Books are the oldest print medium; newspapers are the algae of the news ocean. Books are still with us but have an uncertain future—newspapers are clearly in decline in print, but attempting to morph into new kinds of news organizations.
What are magazines? Almost as old as books, clearly important in the news universe but not as vital as newspapers, magazines are very diverse—they come in many different forms.
According to a magazine trade association report, there are more than 7,300 magazines in the United States today, a multi-billion-dollar industry employing tens or hundreds of thousands (depending on how you count—many media professionals have roles in magazines but don’t work in the industry full-time).
2019 Magazine economic impact--most recent numbers I found online.
Various ways magazines count audience.
General circulation magazines that depend on a mix of ads and subscription for economic viability—like all traditional print media roughly following the penny press economic model of a cheap publication that presents ads to survive—have taken a hit in recent years. “Newsweek” ceased print publication recently during ownership changes, for example.
But not all magazines follow that model. And the number of magazines has actually remained steady while newspapers have been in decline, and magazine readership has grown, although those numbers can be a bit fuzzy because magazine publishers like to include web editions along with print editions.
According to www.agilitypr.com a Public Relations reference site, in January 2021 top 10 circulation magazines in the United States are:
AARP Magazine.
AARP Bulleting.
Costco Connection.
Betters Homes and Gardens*.
Game Informer Magazine.
Good Housekeeping*.
People Magazine.
Woman’s Day.
National Geographic.
Time.
*These are published in Des Moines, Iowa, by Meredith, Corporation.
Today, some magazines still retain national prominence. Investigative reporting in the “New Yorker” and “Atlantic” magazines often sparks stories that become major news across the media. Yet one reason the magazine industry has been so resilient is that it exists in some many forms in so many places.
Here is a partial list of the kinds of magazines that there are:
Trade and organization magazines. The top two magazines by circulation number in the United States are both published by the American Association of Retired People—AARP. Many prominent national organizations sponsor magazines as part of their member or audience outreach programs.
Corporate sponsored. Some magazines are meant to market goods or services or create a sense of community. Costco, for example, published a magazine. If a corporation is large enough—if it has tens of thousands of employees in diverse locations—a magazine publishes specifically for its own employees might exist. Many organizations, including most colleges, publish at least one magazine to stay in touch with parents, potential donors and alumni. Large universities publish multiple such magazines.
2007 corporate magazine published in Cedar Rapids.
Special kind of "corporate" magazine--local government PR magazine in Cedar Rapids.
General circulation. These may be news magazines like “Time.” Or they can be more oriented to an audience, sort of like cable TV. “Elle” and “Cosmopolitan,” for example, target young women. “Sports Illustrated” is for sports fans, primarily males. “Better Homes and Gardens” pretty clearly targets women of financial means in settled households. This category is the one most impacted by media changes—but even here, still includes large and important publications.
"Time" person of the year in 2017 (above) and 2020 (below). It's a sometimes controversial choice--conservatives were angry when Biden and Harris were named--but "Time" is not "honoring" a person. In 1938, person of the year was Adolph Hitler, and "Time" was not endorsing fascism. The news magazine picks what it considers the most newsworthy personality of the year (not always one person). The cover is not a prize.
Niche publications. The Iowa DNR publishes “Iowa Outdoors,” unusual because it’s a government magazine that is subscription based. The internet tends to divide audiences up by specific interest—an idea that is not novel to cyberspace, because it has been a magazine strategy for generations. Many large cities have specific city magazines. Almost any hobby or profession will have one or several magazines associated with it. Magazines are often creative incubators—new fiction writers may see their first stories published in this medium before they complete their first novel. Poetry and prose literary magazines, even including “Paha” at Mount Mercy University, provide an important creative outlet for writers as well as the pleasure of discovering new voices for readers.
Published by Iowa DNR, but subscription based.
Scholarly journals. The best of these are “peer reviewed,” that is, research articles are only published if a panel of experts in that particular field agrees that the research described in the article is worthwhile. Many of these journals are also web sites, and quick sharing of information on COVID-19 via both government sites and science journal sites has been a key collaborative tool that helps explain, for example, why vaccines that usually take a decade or more to develop are starting to be available just one year into this pandemic. Any “hard” science or social science will have a whole series of journals that researchers publish in—and it’s those publications that serve as major news sources of new research, as well as accolades such as the Nobel Prize in physics or chemistry. The cover of Science, by the way, is from December 2009—the cover article is on groundbreaking gene research done at Iowa State University, and one of the authors of that article was Dr. Matthew Moscou. Being on the cover of science is unarguably a highlight of his career—although he also has the distinction of being Joe Sheller’s son-in-law. Coincidence? Yes, yes it is.
