Dr. Miranda Melcher (3:34)

Obviously, there's a lot of things I could ask you about magazines from the book, but I think we're probably going to go roughly chronologically to try and create some sort of structure here. So starting kind of way back in the creation of magazines, which, to be honest, is sort of less way back than I expected. I guess I had sort of conflated newspapers and magazines a little bit in my head. But magazines are, as you talk about, kind of much newer and have played a different role. And one of the roles that you talk about in the early history of magazines in the United States is the role they played in cementing class culture. Can you tell us about this early aspect of magazines?

Geoff Jarvis (4:15)

Yes, and I'll actually go back even a little farther to Addison and Steele and the Tatler and Spectator and their role in coffeehouse culture in England. Jurgen Habermas famously argues that's where we saw the birth of the public sphere. Many argue. I argue as well, but it was a fascinating time because the magazine was part of conversation. It was part of opening up culture in England. In Britain, where people came into coffee houses who were not used to sitting next to each other and what they discussed was in the magazine, and then what they discussed became part of the magazine. And that we would call it today, feedback loop, was part of establishing a culture that, again, Habermas gave great importance to. Then we come to the US and we see Benjamin Franklin try to start a magazine and Webster try to start a magazine. And it was very difficult. The businesses failed, and their goal was still conversational. They wanted to have Other voices, they begged people to write for their magazines so that they could establish national discourse in the United States. And I think that was an important ambition, to establish the nation, to establish our language distinct from yours, and to establish a place for thought and science and interest. So that's the great beginnings of the magazine. What I saw then happened was in 1850 something changed. And this was because of the mechanization and industrialization of print, that is to say, steam powered rotary presses and eventually the Linotype too, but not yet. There was, and also, by the way, cheap paper in the 1840s that was now made from wood pulp, not just expensive fiber. Now we saw an expansion, an explosion of publishing in periodical press in the US There was so much stuff, so much good stuff, so much bad stuff too. But the point was to say, how do we curate the best of this? So Harper's magazine started in 1850 with an explicitly curatorial mission, saying we want to find the best of periodical literature and bring it to all of America. And I think that too was a defining moment in deciding that there was high culture and opinion and commentary and again science and progress that was being expressed in this still new medium of magazines and periodicals. And by the way, parenthetically, I'm working on another book about the Internet. And I'm dreaming of having a Harper's of 1850 for today. Something that would come along in and discover and support and recommend voices of quality and authority and expertise and interest in the vast new abundance of speech that we have online, rather than concentrating all our efforts on playing whack a mole with the bad stuff. Now, Harper's of course, changed its mission as it went along. It wrote its own content, it's found its own contributors, it had its own voices, it had its own high level editors, and. And it became part of a higher level view of culture. Finally, to your question, and Harper's and Atlantic and Scientific American and other magazines like this Century were, I think, efforts to establish the idea of American culture.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (8:05)

Absolutely fascinating. I certainly learned that from the book. That wasn't something I had previously been aware of. On the other hand, there is an aspect about magazines that I certainly knew was a thing. More recently, I hadn't really realized quite how far back it went. Despite the magazines having such an impact on culture and behavior, they weren't exactly a good business right at first. How did that change? How did magazines become not just culturally important, but a decent business idea?

Geoff Jarvis (8:37)

They were terrible business. Benjamin Franklin and Webster ended up in tears trying to start their magazines. Many Started, many died. To this day, there's all kinds of magazines that are thrown against the wall that fail. So I guess it's a consistency through time. Two things happened that made a difference. One, again, is the scale that came to publishing let magazines be so much bigger. But the other thing that I think that really marks an important moment that I came across in researching this book was Frank Muncie, who had an eponymous magazine called Muncies that was not doing terribly well like other magazines. And he was charging, I can't remember, 25 cents, 35 cents for it, which was the price for most magazines. And he decided one day that he was going to charge a dime for it. The distributors wouldn't let him because their share wouldn't have been that big. But he tried to go out on his own and that forced them into his corner and they finally said, okay, so he produced his magazine at a dime at 10 cents, and. And he lost money on every copy sold. How did he make money? Obviously, advertising. And thus was born the business model that has established magazines and all of mass media ever since 1893. I mark as the. As the real birth of mass media, something that in the long run, I lament because I think that treating us all as a mass is fundamentally an insult. And we're trying to break free of that now with the Internet, when we have all our own voices. Nonetheless, that business model supported a hell of a lot of culture and free content in magazines, in television, in radio, and so on. And so I think it's important. It's also important to look at how that had an impact on the view of the audience, that the audience was now a commodity to be bought and sold. And it was the beginnings of the attention economy. That economy, again, I think, corrupts the Internet today. I think it causes a problem because everybody does click bait and things that are aimed at search engine optimization and shares and links and likes, rather than that kind of early voice of the magazine, which was about sitting back. To look at these earlier magazines is amazing because one could sit back and it was one's reading for the month, and we've lost that. I hope we can regain that.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (11:08)

