Chekhov's Mistress
Serious Magazines Consider Themselves “Anti-blogs”
Thoughtless comments from supposedly thoughtful people…
From “Brainy Young Things” in a New York Magazine (issue dated April 10) about “serious magazines:”
Franklin Foer, new editor of The New Republic:
“The thing that sort of unites us is that we’re all trying to preserve a style of journalism that flies in the face of the onslaught of the blogosphere,” he says. “You get the sense that if you grow up editing blogs, you have a different cognitive framework.”
“Different cognitive framework?” I think he means they’re smarter than us.
Here’s another excerpt:
“We’re all sort of the anti-blogs,” says Roger Hodge, the new editor of Harper’s. “And I think we will eventually triumph over the blogs!”
Triumph?
It’s stupid to even act as though these two media are that closely related. Most importantly, I’d be willing to bet that blogs increase the readership of these “serious magazines.” Those who like to read seriously – which, Mr. High-faluttin Editor Man, is not mutually exclusive of blogging – write about what we’ve read. We discuss articles, complain about them, praise them, quote them.
Perhaps you guys are too busy being “serious” to understand what the business people call “viral marketing.” It means, in short, spreading the word to people with similar interests – like a virus (ding!).
Examples: At least 20 people downloaded Brian Phillips’ 27-page (really fabulous) Hudson Review essay linked from this site in the last two weeks. One or two people per day is not a big number, but I imagine for a magazine with a circulation of only 3500, every reader counts (I also posted that article at 400 Windmills, so the number could be larger, but I don’t have data on that site). About the same number visited Soledad Fox’s essay at the New England Review (circulation around 3,000) from here.
Since the middle of last September, this little blog has had about 42,000 readers. In that time frame, 62 people left from a post at this site directly to visit the Website of n+1 magazine (22 to The Paris Review; 148 to The New Republic; 48 to Bookforum; 55 to The New Criterion, which is more, I might add, than they sent me when they mentioned this site on their blog). Maybe a couple subscribed. Maybe other people saw what I wrote and wrote their own posts and some people read theirs and wrote their own, and so on, and along the way, maybe some people visited the magazine’s Website and a few of those subscribed. That’s the viral part (double ding!).
I’m not trying to congratulate myself here and I’m not suggesting blogs are just marketing tools. The point is that I am one person and there are many like me and no matter how excited we are about blogs, none of us that I know of consider our sites individually or collectively in competition with other media – while we are not shy about taking individual articles apart, we see blogs coexisting at one level and if everyone’s lucky, blogs are a source of productive friction. Blogs ≠ “Serious Magazines” or newspapers. Blogs will never overtake good journalism or good magazines (although blogs may help get rid of bad journalism and bad magazines).
You guys remind me of those people who proudly resisted getting a cell phone for so many years before finally giving in. Perhaps instead of celebrating how great you are, you should just join the conversation. There is no need to triumph over blogs.
Technorati Tags: The very serious magazine is the antithesis of the blogosphere, reports New York Magazine
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: April 04, 2006
- Filed Under:
Litbloggers & Blog Floggers
- Comments:0
- Links to this Post: Technorati