Cover of Science, a scholarly journal, reporting on gene editing technology studied at Iowa State.
Anyway, because magazines exist in such diverse forms, they have a more diffuse cultural impact. One impact that has been of concern in recent years is the unhealthy body image our culture puts forth as the ideas for young women—impossibly thin super models whose bodies are transformed using Photoshop appear in images in magazines that target females, particularly teens.
It’s too complex of an issue to blame on magazines, that both are promoting an unhealthy body image but are also following the preferences of their audience.
Magazines are among the most difficult to classify of media—and that is their strength. They don’t follow one model, but many. And many of them are closely associated with, or responsible form, online sites that draw traffic.
Final point: The magazine industry has many publications headquartered in New York, the publishing capital of the United States, but this diverse industry features important publishers in other places, too. “Better Homes are Garden” and some other very large, nationally important magazines are published by a huge company called Meredith—located in Des Moines, Iowa.
One of the U.S.A.'s largest magazine, published in Des Moines, Iowa.
“Newspapers are in a perilous position: Traditional readership is declining even as papers are struggling to create a profitable online business model.” Understanding Media online text.
In 2021, newspapers are a shadow of what they once were. In media history, we are studying the legacies of the great 19th century publishers, Hearst and Pulitzer. In their era, they wielded power and defined a whole new, important information industry.
Newspapers are at the root of news in this country, and those roots are deep and ancient. Thomas Jefferson, the country’s third president is often quoted by newspaper fans: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Those are Jefferson’s verified words, but he also wrote: “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”
Clearly, Jefferson was conflicted, but the papers of his era were deeply partisan and not at all neutral in their reporting. In media history at the end of this week, we’ll talk about why that dramatically changed, first with the rise of Pulitzer who emphasized fully reporting each story, and then with Adolph Ochs, the “New York Times” publisher who will reshape the media industry early in the 20th century.
For more than 200 years, newspapers were the key way most people got information about the events of the day. That monopoly on news ended in the 20th century with a series of three media revolutions—the coming of radio, then TV, then the internet.
This century, the 21st, has seen a great decline in the number of papers published, the number of journalists working at papers and the profitability and viability of many newspapers. The public has broken its newspaper habit in this century.
Two newspaper front page from Feb. 20, 2021. Note that both in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (above) and San Antonio, Texas (below) the ongoing winter weather crisis in Texas is top news--although in Iowa, it's all about a local restaurateur going to Texas to help.
And the unfortunate truth is that nothing has yet arisen that neutrally, effectively and objectively reports news the way that newspapers did. Many of our current political problems are partly due to competing versions of reality that can exist in a social media environment—a reality that did not exist in that form in the newspaper era.
It’s also true that part of what has ended the newspaper era is declining literacy. There are young readers—I’ve had spirited discussion with more than one MMU students about the new novels by Hank Green, for example. Yet reading is not understood as central to getting information as it once was.
But it is. There’s the rub. To a frightening extent, people who say they get their information from sources other than the printed word—who don’t read newspapers—are often people who don’t know disinformation from information—fake news from reality.
I don’t mean to imply that I think all is lost if we don’t go back to the newspaper era. It’s something that can’t and won’t happen—history doesn’t move in reverse. Yet, the energy in news media today, the innovation and creativity, is around new online sources.
In Iowa, for example, The Gazette works hard to be an online publication as much as it is a paper newspaper. New sources such as Little Village Magazine compete to delivery news. The investigative role that newspapers in Iowa once fulfilled is partly taken on by an online nonprofit, Iowa Watch, located in Iowa City but independent of the university there.
Home page of Iowa Watch, an investigative foundation in Iowa City that distributes its news stories for free.