Thank you for taking us through that again. The idea of buying things for dimes is strange in and of itself, but understanding, as you said, the continuity through time on the business side of things, there's also a legal element I learned from the book. Can you tell us about how copyright law, or the lack thereof, has shaped the content of magazines through the time period?

Geoff Jarvis (11:32)

Yes. In the earliest renditions of copyright. It's fascinating to me, and this is in another book that I've written called the Gutenberg Parenthesis. I didn't realize that from 1450 with Gutenberg, a business model for print did not fully arrive until 1710. The statute of Anne in Britain once again. And I also didn't realize that copyright was created not to protect authors and creators. It was created to establish a marketplace with creativity and conversation as a tradable asset. Now, copyright did not originally cover news and newspapers and magazines. Also, copyright was not international. In the case of the US and further, there was almost an ethic of sharing in the early days. In the early days of the United States, the postal service allowed newspaper publishers to share copies of their newspapers with other newspapers for free. And there were people employed at the newspapers in the job title honest to God of scissors editor. They cut up things out of other publications to put in their newspaper and fill their newspaper. And this was really the first national network before wire services. And it was done with, with a policy goal of bringing the nation together in our huge and vast space that we have over here. So come magazines. That ethic carried over and people reflexively wanted to again, in the curatorial reflex, wanted to pull out the best that they saw and copy them into the magazine and then redistribute them. And some objected in the long run and some in the end pushed for more copyright so that that couldn't happen. But I think it was an important time. You caught on something important here is that before copyright covered everything and now we think it covers just every utterance we have on earth. The ability to share things without worrying about copyright enabled magazines to grow in their early days. And I think it was very important to their development.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (13:54)

So if we've laid out sort of some of the things that allowed magazines to develop in terms of business, in terms of law, in terms of kind of cultural consciousness and how audiences reacted. What kinds of factors are we talking about when we try and understand what modern consumer magazines look like?

Geoff Jarvis (14:13)

There's so many. I think one is typographical. Newspapers were gray fields of type, all small type, six point type. The New York Tribune refused large advertising because they thought it was unfair to the small advertisers. So even the ads were filled with small type. And then along came magazines and there was space to breathe. And there were also the beginnings of national markets and national marketers with national brands. And so someone would buy a page of the magazine and have the space there and typography changed. Larger type Bigger splash, white space. The kind of. I consider it almost the invention of the idea of white space. Because it would have seemed to have been such a waste before. But now, again, with cheaper paper and larger audiences and advertisers paying, the aesthetics of the magazine changed radically there. And of course, in this stage, there were illustrations going back to Gutenberg. The history of print is not just the history of text. It is also the history of image. And there were illustrations in the magazines, but then came the camera. One of my favorite stories from the period is that when Lincoln was shot in Washington in the United States, Harpers sent illustrators down to Washington so they could illustrate the scene in what we would now call breaking news. Oftentimes, after the telegraph came along, an illustrator on the scene would draw an illustration and then telegraph back instructions for how to copy that illustration to an illustrator in New York, who would copy it down and then engrave it. Come the camera, of course, things changed considerably. And I think it's at that moment that magazines took on the aesthetic of the photographic image as central to it. When I left newspapers to go to magazines at Time, Inc. I was shocked when I saw a really good story, well written by another writer, die and not get published because the photos were no good. Photos became essential to what a magazine is. And so I think that aesthetic is also critical to what magazines became. And finally, there's also the paper itself. You know, I was fascinated in the first paragraph of the book, trying to figure out what makes a magazine as an object, different. Right. And one. The first thing that occurs to you, to me, is the paper. Newspaper pulp is coarse and cheap. Books are, one hopes, printed on fine stock. That one could imagine the bite of the press cutting into magazine stock is slick. And my favorite aside in the whole project was to learn that what makes magazine paper slick is a mineral called kaolin, much of which is mined in Georgia and the United States. And that's what makes the paper smooth. So that ink will stay on type and colors will be on top. And colors will be. Will remain vibrant. But also, cowlin is vaguely radioactive. That is to say that magazines have a half life, which I think is unfortunately appropriate.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (17:42)

I think we'll get into that half life going forward. But that is quite an interesting thing to learn, given all of these differences. And I agree that kind of paper is the one that I immediately think of. Magazines obviously have quite different things that go into them to physically make them. And therefore kind of have at least one obvious reason for something of a different business model than a Newspaper, in addition to the content being different, what was and to what extent is it still the business model for this kind of glossy, big type, photographically focused consumer magazine?

