Week 8

Week 8
(Oct. 18)

The magazine market represents an early example of market fragmentation. Rather than omnibus, general-interest publications of “all the news that’s fit to print” like newspapers, most magazines were and are created to fit a specific, narrow need in the marketplace. Even in this age of electronic “publications,” go to any bookstore (if you can still find one!) or Google “magazine,” and you’ll find hundreds or thousands of special-interest magazines—from American Ferret Farmers and Archery Today to Footwear Daily to the National Russet Potato Journal to Yachting to Zebra Life. This was a print example of the fragmentation/segmentation of the reading audience, which continues today in even greater form on the Web.

So this week we take a look at the evolving role of magazines and specialized publications as part of the larger question of the mass media’s role in your—and our—life.

• Read Folkerts: Ch. 4 “Magazines”
• The State of Magazines, 2009. Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism
• Blog: Read Column: “Press Performance: A Revival Meeting for the Press” by Dr. Ted

• For Fun: Here’s some “convergence”—Stephen Colbert takes over Newsweek magazine for a week (2009). “Why I Took This Crummy Job." Colbert takes over Newsweek’s Letters section.

• Other stuff: Miniature Earth and Social Media Revolution (4 minutes)
• Blogtalk: Weekly comment on the readings, the WORD, or events about the mass media or the press.
• Quiz.

This is a fascinating guy. A professional iconoclast. Talk about a market niche!

Brann’s Newspaper Recipe: “Here is the recipe for making a ‘great daily’; let them who have stomachs for such work apply themselves: a scandal-in-high-life, first-page, double-leaded, screamer head; two or three columns of rocking chair speculation on matters political, Washington datelines; a few bogus or garbled interviews with prominent politicians; a suicide; a scandal-in-lowlife; a thrilling account of an impossible accident in Timbuctoo; report that a million Chinese have been drowned by an overflow of the Hwang-Ho; full and circumstantial report of a sensational divorce trial—not intended for Sunday-school reading; two-column account of a prize fight; a hanging, with all the ghastly details ‘worked up’; two columns of esoteric baseball lingo in which the doughty deeds of ‘Fatty,’ ‘Shorty,’ ‘Squatty,’ ‘Bow-Legged Bill’ and ‘Short-Stop Sam’ are painted in wonderful chiar-oscuro; account of the elopement of a society belle with a negro coachman; heavy editorial on the ‘Power of the Press’; more editorial inanity and offensive self-glorification; a pimping ‘personal’ column’ two columns of murdered men and English language; more toothsome scandal; market reports to mislead the country merchant; budget of foreign news—manufactured in New York; interesting case of ministerial crim. con.; advertisements of quack doctors, lost manhood restorers, syphilitic nostrums, preventative pills, and other things calculated to set the cheek of modesty aflame; local miscellany; police court reports and taffy in solid slugs. Jam to a mux and serve hot. Price, 5 cents. Now is the time to subscribe.”

—William Cowper Brann (1855-1898), the “American Carlyle,” editor of The Iconoclast,
briefly the country’s most controversial magazine, with a national circulation
of a quarter-million. An enraged reader shot and, er, “edited” Brann
on the streets of Waco, Texas, on April Fool's Day, 1898.

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