Posts tagged magazines
The 2013 Utne Media Awards
2013 marks a new chapter in the 24-year history of the Utne Readerstaff recognizing and celebrating the best of what we read. Formerly called the Utne Independent Press Awards, we’ve decided to contemporize the name and call them the Utne Media Awards.
Considering the wealth of amazing new ideas, exceptional writing, and outstanding journalism taking place on the internet, we think it’s time the name of the award encompass every form of mass communication we come across each day from longform print journalism to video blogs. While we still love and will always celebrate the printed word, we’d be remiss not to recognize the democratization of information made possible by the internet. We think emphasizing the broad term “media” allows us to appropriately consider and recognize all of the ways people communicate with one another in the 21st century.
- YES! Magazine for General Excellence
- The New Inquiry for Best Writing
- Tom Dispatch for Best Political Coverage
- Colossal for Best Arts Coverage
- Guernica for Best Social/Cultural Coverage
- New Internationalist for Best International Coverage
- High Country News for Best Environmental Coverage
- Tricycle for Best Body/Spirit Coverage
- Scientific American for Best Science/Technology Coverage
See here for descriptions of the winners.
See here for the full list of nominees.
FJP: An interesting mix. Agree/Disagree or have some favorites of your own in any category? Let us know.
Swallow Mag Brings Scratch and Sniff to Mexico City Issue
Swallow has devoted its third issue to our beloved Mexico City, as reported by The New York Times’s Maria Newman in a short introductory blog post.
What is remarkable about this issue, though, apart from the stunning and jaw-dropping photography, is a strange new feature that, in our view, exponentiates the scope of basic written storytelling:
“A scratch-and-sniff feature that brings you the smells of the sprawling metropolis”.
Delicious, or maybe not, depending on your sensibility towards all things chilango. Yet, we kind of wonder if this trend-setting feature will eventually embody the future of travel writing/reporting for print publications; a disruptive device
hardimpossible to find in digital publications.Here is the rationale behind that editorial decision:
This time, said James Casey, the magazine’s editor, they decided to include the ambitious olfactory project, put together by Sissel Tolaas, a fragrance expert and artist. Mr. Casey had reached out to Ms. Tolaas after he heard of a project she had done that reproduced the smells from 200 Mexico City neighborhoods.
This issue of Swallow includes 20 scratch-and-sniff stickers throughout that are imbued with the aromas of one of the city’s many colonias, or neighborhoods. (Reproducing the smells in the magazine was a complex undertaking for their printers in Singapore, and is partly the reason it took more than a year to publish.) Not all of the odors are pleasant.
FJP: We can only hope that our fellow Chilanga-in-Portland is not the only one left awestruck:
I knew the Mexico City issue of @swallowmagazine would be unlike anything else out there but I had no idea… Scratch and Sniff? #kickass
— Catherine Manterola (@ManterolaPDX)Images: Assorted local snacks, candies, and pastries. Partial screenshots of Swallow Magazine’s piece on Mexico City’s supermarkets.
FJP: Never underestimate the power of scratch and sniff.
A magazine article is like a strip tease. Whereas a newspaper article is like being flashed on the subway.
No Sleep ‘Til Fairbanks
A few weeks ago EJ Fox wrote a piece for us exploring longform storytelling and adopting magazine experiences for the Web.
In it, he discusses how JavaScript and CSS techniques can introduce full screen images and video, parallax effects and responsive design to amplify and support storytelling.
Importantly, he also writes about how producers of these longform pieces must break out from the templates and general style guides that control the rest of their sites.
SBNation’s coverage of the Yukon Quest Race is a great, new example of harnessing these techniques. Created with Vox Media, it’s an elegant display of wrapping a 5,500-word longread in a delightful presentation package.
Check it: SBNation, No Sleep ‘Til Fairbanks.
If advertising is meant to be aspirational, these ads [in men’s magazines] are presenting a pretty sad version of what American men can aspire to be. And advertisers aren’t selling this hyper-masculine ideal to just any man: They’re specifically targeting the younger, poorer, less-educated guys in the supermarket aisle. In the latest issue of the journal Sex Roles, a trio of psychologists at the University of Manitoba analyzed the advertising images in a slate of magazines targeted at men, from Fortune to Field and Stream. They counted up the ads that depict men as violent, calloused, tough, dangerous, and sexually aggressive—what the researchers call “hyper-masculine”—then indexed them with the magazine’s target demographics. Hyper-masculine images, the researchers found, are more likely to be sold to adolescents, who find higher “peer group support” for manly-man behaviors. They’re also sold to working-class men, who are “embedded in enduring social and economic structures in which they experience powerlessness and lack of access to resources” like political power, social respect, and wealth, and so turn to more widely accessible measures of masculine worth—like “physical strength and aggression.
90 Years of TIME Magazine Covers in 120 Seconds
Are we witnessing the rise of the artisanal magazine?
