BC Business
Recently, I wrapped up a college course I was teaching called “Writing for Magazines.” Twenty-one aspiring writers—most too young to remember the pre-Internet era—sat attentively, if quizzically, for eight weeks as I made the case for that 18th-century technology: the magazine.
The course was part of an intensive magazine publishing program; somebody else taught about design, another imparted the cryptology that is editing. In my class, we talked about Bob Fulford’s Saturday Night and Clay Falker’s New York, and studied stellar feature articles by award-winning writers like Jane Kramer and David Foster Wallace.
For me, the experience produced mixed emotions. I love magazines, and love to proselytize about their virtues whenever I get the chance. But at the end of eight weeks, I couldn’t escape the feeling that, much like a Grade 10 teacher on the BNA Act, I was peddling moldy history.
Magazines are undoubtedly a more considered medium than the Internet—with original research, in-depth analysis and fresh insight being their hallmark. And people hold onto magazines for months, if not years, while the Internet is a constant work-in-progress.
But my students are graduates of the Internet age, and they value the immediacy and interactivity that print can never afford. They signed up for the magazine publishing course, I think, for much the same reasons one takes etiquette lessons: it seems a good and proper thing to study. Magazines have the weight of history—appealing to diehards like me—but the Internet has the weight of currency. I may not have converted them all, but with some luck there is a young fogey (or two) among them—someone willing to embrace the technological relic that is my calling.