Death of Periodical Overlooked in Print’s Obituary

Printed items like wedding invitations, calendars, and parking tickets – eventually, we will digitize them. Will the digitization of these things, formalities, carry that much weight?

The death of the periodical, something we rarely talk about, carries more weight than the death of print. Soon, the very idea of the periodical will be extinct.

According to Wikipedia:

A periodical publication, or just periodical, is a published work that appears in a new edition on a regular schedule. The most familiar examples are the newspaper, often published daily, or weekly; or the magazine, typically published weekly, monthly or as a quarterly. Other examples would be a newsletter, a literary journal or learned journal, or a yearbook.

These examples all are related to the idea of an indefinitely continuing cycle of production and publication: newspapers plan to continue publishing, not to stop after a predetermined number of editions.

Some online magazines create the illusion of a periodical by releasing their issues in PDF, which is a more static format that can be downloaded and printed. Or, they release all their new content at once (i.e. every Monday, we offer new articles). But it’s not the same.

I realize that the death of the periodical is something that has already happened in many ways and a trend that’s not going to stop. However, I have some thoughts.

When I was a preteen, I subscribed to Jane, Teen, Teen People, and Seventeen. Each month, I anxiously awaited my new issues.

I loved receiving my magazine subscriptions in the mail before they hit newsstands. I felt like I was accessing something exclusive and special, something that was worth the wait.

I would keep the magazines by my bed and go through them slowly – I had to ration them until the next month’s batch of glossies.

When I grew older, I looked forward to weeklies like The New Yorker and dailies like The New York Times, mostly because I wanted to seem smart reading these magazines and newspapers. But The New Yorker comes every week, and those articles are really long. I could never keep up with the reading and usually ended up with piles on my bedroom floor. After a certain point, I only read the short stories.

In college, I didn’t subscribed to anything because receiving magazines/newspapers at my PO box was impractical. However, every trip to my parent’s house was a magazine binge.

Now, I don’t receive any magazines.

Think about what it means to subscribe to something, to an idea or cause. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, you are not only supporting something with your money but you are also supporting it with your approval and shared ideals.

When we stop subscribing to magazines and newspapers, in the sense that we no longer want them delivered to our door, in some way we are saying we no longer support the editors’ sentiments. We no longer trust them to deliver the exact news/information that we want to read.

Rebellious and empowered, we would rather be our own editors, turn to the web for the information we want to access. And when publications like The New York Times ask us to pay a monthly subscription fee, we revolt! We feel entitled to find our own information.

Periodicals no longer exist. I don’t have to wait for an issue to arrive. I simply search for an article, or it finds me. Friends send me articles, they post them on my Facebook wall, I find articles on Twitter, I read stuff via Google Reader or Google News.

Now, more than ever before, I am in love with the way media lets me in on a cultural conversation. I am connected to other people in this country and the world. On the Internet, especially, I can watch things unfold in real time, and I can see how my peers and fellow citizens are reacting on Twitter. I can also participate if I want.

I love being able to write blog posts in response to other blog posts, leave comments on news articles, copy and paste passages to use as examples to back up my own work. I just love all the communal aspects that come with being immersed in online media.

However, with print, you can achieve and maintain a certain comfortable distance. You can talk about a print article within an immediate circle of people or even respond by writing a letter to the editor. You can step away from print and think about other things. The periodical gives you time to think, to breathe.

The truth is you really can’t be aware all the time. You have to focus on what’s immediate, on the news in your own life.

After a certain point, all the information just becomes noise without filter, noise you can no longer mediate.

(Photo by sheilaellen)

Tagged as: media, new media