Mr. Magazine

This has been a great week for me as a professor and chair of the Department of Journalism at the University of Mississippi. It was even a greater week for our students and faculty. It was the 25th annual Journalism Week, something that I started as Magazine Week when I joined the faculty here in 1984. Many speakers came to campus and interacted with our students on “all things journalism.” I will be sharing some of their insights here and all of their insights on the J-Department web site here.

Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, gave the Stuart Bullion Memorial Lecture in Journalism. His speech “The Death of News and the Rise of the Entertainment Culture” touched on the major factors facing journalism in general, and newspapers in particular, today. Here are some excerpts:

The decline of newspapers is not about the replacement of the antiquated technology of news print with the lightning speed of the Internet. It does not signal an inevitable and salutary change. It is not a form of progress. The decline of newspapers is about the rise of the corporate state, the loss of civic and public responsibility on the part of much of our entrepreneurial class and the intellectual poverty of our post-literate world, a world where information is conveyed primarily through rapidly moving images rather than print.

The Internet will not save newspapers. Although all most newspapers have Web sites, and have had for a while, newspaper Web sites make up less than 10 percent of newspaper ad revenue. Advertisers have not gravitated to newspaper sites, either unsure of how to use the Internet or suspicious that it can’t match the viewer attention of older media. And the decline of revenues means an assault on the very heart of the news – the ability to gather and produce news. No internet site will ever bring in the kind of revenue that allows a large newspaper, such as The Los Angeles Times, to field a newsroom staff – a staff which even with all its lay offs — still employs 700 people.

Those who rely on the Internet gravitate to sites that reinforce their beliefs. The filtering of information through an ideological lens, which is destroying television journalism, defies the purpose of reporting. Journalism is about transmitting information that doesn’t care what you think. Reporting challenges, countermands or destabilizes established beliefs. Reporting, which is time-consuming and often expensive, begins from the premise that there are things we need to know and understand, even if these things make us uncomfortable. If we lose this ethic we are left with pandering, packaging and partisanship. We are left awash in a sea of competing propaganda. Bloggers, unlike most established reporters, rarely admit errors. They cannot get fired. Facts, for many bloggers, are interchangeable with opinions. Take a look at The Drudge Report. This may be the new face of what we call news.

We live in an age of moral nihilism. We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones and chase after defense-related grants and funding. The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have withered. And this assault has been a body blow to a free press, which is, like the humanities, designed to promote intellectual and moral questioning. The confusion of bread and circus with news means that social critics, those who do not shout clichés on cable news shows, but who challenge and question the assumptions and structures of the corporate state itself are left without a voice.

We are cleverly entertained during our descent. We have our own version of ancient Rome’s bread and circuses with our ubiquitous and elaborate spectacles, sporting events, celebrity gossip and television reality shows. Societies in decline, as the Roman philosopher Cicero wrote, see their emotional and political passions subsumed by the excitement and emotional life of the arena.

Television journalism is largely a farce. Celebrity reporters, masquerading as journalists, who make millions a year give a platform to the powerful and the famous so they can spin, equivocate, and lie. Sitting in a studio, putting on makeup, and chatting with Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, or Lawrence Summers has little to do with journalism. If you are a true journalist, you should start to worry if you make $5 million a year. No journalist has a comfortable, cozy relationship with the powerful. No journalist believes that serving the powerful is a primary part of his or her calling. Those in power fear and dislike journalists – and they should. Ask Amy Goodman, Seymour Hersh, Walter Pincus, Robert Scheer or David Cay Johnston.

You can watch the entire lecture here and I welcome your comments on the future of news, journalism and the rest of the issues raised by Mr. Hedges.

Photo by Robert Jordan

David McDonald is Chairman and CEO of Sunshine Media group which consists of Sunshine Media, Sunshine Printing, True North Custom Publishing and Blue Canoe Dynamic Media. During a visit to Ole Miss I had the opportunity to ask David a question regarding the future of print, the web and the role of innovation in both. “The printed word is the clothing of our intellect,” he mused among many others words of wisdom. Check his view by clicking on the video above to hear his complete answer.

So how is the magazine reading experience different than that on the web? Trisha McMahon, editor in chief and senior vice president for communications and public relations for the Morris Visitor Publications’ New York division answered that question in part five of my video blog series on innovation, print and the web. Hear what she has to say regarding her reading and shopping habits, both as an editor of a group of travel publications such as IN York and Where New York and a consumer who is an avid print reader. Click the video above to hear McMahon answer on why we still need print and why print is her best friend.
Interested in sharing your views on innovation, print and the web? Drop me an e-mail, an audio clip or a video clip that is no longer than three minutes and I will make sure to add it to the series. You can reach me at samir.husni@gmail.com

Media pundits and the prophets of doom and gloom want us to believe that print is dead and only a few entrepreneurs are still launching new magazines. Last time I checked Hearst Magazines is not listed as an entrepreneur but rather a major media company with major media assets on the marketplace. One such asset is the Food Network magazine that launched late last year and is ready to put out its third issue next month. (For the record, big media companies rarely launched more than one or two new magazines every now and then…) I had the opportunity to grab a cup of coffee with Food Network magazine’s publisher Vicki Wellington and I asked her two questions regarding the magazine. The first question dealt with the complete experience of the Food Network magazine, the web and the television network, and the second question was aimed at finding what “innovations in print” the Food Network magazine is doing. Ms. Wellington’s passion and energy for this new title are more than evident in her answers despite the loud noises in the background of the Maison restaurant where we met. Click on the video above to hear her two minutes answers. Keep in mind that it is not only her passion and energy, but also that of the magazine readers. She handed me a hefty folder that includes letters from readers welcoming the magazine and singing its praises. My favorite letter, “I’m your biggest Food Network Junkie…what an amazing magazine with the best group of human beings I’ve ever had the pleasure to share my day with!…” Talk about fulfilling two important addictions: food and celebrities. The first you can’t avoid, the second it costs you NOTHING, a great price to pay during an economic downturn.

As the magazine and newspaper industries continue to operate under the cloud of doom and gloom, I took my little camera looking for answers from those who are not surrendering to the gloomy market forecast and who still see a light at the end of the tunnel that is not the train coming.
Lindsay Bierman, the editor in chief of Coastal Living magazine, part of the Southern Progress Corp. group of magazines, is busy working on reinventing the magazine and its content. I asked him what is he doing to reinvent the magazine and how can he achieve innovation in print. Click on the video below to hear his two minutes answer.

What does a person who heads the digital operation for a publishing company say about magazines and print? Not what you would expect. Listening to Jim Sexton, senior vice president and editorial director of Southern Progress Corporation Digital Network, makes you wonder why don’t we have more people like Jim leading the magazine digital revolution.
I asked Jim three questions for my new blog series On Innovation, Magazines and the Web. Click the above screen to hear his answers on the differences between print and the web, innovation and the future.

Print. The Web. Innovation. The Future. As I move ahead with the preparations for the Magazine Innovation Center, I will be asking industry leaders to share their views on the aforementioned issues. A question or two with a brief answer will form the cornerstone for this new series of blogs. Today, Eleanor Griffin and Howard Greenberg answer my first two questions.
Eleanor Griffin is editor in chief of Southern Living magazine, or as she likes to refer to herself “reader-in-chief” of the magazine. I asked her, during a visit with a group of my magazine students to the Southern Progress Corp. in Birmingham, Al, “Where do you find the soul of a publication? In print or on the web?” Click on the video above to listen to her answer.
I also asked Howard Greenberg, design director at Southern Living magazine “How does innovation in the magazine differ from the web?” Click on the video below to listen to his answer.