the week, the magazine
Posted by jonathan - 03/02/08 at 04:02:39 pm
In my house growing up we always had stacks on magazines laying around. To this day they remain a favored form of reading for their physicality, take anywhereness and adhd-friendly length. Back on the ranch, located in a 1950s era subdivision bedroom community on the poor side of a rich neighborhood in northern NJ, the pile included the usual fare, Newsweek and The New Yorker, but toppled over by the oddly shaped Foreign Affairs and slid sideways by Psychology Today and the Atlantic Monthly.
My circle of friends parents in high school never strayed from Time, Newsweek and the New Yorker. When I moved down south and met an intellectual southern bell I remember being surprised by her large rack … of US News & World Reports. While this mag is common, it was this encounter which started my accounting people’s magazine preferences, started my exploration of different genres such as the Southern Review and started my periodic grilling of friends and acquaintances always in a quest for fresh material.
Moving from the deep south to just below the the mason-dixon line, I wound up working for a now defunked, victim of time-warner-AOL web 1.0 accounting shenanigans, called enews.com (to this day I don’t trust AOL). What did we do but sell magazine subscriptions. I worked on a cool project to bring magazine subscription buying to the point-of-purchase at Barnes & Noble stores. Unfortunately, changing consumer behavior takes an awfully long time and the hissing sound of the balloon bubble deflating could be heard as the company postponed the ipo and eventually I was the 4th to last person closing the company. During this time, in the nations capital, my reads were fast company, wired, the economist, and my favorite of the time, the industry standard.
The economist fell off the list one for its sheer density, often taking me every commute for a week to digest, but mostly for its deadly boringness. The dismal science, which I studied in school only to drop in favor technology, read that way. Its lack of diversity on position, free-markets will save the world, made me realize I knew the conclusion of the article before I read it.
The industry standard was an interesting if tragic story which my young twenty something colleagues probably know nothing about. This magazine ballooned to 200 pages an issue of ad-bloated self referential material about the next big thing and the money train it rode on. I loved it! This continuous circular references documenting the hunt for vc money and the it way to make it, social networks for example have been well documented on the web 2.0 spaces such as technorati, mashable, read/write/web, gigaom which have all fallen off my rss feed. Luckily they have much lower operating costs which will keep them alive.
The only mag-rag from this era that remains on my reading list is wired which while on hiatus for a few years remains positioned on the forefront of cool ground breaking, potentially life changing technology which I often read about in more main stream publications months later as the ideas move into the more tangible everyday landscape, marked by technology sections in major newspapers and websites.
My current list of magazines is:
- Wired
- New York
- Business week
- The Week
All this blah blah blah to get to my point. My good buddy, Mark Malseed, a co-author on The Google Story, partner in ohmygov and consultant on chacha spoke highly of a magazine The Week, which my dad ended up without prior knowledge purchasing for me. This is a meta magazine, aggregating news sources in a format I have never seen before but I sense will be copied in the future. Unlike the natural tenancy to limit your sources to reinforce your given opinions online, this magazine gives a nice quick 40 or less page summary of news events I find refreshing, balanced and sufficiently global. It seems to fit the independent nature of todays modern voter. If you have not picked it up yet you should give it a try.
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