Magazines from a format perspective
This is a series of spotlights on the history of American magazines and their personalities. Every magazine, in its blend of graphic and writing style -- whether on paper or on the web -- reflects the taste and character of a community of people who create and read it. Taken as a blurred whole, magazines reflect the personality of our culture, in a way that books (which are limited by their one-shot status, which detaches them from their audience), newspapers and newschannels (constrained by tight deadlines) and broadcast media (whose tight word limits keep them oversimplistic) do not.
Academic magazine historians seem to agree that behind every successful publication stands a unique, strong-willed individual, who stamped it with his/her distinct personality, which a public happened to pick up on: S.S. McClure, Harold Ross, Harold Hayes, Helen Gurley Brown, Tina Brown, and so on. That may be true, but it affects only the very top few magazines. In a systematic way, since about 1890, the slick magazine style has been refined as a corporate formula for grabbing readers, for enticing them to look at everything (especially the ads) and for allowing them to forget everything once they've read it.
As they compete for readers' attention, even the nobler-purposed magazines fall into this style. How much can you trust an alternative point of view like that of Mother Jones or High Times if the form of its presentation (paper thickness, page size, style of illustration, relationship of ads to text and general design) is not very different as a whole from Playboy, People, or House Beautiful.