What is the role of a newspaper? Here are its traditional functions:
Acing as Gatekeeper or agenda setter. Local papers still help define the conversation, the issues that people talk about or care about; yet they are not as important in this area as they once were, as social media today creates the cultural “buzz.” When papers did act as information gatekeepers, one advantage society had was that there was some sense of professionalism in terms of what was treated as a fact—whereas today, the information environment is looser and less easily defined. Newspapers saw their agenda-setting function degrade when radio and TV came on the scene, but it was the internet that mostly ended this role.
Being a watchdog. That’s honestly one of the key roles newspapers still provide. What does a “watchdog” do? Think of what you know about the Watergate scandal of the 1970s—at the time, it was two reporters for “The Washington Post” who uncovered corruption that eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Even today, some papers, such as the Post and “The New York Times,” and, in Iowa, “The Gazette” still strive to fulfill that function. But an issue in our culture today is that many communities have become “news deserts” where local papers have failed—and that can create a situation where actions of government are not monitored much anymore.
Providing “objective” information. Media bias is a complex issue, and not a “fake” thing because all media has some point of view—it’s just not the simple case of “liberal” mainstream media that is sometime portrayed. Nevertheless, traditionally, newspapers provide the most basic, factual account of events of day. They still do, where they exist, but it’s more important for consumers of information to be wary of the cacophony of disinformation available today that can drive out information.
Feb. 20 front page of Iowa's largest paper.
Anyway, we are in a state of flux in media. The “news” function that newspapers fulfilled is still important, and the remaining newspapers are still often the best sources you can find about events in a community. Yet the culture is shifting away. Dried ink on newsprint is the 19th century way of sharing the news. Sadly, for all our modern sophistication, the 21st century media has yet to evolve something that can take newspapers’ place.
Perhaps it won’t be one thing. Perhaps there is some new balance between competing sources that may yet emerge and provide us with some clarity and some insight that we need. Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, be aware that whether you’re looking at Fox, CNN or the New York Times, you may be looking at lots of different kinds of materials in the same place. To be a literate consumer, recognize that most media outlets may give you:
Opinion writing. The Gazette has two on-staff opinion writers whose stories are not meant to be objective journalism, but are interpretive. Often, inexperienced readers or student researchers will quote something from, say “The Wall Street Journal,” without realizing they are quoting an opinion writer or columnist, not a news report. When you consume news, understand what you’re looking at.
Inverted pyramid reporting. “Plain vanilla” news stories—most reports of breaking news that you can read either online or in print—use this format. The story starts with a “summary lead,” a first paragraph that states what the latest development is. It then reports information in descending order of importance. One way to know whether you’re reading someone’s interpretation of the news or an actual news report is to be used to seeing and recognizing this story format.
In sum: Newspapers remain, even in 2021, an often important, fundamental part of the news ecosystem. But they are not the central element that they once were.
As with last week, here are some additional posts that cover important newspaper-related topics:
The
Iowa College Media Association award ceremony was both very familiar
and very different this year. It is usually held during the Iowa
Newspaper Association Convention, but this pandemic winter, the ICMA
convention didn’t take place.
Yet, the Thursday night award
ceremony did happen Feb. 18. The ceremony, hosted over zoom, was
different due to the remoteness of online meetings, and also familiar,
with radio awards, TV awards and then “news media” awards, mostly
newspaper categories but some online awards, too.
Mount Mercy
University’s “Mount Mercy Times” won seven awards. In particular,
student Courtney Hoffman, a senior who graduates this year and is
managing editor of the Times, was recognized multiple times. Jada
Veasey, a nursing junior who is our senior opinion editor, also won
several writing awards.
Courtney Hoffman, MMU Times Managing Editor.
The
Times has historically done well in certain categories, and again
showed the general strength of its opinion writing. The Times was
recognized with a first-place award for staff editorials.
The three
submitted were written by Jada Veasey, Courtney Hoffman and Veronica
Jons, although the whole editorial board has a hand in setting staff
positions and crafting editorials. In my opinion, providing a
thoughtful, meaningful voice on policy questions on campus is a key role
of a student newspaper, and the Times excellence in this category is
evidence that it takes that mission seriously and does well in it.
Veronica Jons, editor-in-chief of MMU Times.
Jada
Veasey, who I already mentioned, was honored as the best opinion
columnist in the state of Iowa in the past year. Jada’s humorous,
thoughtful, quirky voice has been a welcome addition to the Times, and
it’s good to see her writing recognized on the state level.
