MAGCULTURE.COM / BLOG

What is a magazine?

According to my WordPress interface, this is the 1001st post I’ve written since magCulture began back in February 2006. To start the second thousand posts here are my thoughts on what makes a magazine a magazine.

The subject has currency this week following the refusal by South Africa’s ABC (Audit Bureau of Circulation) to recognise MK Bruce/Lee as a magazine. MK Bruce/Lee is an extraordinary project, a customer magazine produced by South African company The President on behalf of the music TV station MK and sold through music chain Musica. Each issue consists of a bag of printed goodies: fold-out posters, booklets and cards. Every part is beautifully designed and executed, with different paper stocks and print effects. It couldn’t be further from the ‘standard’ magazine format. I’ve argued here before that magazines have to emphasise their printed nature, their ‘magaziney-ness’ to establish a foothold in the future, and here is a perfect case study. Yet, in the words of the ABC, ‘The board rejected your application for membership of the ABC on the basis that it was not considered to be a magazine’ (full story here).

Clearly, MK Bruce/Lee is far from being a ‘normal’ magazine. It will not sit neatly alongside all the regular titles on the shelves at your local store. It is not an A4 full-colour printed series of bound pages. It doesn’t look like what people expect a magazine to be – no logo at the top of the page, etc. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a magazine.

So what is a magazine? I prefer a more open definition, best summed up by Fernando Gutiérrez in my book ‘Issues’, ‘The word magazine means storage space for dynamite. A magazine is full of surprises and it can explode at any minute’. The ‘surprise’ theme has figured here a few times recently as a defining trait of great magazines such as The New Yorker and The Face. But great though such titles are, they not only stick to a traditional physical format but cannot be described as typical. They are (or were in the case of The Face) exceptional for their refusal to be predictable. It is difficult to describe the New Yorker in a single sentence, it’s scope is so broad. Every issue contains surprises – as David Hepworth has said, ‘one of its chief delights is that it’s impossible to predict what’s going to be in it’. This was what made The Face great in its heyday too. It managed to combine the most unlikely parts. Political reportage sat next to fashion in a way that hadn’t been seen before. And yes, they got things wrong: the fashion shoot based on terrorist chic springs to mind. But it was only later, when The Face became scared of making such mistakes, that it began its slow decline toward closure.

With the majority of magazines being nervous of straying too far from their comfort zones – and I suspect many of their readers would support this conservatism, people desire familiarity – we need to celebrate those titles that are attempting to do something different. Whether mainstream or independent, consumer, B2B or customer, old or new, industry bodies like ABC should be supporting innovative publications. And if we’re supporting innovation in content and presentation, why not format too?

There are two important factors to consider in qualifying as a magazine. Firstly, a magazine is a vehicle for content. Text, pictures and design work together to present a mediated view on a subject/subjects. As established above, the whole point of the New Yorker is that you the reader are placing your trust in the editorial team to deliver material you perhaps didn’t expect would interest you. This mediation is an important difference from other content providers, particularly digital media where content is sourced by search or by random links. Nothing wrong with these processes, they’re just different (although they sometimes mimic the surprises found in the the best magazines).

Secondly, a magazine is part of a series, an ongoing project that gets published under a single banner. The period between issues might be weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual or irregular, but another issue is always on its way.

By these two criteria, ever-changing magazine projects like Visionaire, La Mas Bella and Statements are all magazines, as are those listed in Andrew’s recent piece.

And so, of course, is MK Bruce/Lee.