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May. 12th, 2007 03:31 pm
magazines, books
I have been obsessively reading the New York Review of Magazines. Which apparently is different from The New York Review of Magazines. I read mostly the stuff on the first link, which has a Magazine Death Pool blog, and reviews of other magazines such as Jane and Wondertime. It also featured a story on the now-defunct IPA, which was the distributor for many indie magazines, who folded in the wake of its bankruptcy. (Kitchen Sink and Clamor shut down because of it.)
Anyway, it's a pretty interesting read (at least for me), but also kind of snarky when they shouldn't be. For example, they bitch about being able to find most of Entertainment Weekly's content online in other forms, and imply that this means that the magazine is probably going to lose circulation over time because their subscribers can get it for free. That's faulty reasoning - a lot of people don't go online in the first place, and it's easy to read a $2 magazine on the train. Magazines are in this weird space right now - there's more and more magazines being launched everyday, but also more folding as they find out that they can't keep up with the Internet or find enough advertisers to support their content. On the flip side, there are some magazines that manage to defy the odds and actually increase circulation and pickup. The recent launches like Good and Geek seem to be doing okay, and magazines have started branding themselves in order to stay in business - such as Readymade and Dwell. It's a trend that I don't like, but which seems inevitable. (I mean, I saw Dwell-branded sheets in freaking Macy's at high-end designer prices - they look nice, but do people actually buy sheets based on a magazine they read?)
Hmm, I just had a thought: magazine publishing industry similar to the garment/sweatshop industry?
I'm still reading A History of God, by Karen Armstrong. I'm almost done with it, but I keep having to stop, because it gets really tedious sometimes. It's not that it's boring or hard to read - it's written in a very familiar tone, but she says the same thing over and over again. I also think she gives way too much credit to Buddhism. (It's not as simple or as bloodless as she seems to think it is.) I don't know how much she studied Buddhism before reading this book, and she doesn't mention it that often, but the implication is that people would be much better off if they approached religion as Buddhists do. It's weird that she keeps interrupting the history of Western conceptions of God with mentions of Buddhism, because it's totally distracting. Other than that, the book itself divides chapters into different conceptions of God - God of the Philosophers, God of the Mystics, etc. And now I'm on the one where maybe God is dead.
Anyway, it's a pretty interesting read (at least for me), but also kind of snarky when they shouldn't be. For example, they bitch about being able to find most of Entertainment Weekly's content online in other forms, and imply that this means that the magazine is probably going to lose circulation over time because their subscribers can get it for free. That's faulty reasoning - a lot of people don't go online in the first place, and it's easy to read a $2 magazine on the train. Magazines are in this weird space right now - there's more and more magazines being launched everyday, but also more folding as they find out that they can't keep up with the Internet or find enough advertisers to support their content. On the flip side, there are some magazines that manage to defy the odds and actually increase circulation and pickup. The recent launches like Good and Geek seem to be doing okay, and magazines have started branding themselves in order to stay in business - such as Readymade and Dwell. It's a trend that I don't like, but which seems inevitable. (I mean, I saw Dwell-branded sheets in freaking Macy's at high-end designer prices - they look nice, but do people actually buy sheets based on a magazine they read?)
Hmm, I just had a thought: magazine publishing industry similar to the garment/sweatshop industry?
I'm still reading A History of God, by Karen Armstrong. I'm almost done with it, but I keep having to stop, because it gets really tedious sometimes. It's not that it's boring or hard to read - it's written in a very familiar tone, but she says the same thing over and over again. I also think she gives way too much credit to Buddhism. (It's not as simple or as bloodless as she seems to think it is.) I don't know how much she studied Buddhism before reading this book, and she doesn't mention it that often, but the implication is that people would be much better off if they approached religion as Buddhists do. It's weird that she keeps interrupting the history of Western conceptions of God with mentions of Buddhism, because it's totally distracting. Other than that, the book itself divides chapters into different conceptions of God - God of the Philosophers, God of the Mystics, etc. And now I'm on the one where maybe God is dead.
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