Jason Diamond writes in Flavorwire:
Observe The Travel Almanac selling out, and Kindling Quarterly, described as an “exploration of fatherhood through essays, interviews, editorials, art, and photography,” getting written up by The New York Times as examples of this crop of sleek new magazines aimed at niche readerships. David Michael Perez, one of Kindling Quarterly’s founders, told the Times that he believes his magazine (which retails at $14 an issue) is a good business model that he and his business partner, August Heffner, jumpstarted using personal funds. There’s the Canadian menswear magazine Inventory, which retails for $20 in the States, and Babes Quarterly is billed as “a modernized version of the classic 1950’s and 60’s pocket men’s magazine” that is “designed to a creative, babe loving guy in all of us.” These magazines are also thinking of new ways to promote their product, and also new ways of doing business overall. The Portland magazine Kinfolk explicitly states on its website that it is a “collectable print magazine” aimed at growing a “readership of young artists and food enthusiasts by focusing on simple ways to spend time together.” The Chicagoan, a Jazz Age Windy City magazine that was relaunched in 2012 by Stop Smiling publisher J.C. Gabel, says it has “embraced the vintage newsstand as a metaphor to bolster our message of substance and style” by setting up pop-up newsstands throughout the Chicagoland area meant to function “much like food trucks.” The Toronto fashion journal Worn comes out biannually, with a stated mission “[t]o show a wide range of beauty, one that includes diversity of culture, subculture, gender identification, sexuality, size, race, ability, and age,” as well as “To answer, always and above all, to our readers and not our advertisers.”
FJP: The pop-up newsstand food truck idea is brilliant. Could serve sandwiches and coffee too.
The Magazine Experience on the Web
Over on theFJP.org, EJ Fox explores how news organizations are taking advantage of responsive design, CSS and JavaScript techniques not just to make things pretty, but to better tell their stories.
For example, he takes a look at the New York Times’ recent and well regarded Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek. As he explores its presentation, he writes:
- Its graphics and videos stretch to fill the entire browser window, an emerging design trend that is the true successor of the magazine’s full-bleed photos. The Times shows that when you elevate beautiful art that’s telling the story in a seamless way, it becomes greater than the sum of it’s parts. Compare to a similar NYT story where pictures are included with the story, but certainly not featured with any love.
- It’s not confined to the style of the rest of the NYT site, which is for the most part a static 975px width. Some of the impact of full-bleed pieces like Snow Fall comes from the contrast between those special features and the whitespace of the primary site. It’s a clue to the user to dig in, and that something special is going to happen.
Read through for the rest, including how Web presentation and storytelling design affected EJ’s reporting on Occupy Oakland.
You can follow EJ on Tumblr at Pseudo Placebo. On Twitter he’s @mrejfox.
Image: Screenshot, Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, via the New York Times. Select to embiggen.
Athletes Recreating Iconic Album Covers
As ESPN The Magazine’s music issue hits the stands they’ve recreated old album covers with current day athletes.
Here we have:
- Motorcross’ James Stewart as Rick James.
- Nascar’s Jimmie Johnson as Bob Dylan.
- MLB baseball players as Devo.
- NFL football players as Run DMC.
Click through for slideshows of each photo shoot. Select to embiggen.
How to Relaunch a 98 Year Old Magazine: Think of it as a Start-Up
“It felt like for the past 10 years, the magazine was just trying to stay afloat,” he said. “There were real limits on our ambitions.”
Sitting in the K Street offices that The New Republic is renting until it relocates to a space above the International Spy Museum, Mr. Foer said that Mr. Hughes had energized the magazine. “He really thinks of it as a start-up, and that’s exhilarating,” he said. On Monday, readers will be able to see the fruits of Mr. Hughes’s investment for the first time when The New Republic unveils its redesigned print magazine, Web site and app.
How to Staff for Social Media
Mark Golin, Editorial Director of Digital for Time Inc.’s Style & Entertainment and Lifestyle Groups, discusses the social phenomenon of people relying on networks such as Twitter and Facebook as their primary news source.
In order to harness these platforms successfully, Golin explains how magazines must carefully staff social media positions with people who have a particular skill set that is not unlike what we look for in editors. In order to engage users successfully, Golin believes that a unique voice is needed on each platform, and the style and sensibility required of social media editors is something that can — in most cases — be learned and practiced.
Visit the theFJP.org to see more videos with Mark.
#BuhBye
Understanding People: A Publication’s Content Strategy
New on theFJP.org:
Mark Golin, Editorial Director of Digital for Time Inc.’s Style & Entertainment and Lifestyle Groups, talks about People Magazine’s online content strategy.
Much of People’s digital success is due to a digital strategy that creates specific content for each of its platforms based on the expected user experience and engagement of readers on them.
For example, Golin explains, People Magazine promotes a lean-back experience that allows for longer, human interest stories. Meanwhile, visitors to People.com are often at work and multitasking, so shorter, more celebrity-focused content works better.
People’s success, then, comes from optimizing a content strategy for each platform — longer, slower content in the magazine, and shorter, eye-catching headlines online. The division of content offered on each platform therefore needs to be considerate of how readers will be consuming it.
It has long been said that digital platforms work best when content is created specifically for them, rather than simply repurposed from one medium to another. In other words, content should be, feel and act “native” to the platform it’s being delivered through. The People strategy Mark discusses is based on understanding user engagement.
For more thoughts from Mark Golin see here.
To explore more FJP videos on technology, journalism, education, and business visit theFJP.org.
A Chronology of Magazines Transitioning from Print to Digital
Latest on theFJP.org:
Mark Golin, Editorial Director of Digital for Time Inc.’s Style & Entertainment and Lifestyle Groups, walks us through the developmental stages of magazines’ journey from print to digital. Likening the story to that of a growing person, Golin explains how–and why–magazine editors and publishers were so reluctant to post their precious print content on the internet.
This, he says, was the infancy of digital magazines. Moving into childhood meant being more open to posting more and more content online, which did happen, though that content was often selected from the editorial dustbin. Today, we’re living through the growing pains digital magazine adolescence.
Print and digital experiences work well together but there are a few more life lessons left to learn before we’re legal.
See more FJP interviews here.
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