As a long-time reader of print and digital content, I just don’t get it.
(P.S. Despite there not being a newstand reader for the Mac OS, I have had the pleasure to see a demo of the product. It is like a PDF on steroids designed specifically to replicate the print-reading experience. It’s cool for a print-person like me to see and use. But still, it seems to be, at best, a transitional gimmick and, at worst, this year’s version of the CueCat, last year’s $250 million media convergence dream product that proved to be a nightmare.)
IDG has natually selected to evolve Darwin Magazine into a web-only species. The print magazine will go into “hibernation,” says the editor.
Quote (from the Boston Globe):
(Editor) McCreary added that by continuing an Internet-only version of Darwin, he hoped to keep the magazine alive until the ad market can once again support a print version. ”Today’s environment - like the bubble that preceded it - is temporary,” he wrote. ”And when the time is right, we will have survived to launch again in print.
As usual, it comes down to the survival of the fittest.
In the first step towards the creation of a homeland security system capable of recording every move a citizen of Nashville makes, an agency of cash-starved Tennessee today unveiled its new “Enemy of the State” web-cam network. Smile. (Thanks to David for the point.)
Min’s annual listing (story may not stay posted here long) of which magazine covers sold the best (and worst) at the newstand offers plenty of fodder for pop culture pundits.
An editorial in the LA Times crowns an unnamed men’s magazine as the “Worst Single Magazine of the Week” for its “shameless” promotional ploy.
Quote:
Here’s the clever marketing twist that got the magazine’s editors maximum publicity: They named 13 different cities as THE Greatest City. They wrote totally fatuous articles about how great are New York and Detroit, Philadelphia and Toronto etc. as if each was the winner and shipped those versions to the respective cities. Then to ensure their promotional duplicity was discovered, they “mistakenly” shipped the New York copies to Philadelphia, which regards itself as a rival of the Big Apple. Surely, this is a finalist on any list of Shamelessly Cynical Journalism Ploys.
Playboy Magazine’s Hugh Hefner was recently honored for his “lifetime achievement in the magazine industry.” The magazine’s current desperation promotion, a pictorial of the “Women of Enron,” should be “honored” as one of the saddest magazine gimmicks in anyone’s lifetime.
Quote from the Dow-Jones news service:
“This isn’t our way of capitalizing on tragedy at all,” said Kevin Kuster, senior photography editor for Playboy. “In fact, it’s quite the opposite. We realize that the situation right now for the employees of Enron is difficult, very difficult, and after talking about it, we saw it as this might be a way for an employee of Enron to do something exciting and fun.” An employee of the fallen energy trader may find this to be an opportunity to embark on a different career path, said Kuster. He declined to say how much the Enron workers would be paid, but said that it probably wouldn’t be enough to “change their lifestyle.”
For a weekly look at what’s the buzz in the trucking industry, check out Bill Hudgins’ newsletter. Here’s a link to today’s issue, a report from trucking’s biggest event of the year, the Mid-America Show in Louisville.
The New York Times’David Carr and Lorne Manly examine the digital dreams that have led to nightmares for one of the few companies owning both consumer and trade magazines, Primedia.
Quote:
The man in charge is Tom Rogers, Primedia’s supremely self-confident chief executive and digital evangelist, who made a huge bet on transforming an old-line publisher with a line of unrelated media properties including magazines like New York, Seventeen and National Hog Farmer into what he calls an integrated, old-media-new-media enterprise. Mr. Rogers is the last true believer. A former General Electric (news/quote) executive who has spent his career counterintuiting convention in the media industry (he championed CNBC), he continues to engage in the kind of robust digital rhetoric that has others cringing.
Follow-up: (3/25) Via Jim Romenesko, it seems Mr. Rogers was not too pleased with the story nor the undisclosed former relationship the writers had with Primedia.
It’s not often the Tennessean and New York Times independently develop and run arts/entertainment stories this similar. Both examine the paradox of the country radio format in an era of concentrated station ownership. The Tennessean, which has covered the topic often, offers a new twist by suggesting 12 specific songs country radio should be playing now, but doesn’t. I would listen to a Nashville station playing those songs and artists. Hey, wait a minute, I DO listen to a Nashville station that plays those songs and artists.
Why don’t all big media just go ahead and consolidate into AOL & MS and get it over with, ponders Frank Rose (fearfully) in Wired.
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