Magazine

by Jeff Jarvis, Ian Bogost (Series Editor), Christopher Schaberg (Series Editor)

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

For a century, magazines were the authors of culture and taste, of intelligence and policy - until they were overthrown by the voices of the public themselves online. Here is a tribute to all that magazines were, from their origins in London and on Ben Franklin's press; through their boom - enabled by new technologies - as creators of a new media aesthetic and a new mass culture; into their opulent days in advertising-supported conglomerates; and finally to their fall at the hands of the internet. This tale is told through the experience of a magazine founder, the creator of Entertainment Weekly at Time Inc., who was also TV critic at TV Guide and People and finally an executive at Condé Nast trying to shepherd its magazines into the digital age.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

160 pages, Paperback

Published November 2, 2023

About the author

Jeff Jarvis is an American journalist writing for publications such as New York Daily News, the San Francisco Examiner, and The Guardian. In 2006 he became an associate professor at City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism, directing its new media program. He is a co-host on This Week in Google, a show on the TWiT Network.


Picture by Robert Scoble

Reviews

[Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don't be fooled by the diminutive size of this little volume; it's packed with colorful detail about the past, present and maybe-future of my first career love: magazines. Author Jeff Jarvis had a long career in magazines, including as the founding editor of Entertainment Weekly; he's now a journalism professor and an excellent follow on social media for his sharp and necessary media criticism. Anyway, maybe this is too insider-baseball if you're not a magazine person, but I absolutely adored every bit of this, both as history (with many details I did not know), a criticism, and some good old-fashioned gossip.

[Anthony Eales · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Glowing With Praise and Doom Eulogy of Magazines by Someone Who Was There

I enjoy Jeff Jarvis's writings and his appearances on various podcasts. I actually came across the existence of this book in one of his Medium articles. I first discovered Jeff Jarvis with his excellent What Would Google Do? book years ago.

I greatly enjoyed this book and consumed it in one sitting.

I appreciated Jeff's insights coloured by his own experiences in the magazine and newspaper industries back in the rivers of gold advertising days of the '80s and '90s.

The dramatic failures of some of the media moguls like the many proprietors of Time Warner and Rupert Murdoch back in the day were very entertaining to read about in a schadenfreude kind of way.

I really liked hearing about the ancient history of magazines too. And in contrast how badly the magazine leaders of the time bungled the early days of the introduction of the Internet.

Some of the processes described that go into making a magazine were very informative too.

I must admit as a 37 year old male I lived through the tail end of the physical magazine era. I live in a country town in Australia and we used to have a well stocked newsagent in the early 2000s. I'd love reading video game, computer and movie magazines. That has translated into me having a voracious appetite for a lot of digital newspaper and magazine subscriptions that I read on my iPad and smartphone.

Also the idea of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series is really cool. I think I have my eyes on more I want to read.

I don't think anyone could have written this book with as much authority as Jeff Jarvis. I look forward to his next book. And until then I'll be reading his Medium articles.

[Shannon Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

A small, compact book (and part of a much larger series of books like it each on one object) Magazine is a great if also very quick paced history on the creation and perhaps now the end of magazines at least of the days of magazines leading the cultural discussions (at least in fhe US.)

I know the author - we have a larger number of overlapping friends and connections, have been attendees at many of the same conferences and know many of the same technologists, investors, writers, editors and journalists.

I wish he had explored in greater depth the history of pulp magazines and fiction publications more broadly both in the US and globally. Pulps and the magazines they spawned seem to me as a science fiction and fantasy fan with many SF/fantasy writer close friends so be missing from his story here. Fiction periodicals do remain in existence (often with a digital option)

I also wish he had looked at more of the history as well as the present of magazines globally looking both as offerings like Monocle (UK based but global in scope) but also at the long history of manga in Japan and how it is different from the history of comics in the US (and France and the UK and elsewhere). But these are quibbles and who knows perhaps they were like so many stories of old lost to editorial whims and suggestions.

[Richard Greene · Rating 5 out of 5]

FOR MAGAZINE AFICIONADOS

For those, like me, who had a long- standing love affair with magazines, Jarvis’s book is happily full of anecdotes and facts (like an excellent magazine article, in the old days). I left it with a better understanding of the cause of death of the great periodicals. It is a fun, if ultimately depressing (to me) read.

[Jude · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best Object Lesson I've read so far. An incredibly sharp, insightful take on the role of the magazine in society by a veteran in the business. I count myself lucky to be able to read this fresh out the oven (it's published this year!), for as with every critique on media, it'll only dull in sharpness over time.

[Olivia Lee]

* for college *