Geoff Jarvis (18:19)

My first answer is branding. That's a word that I think is overused these days when human beings become brands. But establishing the magazine as an environment to establish the value of a brand, I think became critical. And it was soaps and shaving creams and biscuits and other things that were the first national brands that were built there. And one again, this goes back to Frank Muncie. You're selling the audience, the product, the magazine at a loss so that you can sell the audience's attention to the advertiser. And interestingly, there are differences across the world in different markets. We have tremendous discounting of magazines here in the United States and long have. The standard subscription rate for many magazines in the US for many years is basically a dollar an issue, but it could cost five or six dollars per issue to print and distribute it. Again, we lost money on every issue. We made it up on advertising. The other part of this is what I call the myth of mass media, that the presumption of print, especially magazines, was that all readers see all ads. So we charge all advertisers for all readers. That is to say that when you bought a magazine, the presumption of the publisher to the advertiser was everyone looked through carefully, every page and your ad had value. And thus I can sell all the readers to all the advertisers. Of course, the Internet killed that because no one looks at every page of the Guardian. You only look at the pages you look at, and the advertiser only pays for the pages that someone sees. So it ruined the model for us. But it was a beautiful model for a long time that we could sell attention, we could sell brand, we could sell environment. These are rather crass terms, but this is how magazines made their fortunes. They were houses built out of hype and it worked very well.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (20:36)

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Geoff Jarvis (21:06)

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Dr. Miranda Melcher (21:35)

Not so much anymore. What was the beginning of the end of the era of this kind of mass consumer magazine?

Geoff Jarvis (21:45)

So in the book, I somewhat egotistically say that I was there at the moment, the beginning of the end. At least I got to witness part of it. I work for People magazine. I was the TV critic there. And it was not a hard job to be editor of People magazine. It was highly successful and filled with celebrity, obviously. And when there was a top TV show or a top movie, put the stars of it on the COVID and it sold well. And then one day, I remember Pat Ryan, who was my. Who was the editor of the magazine and my mentor there, she'd gotten the latest sales report from newsstands. And by the way, subscription matters to magazines, but especially at a magazine like People, newsstand was everything. Getting something that was going to draw attention on the newsstand, get people to pick up a copy on impulse, was. Was the profit of the magazine. So she'd had, I forget whether it was Dallas or Dynasty on the COVID and it didn't sell well. And she screamed down the hall at me, TV's dead. Jarvis is dead. Because I was the TV critic. And so she blamed me for that. But something important was happening at that moment, which was that technology was changing and we were getting VCRs and cable and other technologies that came along. And in the view of the entertainment industry and media industries, this fragmented the audience. In the view of the audience, it was great. We had more choice. But the control over that audience changed. And interestingly, I think the power balance changed too. Whereas the magazine used to hold access to the audience as its power, now PR people had access to the stars that would sell on the covers, that would make the business. And so we had to beg stars to do interviews rather than offer them and so on. And as I witness this, I realized that there was a fundamental change. And this is how I came up with the idea of Entertainment Weekly magazine, which I launched in the US At Time Inc. Because I realized that we had a new abundance of choice and we needed help to decide how to spend our time and money on this great new wealth that we had before us. And so in that sense, Entertainment Weekly was born out of that single day when Pat Ryan yelled at me, at people, and I saw a shift in the consumer marketplace around media. Now, if I would not start Entertainment Weekly today, because we have things like Rotten Tomatoes and we have Reddit, we have lots of people where places where people can express their opinions and share criticism, and we have podcasts like this. So we didn't really need it. But for a time, when the marketplace of media changed, there was a need and an opportunity that I was lucky enough to see.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (24:45)

So this, I mean, I get the point about sort of egotisticalness, but also, you know, it makes for a good dramatic moment in a book. And I think it's kind of a good insight into what this shift has looked like. I think it's probably not at all controversial to say that the Internet has challenged magazines. I think there's a lot more debate about how, why, what is kind of, you know, there seem to be multiple things happening. What are the things to really focus on? What do you think was or is the biggest challenge that the Internet presents to magazines?