Jada Veasey, senior opinion editor.
The
Times links its web site to blogs written by editors and staff
writers—and two of those won recognition. The best newspaper blog in the
state, according to ICMA, is written by Courtney Hoffman, managing
editor of the Times. The second best is by staff writer Annie Barkalow.
Image of Annie from her blog.
Annie
is a nontraditional age student, and I’m glad that she was able to view the
zoom award ceremony Feb. 18. The next day, she told me that she had
informed her family of her second-place win, and said her teenage
daughter’s reaction was, “mom, it wasn’t first place.” Ouch. In Roman
times, to keep a victorious general from having too much hubris, a slave
would stand with him in his chariot and whisper in his ear that he was
only a flawed human during the general’s victory parade. As a father, I
guess I can see that one’s teen offspring often serve the same purpose.
Well,
congratulations to the talented student journalist who serve an
important role at Mount Mercy by providing the community with a vibrant
student news outlet. MMU would be a poorer place without that.
In addition to the first-place awards, the Times won awards in feature photos, profile story and page one design.
Below is a list of the seven awards won by the MMU
Times, by category. With each is the name of the student or students
from MMU honored in the award, comments on the individual entry from the
contest judges (professional Iowa journalists provided by INA) and, in
some cases, category comments, which were notes from the category judge on the whole let of
entries in that category from all Iowa college newspapers.
Here are the awards the Times won:
Best Feature Photo, Second Place, Mount Mercy University- The Mount Mercy Times Accident Leads Back to School—Hands; Courtney Hoffman Judge’s comment: The portrait of hands clutching a cane powerfully reinforces the message of "true grit." Best Profile Story, Third Place, Mount Mercy University- The Mount Mercy Times Accident Leads Back to School; Courtney Hoffman Judge’s
comment: A nice story that maybe could have used an additional source
or two. I would have liked to have seen the social work get moved up to
the front. Feels like it could have been shorter. Category comment:
Everybody has a story. The winners in this category run the gamut from
people who have an obvious story to people who maybe aren't so obvious.
The key to a good profile is a good interview while multiple sources can
help flesh out a story. There were a lot of one-source stories in this
category.
Best Opinion Writing, First Place, Mount Mercy University- The Mount Mercy Times Opinion Columns by Jada Veasey Judge’s
comment: A refreshing and engaging writing style made these columns
enjoyable to read. The use of analogy and reasoning made them
thought-provoking, as well.
Best Blog, First Place, Mount Mercy University- The Mount Mercy Times Curious Consultations: unsolicited anecdotal advice by Courtney Hoffman Judge’s
comment: Courtney is a conversational and entertaining writer who
brings relatable topics front and center for her college audience. Best Blog, Second Place, Mount Mercy University- The Mount Mercy Times Anne with an E by Annie Barkalow Judge’s
comment: Through her lens as a nontraditional student, Anne brings her
own brand of challenges to the college scene -- and her blog.
Best Staff Editorial(s), First Place, Mount Mercy University- The Mount Mercy Times Mount Mercy Times staff editorials-Jada Veasey, Veronica Jons, Courtney Hoffman Judge’s
comment: The strength of these staff editorials addressing timely,
relevant social issues lay in the numerous examples used to connect them
with the local university culture. The specific recommendations offered
move each piece beyond mere words into action.
Best Page 1, Third Place, Mount Mercy University- The Mount Mercy Times Derecho and President Departs by Veronica Jons Judge’s
comment: Very newsy content. Masthead is too large for the page and
slightly stronger writing might have pushed this into second. Category
comment: Two things—really focus on your local community. The winners
in this category were newspapers that knew their audience and provided
information that audience could only get from them. Look at your
mastheads and how they balance against the news portion of your page.
Watch the use of reverse type, it's hard to read although it can
sometimes be an attractive design option used in serious moderation.
Final
thought: Iowa universities are beset by many challenges, including, at
the state level, a wrong-headed GOP legislature that seems to want to
cure was it perceives as free expression problems on campus by a weird
series of laws that, in effect, would muzzle expression.
Sort of like in
"I Cladius" when the crazy emperor cured a boy's cough by chopping his
head off.
Anyway, the Times, like other student media, stands for free
expression. As another faculty member reminded us at the ICMA awards ceremony, nobody in your audience cares
what you did yesterday, so the challenge is to go out and do it even
better tomorrow. I would add, with courage.
