The sad death of magazines
When I was a kid I was obsessed with magazines. I still remember the feeling of waiting excitedly for new issues to arrive in the mail every month. When I was really young I read American Girl magazine, then eventually graduated to Girl’s Life, then Jump (RIP), YM (RIP), Teen (RIP), CosmoGirl (RIP), Seventeen (wow a magazine that’s still around!), and then as I got older Lucky (RIP), Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, and Glamour. (Just typing that sentence and noting how many of my favorite magazines of my youth are now defunct was a little depressing).
I took the does-your-crush-like-you quizzes, bookmarked outfit inspiration and tried to replicate them with my Kohl’s clothes, and followed the back-to-school beauty guides every year (“3 weeks out: start drinking 8 glasses of water every day for clearer skin!”) This was still in the era where my internet time was limited, since I could only tie up my family’s phone line with our dial-up connection for so long. So print magazines were the main way I accessed the greater world out there, and the way that I dreamed of someday having a bigger life than the one I had in my suburban hometown.
Which is why it’s sort of insane, two decades later, to watch the magazine companies that I idolized in my youth die a slow and painful death due to their own incompetence. 12-year-old me would have died to work at Conde Nast or Hearst. But now, I read about those companies and feel like I’m better off not having worked there. This week, two pieces about editors at Conde Nast caught my attention — one about Dan Peres, the former editor-in-chief of now-shuttered Conde men’s mag Details, who is releasing a memoir about how he was addicted to opioids while running the magazine. The second piece is an interview with Stuart Emmrich, a longtime print who just became the editor of Vogue.com.
Taken together, the two pieces give you a rather depressing view into the state of the magazine business. Peres spent 15 years as the editor of Details, until the magazine shut down; he spent half of that time taking as many as 60 Vicodin a day to fuel his addiction. The Times story recounts how Peres was regularly high and non-functional at work, how he used company resources to book trips that allowed him to buy drugs — he once, on a work trip to LA, rented a car and drove to Tijuana, Mexico and smuggled drugs back into the country (and then went on the Bill Maher show after). Addiction is a deadly disease, and addicts need help; Peres eventually did get clean, in 2007. But it was shocking to read how he was given one of the most prestigious, most privileged jobs in media for years while basically phoning it in and letting his team do the work of creating a magazine each month — and it was even more shocking to think of how the culture at Conde Nast allowed him to hold on to such a job while failing at it so miserably.
The Stuart Emmrich interview is a different beast: Emmrich is a longtime print newspaper editor who just took the top digital job at Vogue magazine, running Vogue.com. But the interview was roundly mocked on Twitter, because Emmrich had never worked on the internet before, and appeared to have very little understanding of how digital media worked. He had never used a CMS before (content management system: the tool every website uses to publish articles); he didn’t know that during a live event like the Golden Globes, if you publish your story late, you miss out on traffic! (He got a call from Anna Wintour asking him why the traffic was down, and this was when he apparently first realized how websites work). It signals that for the people running media companies, digital is still something of an afterthought — something anyone can do, that doesn’t require any particular skills or experience or sensibility.
I haven’t worked in print, but I did work in the digital department of two broadcast media companies, and I know very well that feeling that the folks at the top only cared about TV — they didn’t think the website mattered, they didn’t see it as something serious and worth investing in. We saw digital as the future and the most important thing; they saw the website as just a place to put clips from TV shows.
These days I don’t have many print magazine subscriptions anymore; I don’t wait anxiously for them to arrive in the mail every month because I can read so many things online every day that there’s no longer a need to wait a whole month for a new set of interesting articles to read. At the same time, I miss magazines — I miss the excitement of opening a new issue and deciding what to read first, and the feeling of having a perfect package curated for me instead of having to go filter through all the noise on Twitter to find something interesting to read. But I find myself more and more disappointed at how the companies I once revered have so poorly adapted to the current realities of how people consume media — and as sad as it is every time a magazine shuts down, I can’t help but feel like the people running big media institutions should have seen this coming, they should have been more nimble, they should have tried harder to adapt to the internet. Or maybe they could just start by hiring some editors who get the internet first.
What I’m reading
How your laptop ruined your life, The Atlantic.
Young men embrace gender equality, but they still don’t vacuum, New York Times.
The economics of freezing your eggs, Wall Street Journal.
Fashion Week is simply not sustainable, The Cut. "The world that Fashion Weeks were created for — powerful department stores and glossy magazines — doesn’t exist any more."
When living apart keeps you together, Curbed.
Why people get the Sunday scaries, The Atlantic.
Judith Butler wants us to reshape our rage, The New Yorker.
Lori Gottlieb’s Marry Him was always a caricature of the shallow, petty woman, Jezebel.
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