Editor’s Note: This is the first part of a three-part column by Allen You.
If nobody reads Northwestern’s campus magazines today, it’s not simply due to general apathy. The stories are boring, and the designs are repetitive. Really, who should be reading them? They are, for the most part, not worth reading. Despite this, magazines persist, vampirically sucking the life out of their poor staffers, who themselves are poaching resume boosters and bylines.
But the tragedy of NU’s magazines is not that they’re worthless, it’s that they could be better but sadly choose not to be. Is it hopeful to believe that the magazine’s potential has only yet to emerge? Only through a critical assessment of the possibilities of its production could a magazine aspire towards such redemption.
The magazine form poses constraints that restrict its production. On the surface, these constraints only appear as problems for the producer. However, the magazine only achieves value by utilizing its form to create an effect in its content.
For example, all magazines will design covers so that they introduce or make a statement about the magazine’s contents. While these covers may be cumbersome to create, only through the successful use of this aspect of the magazine form can it distinguish itself from other media.
Of course, other forms of media share the issues of covers, page limits, folds and more. It is therefore insufficient for the magazine to only consider the partial aspects of its form and their uses. For the magazine to have worth, it must master all aspects of its form in its unity.
If it fails to do so, it is simply superseded by other journalistic media, especially the newspaper and online publications. The magazine must make a case for its relevance in spite of these other forms. Therefore, an analysis of the division of labor among the journalistic forms would provide the basis for the magazine’s criteria for judgment.
Firstly, there is the daily newspaper, whose function is immediacy. They offer quick notification on relevant matters, and the paper is itself irrelevant if it cannot satisfy this need. They have to do so without error since its content cannot be altered once the newspaper goes to print. These goals of immediacy and precision push newspapers to present the world as it is observed — that is, objectively. Reliably doing so then builds rapport with an audience. Thus, traditional journalistic practice was born. Publications like The Daily Northwestern represent this necessary craft.
Newspapers are constrained by their form primarily through the limited page space. It restricts the sheer amount of content that can be published, posing a question of cost efficiency. Thus, each story’s word count is heavily regulated so as to communicate the most information with the least words. Stories are typically placed on the page with minimal visual flourish besides simple hierarchical information — the headline and byline, for example — and accompanying photography. Newspaper typesetting, font size and layout are standardized for consistency, readability and efficient page usage. In short, newspapers are measured by their ability to maximize the utility of their page space to print only the most necessary and essential journalistic elements.
But the newspaper’s dominance over timely production has long been in decline. The development of television and broadcast journalism was its first major crisis, but broadcast couldn’t perfectly replicate the effects of the print formats. But the advent of web publications in the past two decades has put the nail in the coffin.
Web publications are able to do exactly what the newspaper hopes to do, but even quicker and with fewer physical constraints. The web doesn’t need to wait to print, it can publish as many stories and advertisements as it wants, and it can revise already-published content on a whim.
If everyone has internet access, web publications render the newspaper totally superfluous. Printing The Daily today amounts to a mere ritual. Even The Daily knows this: they cut down their print schedule to once a week as they prioritize their website.
Here is where the magazine presents itself as an alternative. It represents the opposite of the newspaper’s telos: while the newspaper streamlines its production to quickly publish its stories, the magazine allots time to more carefully think over the possibilities of its use of theme, language and visual presentation. In doing so, the magazine at its best will embrace its formal limitations to create an intended effect in and through its content.
The best magazine producers know that web publications offer greater capabilities, but choose to make magazines because of their distinct limitations. They choose to let the page size restrict them; they choose to design front and back covers; they choose to let typesetting issues dictate their sentence structures and so on. Their activity is conscious of the magazine form and its relation to developments in media history. The relevance of the magazine is not merely a given.
Yet it is precisely for this reason that, unlike newspapers, the challenges of the magazine cannot be easily translated online. The newspaper’s more immediate goals create an indifference to form which renders the newspaper readily superseded by the web. Hence why many new publications are online and why most traditional newspapers, like The Daily, are migrating to a web-based version of their old practice. The necessities of the content harshly dictate the form they house it in.
The magazine’s condition is the opposite of the newspaper: the primacy of the form. The necessities of the form subordinate the potential content. The adequacy of content to form creates effect. A great magazine can make an experience even out of the mere act of page-turning — it utilizes its tactility uniquely to its benefit. It curates stories in a contained setting so that the individual pieces constellate a greater whole. An online version of the magazine would only inhibit the web’s technological freedoms to romanticize what is lost in its lack of physicality.
Read the other way around, realizing the productive tension of form and content is the only substantive justification for continuing magazine production, otherwise switching to the web becomes a logical necessity. The magazine must succeed only where the web can’t.
NU’s campus magazines realize their own inadequacy, albeit unconsciously. More and more magazine-based publications are transitioning to the web, not because the web is a nice addition to their existing means, but because they don’t need a magazine to publish their stories in the first place. Magazine writers don’t write for the magazine, they write for the mere fact of publication, and the web is the quintessence of publication as such.
It proves increasingly irrational to fund and furnish magazines that receive little attention. But because of NU’s institutional support, magazines still manage a feeble, precarious existence. As it stands, poor magazine production only amounts to mere self-denial in the face of the straightforwardly superior web publication. Only a wholesale break with current production methods could redeem the magazine — a conscious choice.
So if nobody is reading these magazines, then why magazine now? What is motivating their production? The question is unavoidable. If the motivation is romanticism and sheer inertia, then the magazine is hollow. If it’s simple career opportunism, then The Daily is readily better. But if rational intent could combine with ambitious creativity, then the magazine may be due for a new dawn. What might that look like?
Allen You is a Medill sophomore. He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.