Geoff Jarvis (25:21)

It's a wonderful question. I think I'm not going to pick one. I think that first, the challenge was simply that we have an abundance of content now, and content was scarce. It was special. Writing was special. AI is going to show us very soon that content is a commodity and writing isn't so special. But magazines in their time were the place to find something that you spent time with. And the place to summarize the week at News Weekly is like Time and Newsweek, and we just don't need that anymore. And there's plenty of opportunity for interesting stories and hot takes and opinions everywhere. So I think that the Internet challenged magazines first in commodifying this idea of content. Second, as I, as I alluded to earlier, the Internet challenged magazines because advertising did not necessarily need to appear in an environment. Along comes the Internet. And not just that there's an abundance of places to put ads everywhere, but also now there's technology, programmatic advertising, it's called, and retargeting. This is the reason why when you look at a pair of boots online, those damn boots will follow you all around the Internet everywhere for the next six weeks, even if you bought them, because there's data about you as a boot interested consumer, and that data is more valuable than the environment that magazines used to provide. You don't need to put your boot ad in Vogue if they're fashionable or in outside magazine if they're for roughing it. Instead, you can put your ad anywhere on the whole Internet, as long as you have the data that that consumer has interest in boots. So that robbed magazines of the opportunity, I think, to say that you had to advertise in them because it was the place to advertise because. Because our brand, the magazine's brand, will rub off on you as a fashion advertiser. You put something in Vogue because you want to say you are worthy of Vogue. Whether or not Vogue picks you or not, Nana Wintour picks you or not, you're inside Vogue and that means something. And Vogue established the fashion and culture of the country. And now we have young people on Instagram and TikTok establishing fashion trends on their own, not being handed down. So that's the next one. Finally, I think that what hurt magazines was that they didn't realize the value of community, and they should have.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (28:14)

Okay, let's poke into that one a little bit more. Magazines as community is not necessarily how we might immediately think of magazines. In fact, going back to what you were saying right at the beginning, the pounds of them and the feeling them when you get home like, oh, look at my hoard, look at my booty, is that magazines are often thought of as objects, not communities. Why is it a problem if magazines are thought of as objects?

Geoff Jarvis (28:41)

That's the irony of writing this for a series called Object Lessons, where I think that in the end that is the death of magazines, that they valued too much. Putting out this thing that is bounded by covers and has content in it to even imagine the idea of content is a Gutenberg era notion. It's that which fills something. And so I think magazines lost a beat here where if they had seen themselves instead as gatherers of communities, I think they could have won the Internet. If they'd seen themselves as maypoles around which people dance when they share an interest, a circumstance, taste, mission, any of those things, then magazines could have seen that, yes, content is a tool that we have, it's a benefit that we have. But we can do other things as well. We can convene people together to talk. We can connect people with each other, with journalists, with experts. We can make movements happen. We can bring empathy to people and make strangers less strange. Magazines could have done so much. I think they could have invented AOL and Twitter and Facebook in a sense, but instead they saw themselves as publishers of this thing called a magazine, filled with this commodity we call content. And I think that limited them far too much. When I worked at Conde Nast at Advance Publications, the parent company. I remember a very smart editor at the New Yorker who was working online in the early days of digital magazines, as we called them, and said, the New Yorker is a tower with people all around it and with windows all around it. And she said, what I want to do is open up all those windows so people can talk to each other through us and around us. But that's not how editors saw their job. Editors saw their job as saying, no, no, no, I find the best. I don't curate it. I get it created, and I sell it to you as this commodity. And so it goes back to your earlier question about the impact of copyright. I think in the long run, it was almost damaging because it said that our value is. And this is true of journalists as a whole. I think that when they think that their value is intrinsic in this thing called content, they miss the idea that they can be conveners of community and providers of services and perhaps even educators.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (31:22)

So if they've missed this, then what do you think is the future of magazines?

