It’s a perennial space shortage in the garage attic that leads me into a week or two of bittersweet nostalgia each spring.
This year, I pulled several armfuls of old magazines and newspapers from the boxes where they’ve been awaiting a second read for years. As usual, I hunkered down in front of the wood stove and dutifully glanced back through each of them, sorting them into two piles, one to recycle and one to repack and review again at a later date. The two stacks, as usual, were about equal in height when I was done.
I like to think of the process as a forward-looking effort to step cleanly and efficiently into the future, but as the pages turn, I can’t help but think about the past. While some of my nostalgia comes from rereading dated stories, reliving as history what were once current events, I think I’m more sentimental about the changes I see in the print media—the industry in which I’ve spent most of my adult life. The newspaper and magazine business has changed a lot over the years.
One doesn’t have to go very far back to see some of those changes quite dramatically. Most of the pulp I went through this year was published between 2002 and 2010—a mix of glossy sports monthlies, weekly news journals and daily papers.
The overall trend was starkly obvious: most pubs got a little thinner with each passing year.
There were other changes, many directly related to the reduction in page count. Some publications reduced the number of words on the page; others reduced the type size. Some publications went from bi-monthly to monthly. Almost all publications underwent some sort of redesign or introduced new features just during the three or four years of back issues I glanced through. With a reduction of space, graphic design played an increasing role on each page, with more sidebars and info boxes and images overlaid with text sprinkled about.
Many observers of the modern American media have proclaimed print media a dying industry. The pessimists blame all sorts of things for the demise of print, including the rise of the Internet and the fall of education and literacy. And there is some truth there.
But my annual spring cleaning always leaves me more hopeful than not.
Holding those old periodicals in my hands, I connect with them in ways I cannot connect with images flickering on a computer screen—not even a new tablet computer. It’s that sort of connection, I’m sure, that my 11-year-old daughter seeks when she declines the offer to download an electronic version of Stephenie Meyer’s Midnight Sun, preferring to “wait to read it in hardcover.”
It isn’t a Luddite thing. It doesn’t signify a rejection of technology. Rather, it is a preference for a particular kind of finished product—a product enhanced continually by the advance of publishing technology. The portability of a printed periodical, the fact that printed material can be preserved in a box in an attic for years to come, surely bodes fair for the survival of the printed word—that and the ability of publishers to continue meeting challenges with innovation and a sense of duty to their readers.
As I head off to the recycling center with piles of magazines, many probably fatter than they’ll ever be again, I marvel not at the evidence of decline in print media, but at the evidence of resourcefulness and resilience within the industry.
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In this issue of the Valley Advocate, you may note some of the changes arising from this year’s re-examination of our own portfolio, which now includes not only the Advocate, but our monthly arts magazine, Preview Massachusetts, and our bi-annual wedding publication, I Do.
To free up a bit more space for news in the front section of the Advocate, we will begin jumping the second column of Chuck Shepherd’s popular News of the Weird column to the classified section, along with E.J. Pettinger’s Mild Abandon cartoon. Jumping Shepherd’s column, we hope, will also draw readers to a new Home and Garden section of our classifieds. There readers will find a new weekly column by Caleb Rounds, who writes the popular Talk Dirt to Me blog at www.valleyadvocate.com.
In the weeks and months ahead, we have other changes in store for you, including our newly redesigned Best of the Valley Readers’ Poll edition, which hits the stands mid-April. Come June, the Advocate will first launch a new bi-annual parenting magazine; later that month, Preview Massachusetts will release a dining special issue that features recipes from some of the best chefs in the region. In September, the Advocate will hit the street with its first annual Movers and Shakers edition, highlighting some of the people who make things happen here in the Valley.
The Valley Advocate, which will celebrate its 40th anniversary next year, has changed a lot since 1973. Undoubtedly it must continue to change and grow with the needs and opportunities of the next 40 years.
