Do Magazines Have a Future?

Patricia Prijatel blogged about this issue last March in her other blog, PEP Talks:

In this current economic mess, I have often thought about how our over-consumption has caused us such grief. Yet, that consumerism is what drives many magazines, so it is a little difficult to be too critical of spending patterns that keep our careers going. Still, moderation is a good thing, and I hope we have learned that overbuilding and overspending have serious consequences.

We see more and more green products advertised, so that gives me hope for the industry and society as a whole. How nice it is to be supported by products that do good.

Yet, spending is embedded in the American psyche and few of us are so holy that we don’t fall into the “I gotta have it” trap, and the goods of our desire are not all that good for anything or anybody. I just bought a pair of jeans and am really pleased at how they look—they do a nice job of showing off all the weight I have lost. And my reaction to this pleasure? I think I need to get another pair.

That is not moderation, is it? Advertisers love that about me, though. Until they realize I am way too old to be demographically significant. No matter my age, my desire to have more and more helps stoke the economic engines quite nicely. As long as I have the money to buy, I will continue to stoke, but I have always been a tad stingy, so Madison Avenue had better not depend on me too much. I am more generous in green expenses. I spend an inordinate amount on organic food and we’re planning to beef up the solar power at our cabin–and get a new compost toilet.

The economy also got me thinking about how magazines have weathered these types of storms in the past. During the worst economic downturn this country has seen, the Great Depression, magazines continued publishing—some even were started then. Esquire magazine began publishing in 1933, during the depths of the Depression. The New Yorker started in 1925, four years before the stock market crash, and continued throughout the Depression. In fact, it had a shaky start and didn’t really gain momentum until the 1930s.

The Atlantic and Harper’s continued giving readers perspective on their world throughout the Depression. In 1932, The Atlantic published an article by John Maynard Keynes, titled, “The World’s Economic Outlook.”

The economy, then, can even help magazines by providing content about…the economy.