So Where Have They Gone?

Yesterday's New York Times ran a piece by Alexandra Jacobs asking, Where have the magazines gone? I could have written the first two paragraphs myself:

I miss magazines. It’s a strange ache, because they are still sort of with us: staring out from the racks at supermarket checkout lines; fanned wanly around the table in hotel lobbies; showing up in your mailbox long after the subscription was canceled, like an ex who refuses to accept the breakup.

But they’re also disappearing. This accelerating erosion has not been big news during a time of pandemic, war and actual erosion, and yet the absence of magazines authoritatively documenting such events, or distracting from them, as they used to do with measured regularity, is keenly felt.

So sad, so true... Reading the story made me feel worse, lessened slightly by knowing someone else feels the pain. I've loved magazines as long as I can remember, way before they ever became my work. 

The world came in the door via Life magazine. 

I would carefully read my much older sister's copies of Seventeen when she was out of the house. She was 16; I was 7. 

A few years later I impatiently waited for THE DAY Glamour appeared on the rack at the drugstore (as noted in every issue) and plunk down my 35 cents for it, never becoming a subscriber lest it be delivered even one day later.

I can't remember much about the kids, but I loved reading the New Yorker when I babysat for the family down the street, east coast transplants obviously missing civilization.

One summer I took the ferry to Boston from my job in Provincetown, specifically to buy a copy of the latest Vogue Knitting. I had to beg for a room at the YWCA as I hadn't brought enough money to spend the night. 

Occasionally I bought a copy of French Elle at the foreign newsstand in downtown Cleveland, way before Elle had an American presence. It was $5, equal to almost $50 today. 

Faithful readers of the blog will recognize these stories. Reading Jacobs' piece churned them up in a wellspring of soggy memory.

Then came 38 years of my life in magazines. I could count on one hand the days I didn't want to go to work, and those were probably weather-related. I left in 2003, before the party ended, sorry to go but in retrospect happy to have missed the dimming of the lights.

My last fifteen—and possibly best—years were at Woman's Day. It was a sisterhood (with a few empathetic men) of many ages and backgrounds, all creating something we believed in. Money was never the sole reason to work in magazines. There were other rewards—personal accomplishment, lifetime friendships, free beauty and fashion advice, books on the giveaway table, always someone with an ear for a problem or to weigh in on an idea.

Back then one couldn't walk down a street in midtown Manhattan without running into a magazine stand. New magazines came out right and left. For a while I bought the premier copies. Anyone want a first edition of People, Mia Farrow on the cover?

How many are still publishing?

The magazines I still subscribe to are getting so thin they could probably skip the mailbox and slip through the crack in the door. I won't go into whether magazines are relevant or not. Of course they are no longer timely, not with instant everything on the device you are using to read this. Magazines always had a point of view; that's why you read the ones you did. Now being opinionated has ramifications. Yes, there's so much "we" (and I use that as someone guilty by association) could have done better in terms of equality and diversity. Naivety is not a very good excuse.

If magazines disappear, what will the writers of ransom notes do? What will become of mood boards? Magazine holders? The pandemic has already cleared periodicals from doctors' offices. Whatever the reasons for their demise, be it momentary or permanent, they will forever be a part of me. 

A good sign, available on Amazon