Earlier this year, Esquire ran a wonderful ad campaign propounding the virtues of magazines. The tagline was, ‘We surf the internet. We swim in magazines.’
This articulated for me something I had long felt in my gut but had never been able to define. And it got me thinking about the difference between reading an article online and in a magazine.
There is something superficial about the way we read online. Because there is an endless supply of stories, and they're usually free, we tend to read one and then move on to the next right away. We gobble them. It's a kind of intellectual gluttony and attention deficit disorder rolled into one.
Magazines, on the other hand, are more leisurely. This is especially true of a magazine like Esquire, which is monthly and text heavy. A monthly magazine allows you – forces you – to read and then pause and reflect on what you have read while you wait for the next issue. If you’re like me, a magazine probably sits on your coffee table for weeks or months afterwards, and you might even pick it up again to scan for anything you missed the first time around, or to revisit a story or a particularly memorable line.
It is this reflection, I believe, that is too often missing from the public consciousness. Gone are the days when a story by a journalist such as Hunter S. Thompson could resonate long enough to change minds. The modern news cycle is now so hectic that being first is more important than being accurate or thoughtful. Analytical pieces tend to be ill-informed, shoot-from-the-hip preachments based on gut reaction, not well-researched distillations of the issues at hand. There just isn’t time for anything else.
My wife and I have a running joke. When I’m reading Esquire, she’ll point to the box-outs or panels on an otherwise text-laden spread and say, “You can read that bit and that bit.” The inference is that the enormous banks of text are too taxing to bother with. It’s funny, of course, but it also represents an attitude that has darkened publishing like a solar eclipse. As the old saying goes, many a truth has been spoken in jest – and for me that joke delineates the intellectual indolence that has flourished during the internet age. If it can’t be communicated in a hundred words or less, it’s not worth listening to.
Part of the problem stems from the publishing establishment. During the late 1990s and the 2000s, so-called experts began telling the proprietors of newspapers and magazines that they had to be more like the internet or risk becoming outmoded in the space of a few years. Disappointingly, publishers (many of whom had business, not creative, backgrounds) believed this twaddle and put pressure on editors to do something about it. Trying to beat the internet at its own game was always going to fail. Countless magazines have hit the wall in the past 10 or 15 years as a result.
The magazines that survived and thrived – like Esquire – are the ones that gave their readers something to swim in. It’s much harder for newspapers to provide a swimming environment, which probably explains their continuing decline. Daily newspapers were the internet before the internet: inherently disposable, designed to be quickly read, absorbed and then cast aside.
There is something wholesome about taking an hour to read a single magazine article and then spending another hour pondering its significance or its author’s use of letters. It’s the same thing in the world of fiction: reading a novel like The Grapes of Wrath or To Kill a Mockingbird is nutrition for the brain, while a book by the likes of James Patterson (with its one-page ‘chapters’, total lack of depth, and insipid use of language) is the worst kind of junk food – empty calories.
Thank God for those editors – of the book and magazine variety – who refuse to dumb down or pare back their products to appease some bean counter or marketing twerp. They represent a circle of wagons defending against the poison of greed, censorship, political correctness and intellectual envy. They allow society to take a long hard look in the mirror, instead of a quick glance in sketchy light that leads to a false self-image.