Reading the New York Times Magazine isn't what it used to be
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/09/new-york-times-magazine-decline Version 0 of 1. Two magazines, both published by the New York Times, arrived in my house over the weekend, one thin, the other thick. The thin one, The New York Times Magazine, is largely about public issues, or reflections about the culture, or science, or literature. The thick one, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, is about fashion, design, taste, and luxury. This column is not, let me hasten to say, about the death of news values and civic interest, that the two magazines, side by side, might seem to reflect. Rather, it is about the nature of magazine publishing, and about publishers and the choices they make. It is also about nostalgia, as so much about publishing is these days. And about advertising, which, confoundingly, most writing about publishing is not about. The nostalgia: the New York Times Magazine was once, arguably, the most influential magazine in America (the runner ups would be the New Yorker and Time), as well as one of the most profitable. This had less to do with its famous long-winded prose, then with the fact that it was a supplement delivered with the Sunday Times, and therefore read at nearly the same moment on Sunday morning by the Times readership – some of the most influential people in America, in attentive repose. The magazine was a testament to the power of audience – or the power of its attention. For a writer, appearing in the Magazine (always called "the Magazine") was like a comedian appearing on the Johnny Carson Show – everybody who was anybody suddenly calling! (I recently asked a friend who, a few weeks ago, published his first piece there about the response he'd gotten. "Not a peep.") And advertising: there were once many kinds of magazines because there were many kinds of advertising. Such advertising has now been reduced to only a few profitable categories (and those are less profitable than they once were): traditional women's magazine advertisers, packaged goods, makeup, and personal grooming; and luxury goods, fashion, fragrances, jewelry. Accordingly, the publishing industry has created many specialty titles seeking those advertisers, crowding out the news and general-interest magazines that used to profit from those categories. That's precisely what happened to the New York Times Magazine. T came along and sucked up all the richest advertising pages from the Magazine. This is a demonstration of, among other things, the vitality of advertising. You can't have an important looking magazine without important (or at least expensive looking) advertising. A quick glance through the New York Times Magazine show that one of its biggest ad categories is now partial-page direct selling classifieds, helping to make it look like a throw away.<br /> <br />The Times' management, no doubt, enviously saw the successful example of the Financial Times' amazingly vulgar and trashy (although not in a throw away sense) weekend supplement, How To Spend It. And it was no doubt threatened by the success of the Wall Street Journal's luxury supplement, WSJ Magazine, and, indeed, hired away its editor, Deborah Needleman, to run T. There are, beyond advertising, several other stark juxtapositions between T and the Times Magazine. T looks like a modern magazine. It has lots of photos and illustrations, both small and large, many call outs, and keeps its type blocks to a minimum. You flip it, rather than read it. The Times Magazine, although it has tried to add modern details, still seems old fashioned, page after page of type. It needs to be read and that seems, I believe to almost everybody, exhausting. I should say too that T and its brother luxury supplements have never said a negative or memorable word about anything. (On the other hand, while the Times Magazine may well be analytic and hard hitting, no one would know, because nobody reads it.) They exist together uncomfortably. The Times Magazine used to be the relaxing dollop of color you got on Sunday – longer, narrative, magazine-like feature stories in a newspaper. But now T more clearly provides that dollop and that relaxation. What's more, the Times Magazine blends almost seamlessly with the newspaper itself. There is hardly any rhyme nor reason why something is in the paper or in the magazine, except that things in the magazine are somewhat longer (usually too long). Online, an article from the paper itself or from the magazine is quite indistinguishable. T, as a more orchestrated package, does not fit so well online – you need the whole thing. That might seem like a negative, that it doesn't transport. But, since its ad revenues are print-based, it's a profoundly positive virtue. Why, then, does the magazine exist? Indeed, as much as you have in T and the Times Magazine a striking example of publishing trends and strategies, you also probably have a cautionary lesson in publishing management. Or New York Times management, where ambivalence seems like strategy. The Times Magazine, if the Times had wanted to save it, might have been combined with a luxury and style sensibility. Instead, T was created, canceling out the Times Magazine. At the same time, losses at the Times Magazine mostly cancel out T's profits. Curiously, at the same time it has created mortal competition for the magazine, the Times management seems concerned about its future, recently dispensing with its magazine editor, Hugo Lindgren, and, according to rumors, getting ready to hire Jodi Kantor, a much-vaunted Times reporter and editor known for the kind of softer feature treatments of the news which have become a staple of the paper. Personally, I don't get it. Many people in the media business, or, anyway, those who continue to pay attention to the New York Times – who understand that advertising is not just the paper's key to survival but its reason for being – are, I believe, ever-more puzzled by the arrival of these conflicting magazines, and about what the Times is trying to become, or what it would like to be, and what its plan is to save itself. Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning. |