My wish for you (link in case video does not show, it doesn't on my phone but does on computer), MMU student journalists and all Iowa student journalists:
“The post–Gutenberg world was revolutionized by the advent of the printed book.” Understanding the Media, your optional online text, page 89.
Image is 1940s Paperback from Amazon.com. Paperbacks in the 20th century made books less expensive and less durable. Today, books are also available as electronic e-files. But the most long-lasting book format is the so-called "hardback," or book with a hard cover.
(This post is required reading material for CO 140, a class I am teaching this spring, but y'all are invited to read this text for that class for free. You're welcome.)
Books are the first mass medium we turn our attention to because of their foundational nature. By this, I mean both they are the historic root of all mass media, and they still today remain an important foundation of content in the larger media world. Think of how many movies, online or network TV shows, are based on books.
Literature began orally, with poems and plays, but those literary ideas only became fixed when scribes started to, well, scribe. The first books in our culture date to around 3,000 BC, when Egyptians began writing book-length papyrus scrolls. Printing was invented by the Chinese around 700 AD, and in Europe, really took off after Johannes Gutenberg invented moveable type for use on the press in 1488.
Books had originally been hand-written, and when scribes or monks had to transcribe them, they developed into elaborate works of art as well as texts.
But when books became more common, culture was shifted in multiple ways:
Johannes Gutenberg from Wikimedia Commons.
Both the Renaissance and Reformation, revolutions in in knowledge and religions that fueled dramatic social upheavals, were indirectly caused by the spread of subversive ideas in book form.
Our modern sense of “childhood” and “education” are largely tied to a culture that valued literacy, partly for economic reasons. A factory mechanic is a more valuable employee if he can read the manual that came with the steam engine (or, these days, the robot).
While media content comes from many sources, the most recognized media tropes, stereotypes and characters first came to us in book form. Think of “Lord of the Rings” or Harry Potter. These days, nonfiction books still have political influence. As we noted earlier in media history, this country was partly created due to a booklet called “Common Sense.” The Civil War was foreshadowed by the cultural rift exposed in “Uncle Toms Cabin.” Former President Donald Trumps first impeachment was partly the result of the “Mueller Report,” a special counsel government report available in book form.
It is sometimes stated that we live in a “post literate” world—that the educational revolution caused by Gutenberg is being terminated by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, TicToc and YouTube.
That’s bogus, for many reasons. While it’s true that it’s a cultural problem literacy is not as “popular” as it once was—readership of all print media struggle, it’s difficult at Mount Mercy to encourage many people to glance at even brief printed works such as a 6-page edition of “The Mount Mercy Times.” Yet, in my experience, the brightest people I know are all “book” people. Sure, some book readers can be introverted nerds and retreat to books to get away—but think of how book-oriented almost all of your professors are. I grew up in a screen generation too, even if the screen of my youth was the television set. Anybody who has an advanced degree has come to terms with the need to both extract meaning from, and to produce, long text forms.
Even today, several MMU students are “book people,” and mostly they are among the best students I know. To an important degree, anybody seeking a university degree is learning the writing of their chose discipline—and the best and most effective writers are all book readers.
I think many ideas—both fictional and journalistic—are best expressed in book form. Books are a linear text medium that reflects sequential thought. That many people today don’t read means that many people don’t engage in deep thinking, because deep thought is cumulative, orderly, sequential—bookish.
If you want a healthy body, you have to both be lucky—we don’t control our DNA nor our environment—but also exercise and eat right. If you want a healthy brain, you face the same issues. I hope your DNA and the MMU environment foster and improve your thinking ability. But exercising your brain and gaining depth of knowledge still requires that you cultivate that brain by engaging in sustained mental work. In short, read a book.
How to be smart, part 1 of the How to Live series. Be like her. Read. Woman floats in Dead Sea, Wikimedia Commons image by Patrik Neckman.
And books that we enjoyed when we were young often form touchstones of our lives. Just as music we loved as a young adult partly becomes our personal soundtrack, the book you didn't have to read but devoured early in life sticks with you, something I ruminated about in this blog post I wrote in 2015 which is also about "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee.
Over time, I’ve written about books now and then on my blogs. Here is a selection of some past posts:
