Confronted with the notion of a 500-channel universe, our social critics now fret about the fragmentation of our culture and worry about how anyone can produce enough content to fill 500 channels.
I'm not worried. I am, you see, the editor of a magazine with a circulation of 50,000. I know mass media are an aberation. We magazine editors have no trouble filling hundreds of channels.
A few blocks from my house is a new Borders bookstore that stocks 100,000-plus different book titles and several hundred different magazines. No one expects to go to its newsstand and see only Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News, with perhaps The Economist playing the role of PBS. In print, we take abundance for granted. We think nothing of the fact that there are a half dozen magazines devoted specifically to collecting and making expensive dolls or that we have not only sports magazines or home-decorating magazines or bride's but skateboarding magazines and kitchen and bathroom magazines and Southern bride's magazines.
In the magazine business, at least, abundance has been on the increase. The Magazine Publishers of America reports that since 1950, the number of U.S. periodicals has gone from just under 7,000 to more than 11,000. Just since 1980, the MPA's estimte has risen by almost 1,400--and that's a net figure that doesn't include all the magazines that have come and gone. When you throw in small literary journals, 'zines, and other tiny titles, there are far more magazines than the MPA can even begin to count. And desktop publishing is making them cheaper and easier to produce.
The lesson for the new media age is that when media are abundant, they become more specialized, like magazines and newsletters. And they develop more personal relationships between producers and audiences.
Mass media assume they produce programs or articles for the general public. And, in my experience, the editors and producers assume that the general public is not like them but should be. This produces a paradox that Don Roberts, a communications professor at Stanford, pointed out to me recently. Most journalists--by which he means most mass-market, "mainstream" journalists--are simultaneously populist and elitist. And these two strains are always in tension. (The tension is even greater among journalism professors.)
The more specialized the publication, the more readers and editors identify with each other, the less prominent is that tension. I do not think the reporters of TheNew York Times or The Wall Street Journal think of themselves as writing for the uninformed masses who don't have the sense to know what's important. They, and their audiences, share an educated elite's sense of what issues are important. That's why the Times doesn't carry comics, or Dear Abby, or a mass-market Style section. And it's why both newspapers can find national audiences. Their communities are sociological, not geographical. They share what novelist Rebecca Goldstein called a "mattering map," a view of the world like the famous New Yorker cover where some subjects grow in importance and others shrink.
But there are degrees of identification. No newspaper approaches the personal relationship specialized magazines have with their readers. When you write a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times, the "editor" in question isn't a real person but an institution. You are really writing to the Los Angeles community in general. The letter is a little editorial, broadcasting to your fellow readers. You do not expect a reply.
When you write a letter to Reason, however, you are writing to a person--me. In fact, most of the letters to the editor we get are addressed "Dear Ms. Postrel" or, very often, "Dear Virginia." And Reason editors, writers, and even interview subjects talk back. Reason readers identify with the magazine, even when it makes them mad, and they expect to have a conversation. The more letters and replies we run, the more we get.
New media are bringing this two-way relationship to mass-market publications. In a recent issue of Folio, the trade magazine for magazines, Philip Elmer-Dewitt, Time's technology editor and its chief correspondent in cyberspace, wrote about the newsweekly's experience going on-line. His article begins, "Six hours after Time launched its first online edition, I thought I was going to die of modem stress." He and a dozen other Time staffers had been typing greetings and answers to the 8,374 people who stopped by to chat--and who expected replies.
Two of his conclusions:
1. "To be successful in the world of online publishing, an interactive title must, above all, be interactive." Readers in new media communities expect replies. They expect two-way communication. They expect editors who identify with them, not editors who see them as a mass to shovel information at. In other words, they expect the kind of relationship with editors that specialized publications have with readers--only they expect it right this minute.
2. "The medium tends to attract people who feel their point of view isn't being represented by the mainstream media." Newly abundant media always outsiders, whether the medium in question is the Reformation-era pamphlet, the AM airwaves after music moved to FM, the underground newspaper and free urban weekly after "cold type" cut costs, or the "alternative" college newspaper since the coming of desktop publishing. Sometimes the outsiders are right-wing, sometimes they are left-wing, and sometimes they are just weird. But newly abundant media allow them to find each other, to create new communities of interest.
Consider two familiar, well-developed media: talk radio and urban weekly newspapers. One of the questions you often hear in these days of Rush Limbaugh is, Why are all talk-radio hosts right wing?
To which I usually reply, Why is every urban weekly newspaper run by leftist editors?
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منتدى العرب|3.9.11 @ 8:43PM|#
Thank you