Projects and Assignments about the Lifespan (or History) of a Magazine
Idea 1: Magazine mutations
Some magazines, clear about their identity and purpose, steadily provide the same product to readers over the course of their life. More often, though, magazines begin at one place and wind up somewhere else entirely, or they undergo other transformations (small and large) in identity, look, and purpose as time goes on. (The Dial may be a good example.)
Select a magazine that has a sizable run, and then investigate the different ways it evolved over time. Some questions you might consider: What kinds of changes did it undergo, and how "deep" are they: i.e., superficial or fundamental? What explains these changes? Are they a result of the magazine's natural growth (do magazine's grow naturally)? Are they instead a result of external circumstances that impinged on the publication? If the magazine experienced multiple kinds of changes, or if changes occurred at different times, might a common cause be responsible for some (all?) of them? Or are the multiple changes best explained by multiple causes? If changes in the magazine came in spurts, or periodically, what accounts for that ? Finally, what didn't change over the course of the magazine's history, and what allowed this continuity in the face of the other changes it underwent?
Idea 2: The coroner’s report (when journals die)
We usually have a pretty good idea of why individual journals were created (the magazine’s first issue may even spell it out for us), but rarely do journals tell us why they died—and when they die, they tend to die unceremoniously (or ingloriously), when the next issue advertised never comes out.
Pick a journal that has gone out of existence, study its origins and how it changed over time, and then try to diagnose—from internal and external evidence both—why it ceased publication. Your account will probably involve several causes; here are a handful to consider: the funding ran out; the editors ran afoul of a sponsor; the magazine was sued—or ran afoul of the law; strife divided the magazine’s inner circle; circulation declined (i.e., readers stopped buying the magazine); circumstances in the market (or society at large) changed; the editors lost interest and moved on to other ventures; the magazine was subsumed by a rival. You may also want to evaluate the magazine's passing: was this a necessary or fortunate end to the magazine, or could it (should it) have been prevented? Can you imagine a better time and way for the magazine to die?
Idea 3: Magazine reincarnation
Sometimes when magazines die, they come back to life (hurray!) in a different form—perhaps with a new name, new design, new purpose, new owners, new editors. Below is a list of paired magazines (as well as groups of three) that underwent dramatic overhauls like this. Select one pair/group and compare the new magazine with its former self; then try to make sense of the transformation, perhaps by asking questions like these: How is the reincarnated magazine both like and unlike its former self? If the resemblance is strong, should we see the new magazine as a continuation of the old? If the resemblance is slight, should we see it as an entirely different journal? Why did the magazine die/revive? What could the new magazine do that the older one couldn't? Was it necessary for the old magazine to die and then return to life (or begin anew), or could the old magazine simply have been retooled in less drastic ways? Did the reincarnation improve the paper, or make it more profitable? When the new magazine eventually died, was it done in by what killed the old one?
- The Freewoman (1911-1912), The New Freewoman (1913) and The Egoist (1914-1919)
- The Masses (1911-1917), The Liberator (1918-1924) and The New Masses (1926-1948)
- Scribner's Monthly (1870-1881) and The Century Magazine (1881-1930)
Idea 4: The Leviathans
By “leviathan,” we don’t mean a whale, or the giant sea creature from the Bible, or even Thomas Hobbes’ famous political tract from 1660 that laid out his social contract theory, but rather the cheesy horror film by that name from 1989 in which an undersea monster grows to terrible dimensions by assimilating into itself the bodies of a doomed submarine crew. Some magazines act like that: they grow big by absorbing into themselves their rivals. Pick such a periodical leviathan and try to explain how it succeeded while its rival(s) succumbed to assimilation/reincorporation. Here are a few famous examples:
- The Argosy absorbs Munsey’s in 1929
Idea 5: The immortals
Most magazines eventually cease publication, but others—a select few—go on and on, seemingly impervious to the mortal threats other magazines face. Select a magazine that is publishing today that began at least a hundred years ago, and try to explain the secret of its longevity. Here are a few to consider:
- The Atlantic Monthly (1857 - present)
- The Crisis (1910 - present)
- Harper's Magazine (1850 - present)
- The Nation (1865 - present)
- Poetry Magazine (1912 - present)
- Scientific American (1845 - present)
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