Introduction
The question about what a magazine is, or isnāt, has by now surely been won, been lost, been declared a draw, been abandoned in a fit of pique ā¦ hasnāt it? No, it would appear that despite the long drawnāout debate (see Holmes and Nice 2012, chapter 1), it hasnāt. It hasnāt because the premise of the question keeps changing as the ways that people use media, and particularly digital and social media, evolve. It hasnāt because magazineālike media entities continue to be invented and used in ways that make them candidates for inclusion in the taxonomy.
Here's an interesting metaphor, drawn from a magazine about wildlife, for how perspectives on what is or isnāt a magazine can legitimately differ. The Kittiwake (Rissa tridactyla) is a seabird that many of us would, in our ignorance, classify rather generally as a small seagull. Like many birds, kittiwakes have moved into urban areas and adapted manāmade landscapes for their own purposes. In the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, in the northeast of England, there is a colony of kittiwakes that nests on the Tyne Bridge. The magazine story itself is about how not everyone welcomes the presence of these birds but the author makes the point that, āAs far as kittiwakes are concerned, the bridge is a cliff, but in a different setting. It looks quite different to us, but it provides most of the same featuresā (Mason 2018, p. 34).
I will argue in this chapter that it is the features that are important, not the setting, when it comes to debating what is or is not a magazine. Dr. Samir Husni (n.d.), whose impressive credentials include being the founder and director of the Magazine Innovation Center, as well as professor and Hederman lecturer at the Meek School of Journalism and New Media, University of Mississippi, is also known as Mr. Magazine. On his website of the same name, there is a strapline that reads, āIf it is not ink on paper, it is not a magazineā. (Mr. Magazine n.d.). He is right, of course, but right in the sense that the opponents of Newcastle upon Tyne's kittiwakes are right: it's a bridge, not a cliff ā but in the absence of a real cliff, it will perform the functions of a cliff very well indeed for the birds that use it. Are media consumers who use nonātraditional structures for magazineālike purposes to be denied the opportunity to think of them how they like? Are we who study those uses to be strictly limited by a historical straitjacket that forces us to consider only old issues of Vogue or new issues of Cereal? Or, as Andrew O'Neill notes in his history of the highly contested musical genre heavy metal, is it the case that, āUltimately, genre labels are unimportant. The map is not the territory. They exist as a descriptive guide, but the boundaries between genres are all porousā (O'Neill 2018, p. xxi)?
The metaphor above might help to illustrate a point but it does not explain what āmagazineālike purposesā are, nor does it provide a solid framework for analysis. For the former I draw on the General Theory of Magazines expounded in Magazine Journalism (Holmes and Nice 2012); for the latter a useful model is provided by Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, who proposes that the industrialized world has been through three industrial revolutions and is entering the fourth (Schwab 2017).
The theory of magazines states:
- magazines always target a precisely defined group of readers;
- magazines base their content on the expressed and perceived needs, desires, hopes, and fears of that defined group;
- magazines develop a bond of trust with their readerships;
- magazines foster communityālike interactions between themselves and their readers, and among readers;
- magazines can respond quickly and flexibly to changes in the readership and changes in the wider society (loc. cit.).
Although the primary focus in this definition is on what magazines do, it is equally important to note the functions of members of the readership group in the relationship ā they are a cohesive community of interest; they express, explicitly or implicitly, a set of information needs; they trust (and are trusted); they interact with one another; and they change, either because group membership rotates or because their information needs change in response to external stimuli or personal development. All these factors count toward determining the āmagazineālike purposesā of both the media entity and the community of interest.
In his book The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Klaus Schwab briefly delineates three phases of industrial development that precede the current situation in which machines are smart and technologies are fusing āacross the physical, digital and biological domains [making] the fourth industrial revolution fundamentally different from previous revolutionsā (op. cit., p. 8). Although sketched rather than analyzed deeply, with a little customization the precursory phases provide a useful framework on which to map out an evolutionary history of magazines. In Schwab's timeline, the first industrial revolution occurred with the shift from reliance on animals, human effort, and biomass as primary sources of energy, to the mechanical power enabled by using fossil fuels. In fact there is a strong argument that the roots of the first revolution can be more accurately dated to Gutenberg's perfection of the printing press and movable type circa 1439 (Eisenstein 2012, p. 13; Steinberg 2017, p. 17). Not only did this permit and encourage the spread of knowledge essential to the flowering of the first phase of industrial development, it also allowed the invention of the magazine form. Whether the very first was Gynasceum, sive Theatrum Mulierum (1586, fashion plates) or Erbauliche MonathsāUnterredungen (1663, edifying philosophical discussions) or Journal des Scavans (1665, book reviews), the form is accurately defined by David Abrahamson as bringing āhighāvalue interpretative information to specifically defined ā¦ audiencesā (Abrahamson 1996, p. 1).
Landmark inventions from the postāprinting press phase include James Hargreaves's spinning jenny (1764), Arkwright's water frame (1769), Trevithick's steam locomotive (1803) and, of course, Koenig and Bauer's steamādriven printing press, the first two of which were installed by The Times of London in 1814. The key magazine from this period was undoubtedly The Gentleman's Magazine, founded by Edward Cave in 1731. Not only was it the first periodical to feature the word āmagazineā in its title, it concerned itself with improving the social, cultural, and economic capital of the landed gentry who were its intended consumers, including ways of incorporating inventions of the industrialāagrarian revolution into their farms and estat...