Geoff Jarvis (31:28)

I think the future of the print magazine is pretty much doomed now. I'm not going to predict the death of print. I think that things will still continue to be in physical form and there'll still be niche magazines that'll be out there. I think newspapers in print, I think, are absolutely doomed. There's no economic justification much longer for them, and they have to move online. What I would wish to see today is one thing about researching the book that fascinated me was that magazines had their periods, and you've gone through that history. But just to recount for a second, you go to the earliest Spectator and Tattler, it was very much conversational in a public sphere finding itself. Then it continued as conversational in the early days of magazines. Past that. Then it became, as I said, curatorial with Harpers. And then it became cultural. When magazines like in the US The Atlantic and Harper's found the best writers, the best of fiction, the best of reporting, muckraking magazines came along and so on. Abolitionist magazines and causes magazines had loud and strong voices. Then come the 1920s, we see Henry Luce and Time magazine and the company that I worked for that created the corporatization of magazines, and companies like Time Inc. And Hearst and Connie Nast became big corporate behemoths. And then you get to this incredibly glossy period of magazines with Vogue and such, where they're thick and heavy. The September issue is as big as a phone book because we want to be inside them and Love how they present culture and commerce. And now I think magazines that exist exist to put out a volcano feed of hot takes. I love the Atlantic. The Atlantic is in some ways some of the best journalism we have. And in the other ways, it is frustrating because it is the latest hot takes on topics and it thinks it has to make more content and more content and more content when I think the opposite is true. It should be more selective. So the magazine has never been a consistent single thing. It has changed. It has evolved as culture and needs have evolved. So what do we need today? I think what we need today is the harpers of the 1850s again. I think we need to listen to the voices who for too long were not heard in mainstream mass media that's run by people who look like me, who you can't see, but I'm an old white man. The voices that are on black Twitter, the voices that are in communities in Facebook, the voices that are in blogs. A lot of it is not worth our time. A lot of it's crap, conceited. But in this, there has to be art and artists and authority and expertise that were not seen before, that did not survive the gauntlets of old mass media and magazines. And so I want somebody to come along, a newfangled magazine, a newfangled Harpers, to say, I'm going to find the good stuff. And there isn't a single definition of that anymore. This is the hard part. Your definition of good stuff, Miranda, and my definition of good stuff are inevitably going to be different. But in the wealth of speech that we have now, the great abundance that I celebrate, I want help. I want somebody to go to the effort to like editors of old, to find interesting things, to bring to me things that are worth my time, things that answer my questions. It's not a search engine. It requires more individual care. It's about human choice. And. I think it's important to remember that freedom of expression is not just the freedom to write and speak, but also the freedom to choose to edit and curate. And so I think there could be a next generation of magazines to meet the needs of this time and this age. I don't see it yet, but I think there's an opportunity, a cultural need and a business opportunity to be had there. If someone would grab it.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (36:01)

Well, that's quite exciting. I wonder who will grab it and what that will look like. Speaking of wondering what the future might hold, as my final question, you've already mentioned them a little bit so far. Would you mind telling us what you're working on now or next. Give us a bit of a preview.

Geoff Jarvis (36:19)

Happy to. So I have a next book I'm working on that'll come out next year. As happens with editors, they've rejected my working title, which was the Internet we deserve. And so we're yet to enter into the dance to negotiate a new title. But it is a defense of the Internet against what I see as a full throated moral panic against it and technology by my colleagues in media. And by this I don't mean that I'm defending the companies that exist or the ways that it exists. One of my lessons from looking back to the beginnings of magazines in this book and the beginnings of print in the Gutenberg parenthesis, my other book out this year, I see a very long timeline and I think that the Internet may prove to be as momentous as movable type. I'm too old to know how this story turns out, but if that's the case, I think that we can learn lessons from the past that inform the decisions we make for the future. And I think the Internet, like print, seen at first as a technology, but I don't think it's a technology. I think it's a network of humans. It's a human enterprise with all our faults and all our brilliance. And so I'm looking at the faults that are blamed on the Internet, which I think are sometimes too simplistically done. It didn't make us hate, we already hated. It didn't make us greedy. We had these characteristics separating out that which is technology's fault from that which is humans fault. Trying to remember the early Internet and the hope we had for it, and then to propose some ways to build covenants of mutual obligation for the future. For we're all responsible for the future of the Internet. Alongside this, as I switch universities, I'm hoping to be able to work on a program in Internet studies. And my argument is this is again not technology, but is about the humanities for the Internet as a human enterprise, as I said, and to bring the disciplines of anthropology and history, ethics and philosophy, design and community studies into our understanding of the Internet as the human network. And so that's a pretty amorphous blob I just described, but I'm in the process of editing it now.

Dr. Miranda Melcher (38:56)

Fair enough. Amorphous blobs with lots of cool things in it like that can be, I imagine, both fun and challenging to edit down. So good luck with that process. But of course, while you are off working on that, listeners can read the book. We've been discussing again, part of the Object Lesson series from Bloomsbury. The book is titled Magazine. Jeff, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on the past, present, and perhaps even future of magazines with us.

Geoff Jarvis (39:24)

Miranda, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to talk about this.