Online Publications See a Future...in Print?

Indeed.

From a piece in the Los Angeles Times...

While pundits were declaring the death of ink on paper, though, a funny thing happened: Some of the very people who helped pioneer online-only journalism and criticism began to reconsider print.
Indie-music kingmaker Pitchfork.com, which has spent 17 years publishing on the Web, just launched a quarterly print edition. The Los Angeles Review of Books, which began on Tumblr in 2011, recently celebrated the release of the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, while intellectual online journal the New Inquiry is planning a print anthology. This fall, the feminist site Jezebel, an arm of the Gawker Media empire, published "The Book of Jezebel" — an "illustrated encyclopedia of lady things" — and teen girl website Rookie published its second "Rookie Yearbook."

"There's been a lot of discussion of the transition in one direction: print to digital," says New Inquiry editor in chief Rachel Rosenfelt, 28. "But this is the first generation of people who have always been digital, moving in the other direction."

22 Odd Ads from 1910s National Geographic Magazines

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The Art of Harvey Kurtzman

Read Every Popular Science Ever Published Since 1872

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N+1 on the McSweeney's Empire

The First Rough Draft of History

An oral history of Newsweek, here.

60 Years of Mad Magazine

How Do They Fact-Check at the New Yorker?

The Columbia Journalism Review has the answer.

From the story...

Preventing errors from appearing in the magazine is not a simple process. For openers, you need to know that in addition to the basic reporting pieces, we also check “The Talk of the Town,” the critics, fiction, poetry, cartoons, art, captions, the table of contents, certain of the several-paragraph-long essays in the “Goings On” section. We also fact-check the contributors page, the cover wrap, the letters column, all the press releases, and a good deal of the recently mounted Web site.

To start checking a nonfiction piece, you begin by consulting the writer about how the piece was put together and using the writer’s sources as well as our own departmental sources. We then essentially take the piece apart and put it back together again. You make sure that the names and dates are right, but then if it is a John McPhee piece, you make sure that the USGS report that he read, he read correctly; or if it is a John le Carré piece, when he says his con man father ran for Parliament in 1950, you make sure that it wasn’t 1949 or 1951.

In the Middle of Major Men

The women who edited and defined Poetry magazine are discussed on the Poetry Foundation website.

From the piece...

But when Monroe looked up the numbers, she was surprised to learn that from April 1919 through March 1920 she had printed 64 men and 41 women; in total pages, the ratio of work by men to that by women was “almost exactly two to one.” Men still dominated the pages of Poetry despite the fact that the editorial vision of the magazine, especially in the beginning, came from women. Soon after this point, however, the ratio would equalize and then tip in the other direction: more women than men were published in Poetry’s pages in the early 1920s.

A photograph—taken in Poetry magazine’s office at 543 Cass Street sometime between 1912 and 1922—shows Monroe at a desk stacked with manuscripts and letters. According to Monroe, the office had a shabby, domestic elegance and was fitted with a wicker rocker known as the “poets’ chair,” where many of the poets who visited Monroe would sit. The chair was “an ancient affair,” as Eunice Tietjens described it: “most of the poets of our generation have sat in it and the thing really belongs in a museum.” Monroe might brew for her poets a pot of coffee over an open fire in the vacant lot next door.

That Poetry’s early office was housed in an old family home underscores the fact that the magazine was conceived by a woman and sustained by her mostly female staff. “I had never been the actual mistress of any home which had sheltered me,” Monroe would later write, “but this little kingdom was mine, and I rather enjoyed dispensing its fleeting hospitalities.”

Inside the Offices of Newsweek

25 Vintage Magazine Covers from Japan

Beautiful!

A Fleet Foxes-Related Literary Journal to Be Published

It'll be called Unified Field Collective.

From a piece in the L Magazine...

In the case of the inaugural issue, we can expect a 10'' transparent vinyl pressing of rare tracks from the aforementioned Pecknold, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Amen Dunes, Grizzly Bear spin-off Department of Eagles and more, while its 60 pages will work off the theme of "transition" (each issue will carry a theme, natch). Round one features a journal entry penned by recently freed West Memphis 3 member Damien Echols on adjusting to life after 18 years on death row, an excerpt from Gloria Steinem's forthcoming book, a photo essay on adolescence by noted rock photographer Autumn de Wilde, a contribution from SPIN's Charles Aaron, and another from Animal Collective sister/visual collaborator Abby Portner, among 30-plus other pieces. Also worth mentioning: Both Beach House and Sub Pop are listed among the collective's roster. Perhaps a hint of what future issues will hold?

Wondering How Far Magazines Must Fall

Magazines are in crisis. People aren't buying them much anymore.

From a story in the New York Times...

The problem is more existential than that: magazines, all kinds of them, don’t work very well in the marketplace anymore. 

Like newspapers, magazines have been in a steady slide, but now, like newspapers, they seem to have reached the edge of the cliff. Last week, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that newsstand circulation in the first half of the year was down almost 10 percent. When 10 percent of your retail buyers depart over the course of a year, something fundamental is at work. 

I talked to an executive at one of the big Manhattan publishers about the recent collapse at the newsstand and he said, “When the airplane suddenly drops 10,000 feet and it doesn’t crash, you still end up with your heart in your stomach. Those are very, very bad numbers.”

Amazing! The Return of Amazing Stories

After a long haitus, Amazing Stories (having folded in 2006), is back and is offering its first issue FREE.

Learn more, here.

Top 12 Best Online Literary Journals

The list, care of Bookfox.

The New Yorker's New App

A Collection of Vintage Punk Magazine Covers

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McSweeney's #4

Biblioklept relishes in McSweeney's Quarterly, issue #4. And why not?

What Was It Like to Work at Playboy in the 1960s...as a Woman?

When it launched, Playboy was a literary power and a force for change. The magazine’s offices also happened to be an interesting place to work—for women. Jessica Francis Kane interviews her mother about life as a secretary in 1960s New York City, care of the Morning News.

From the piece...


JFK: What was the office environment like?
Mom: Sexual overtones were in the air, like breathing. It was the culture, not just at Playboy. Women were objects of desire, period. However, this was the office of a highly successful magazine and we were expected to work well and professionally and we all did. There were, as I remember, five of us, including the head secretary. We sat in a line at our desks in a large room and the ad men’s offices opened behind us. Each ad man had a small office, but with a window overlooking Park Avenue, a nice desk, chairs for visitors. We each worked for two or three ad men directly. There was flirting, innuendo, double entendre all the time, but rarely was it serious. It became serious only if the woman allowed it in the work place and this hardly ever happened. Not at Playboy while I was there, but certainly somewhere, and abortions were illegal. I knew one young woman who flew from New York City to Mexico for one.

JFK: How did people react when you told them you were a secretary at Playboy?
Mom: Men with double takes, truly, and undisguised curiosity. Women with a “You are kidding, how awful” attitude. I quickly changed their thinking. It was fun working there, Jessie, and fun seeing people’s reactions. There was another firm on our floor and we would sometimes meet those secretaries by the elevator and they would mumble and actually lower their eyes! We thought it was hysterical.

What's Happening Today from the Laid Off Staff of Good Magazine?

Tomorrow Magazine.