magazines – Tina Amirtha

I have a troubling announcement. It has taken me over half a year to finally get past the introduction of Paul Ford’s story, “What is Code?”, for Bloomberg Businessweek. It was published in June 2015.

Yesterday, I decided that I wanted to read longform online but instead of just clicking the down arrow on my keyboard in order to finish a piece, I thought I would shake it up a bit.

Ford’s story features a little robot cheerleader cheering the reader on as she attempts to read a story that fills the entire length of a print magazine. There are animated GIFs and short videos that lessen an otherwise dull task: scrolling down a webpage.

For the record, neither the writing nor the topic prevented me from continuing further. I really liked the format of the online piece from the first time I started reading it. And my coding background immediately drew me to the piece. After seeing Twitter people start tweeting it out last year, I read the introduction a mere seven minutes after I saw that it had been posted online.

But then I saved it to Instapaper. Which turned the story into a limp, dry sock when it was supposed to be a lively, beating heart on my computer screen.

Instead of sifting through my Instapaper queue, I just googled Ford’s story and have been reading it directly on Bloomberg.com.

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glamour.com

This past Thursday, the US National Magazine Awards recognized Glamour magazine as Magazine of the Year, the organization’s top prize, for excellence in print and web publishing (via NY Magazine). Between the ages of 17 and 23, I was a devoted Glamour reader, while my readership trailed off thereafter. Now that spring has rolled around in my new European residence, I have decided to refill the cultural void that the magazine once filled by snapping up any magazines that have caught my eye in the last month or two. And guess what? Among the New Yorkers, Vanity Fairs, international editions of Elle, and Marie Claire, I have stumbled across two editions of the Spanish and Dutch Glamours.

As is telling of a website that is translated into a myriad of languages for different international markets, the Glamour folks are doing pretty well, commercially speaking. The group is able to consistently publish their glossies for the 18-25 female age group, maintain the same columns that one would expect to find in any edition of the magazine, and secure top names in entertainment to fill their features pages. Content-wise, I give them kudos for setting Kate Moss (!) up for their Dutch cover. Despite the industry-wide decline in print publishing, Condé Nast has found a little treasure in Glamour.

However, the dealings of standardizing the magazine’s style over several countries has its price: page 77 of the Spanish April edition and page 96 of the Dutch March edition have identical spreads. What’s more is that once one of the international arms actually gains control their content, that market is free to create a complete disaster, as anyone reviewing the pages of the Dutch designers feature in the March 2010 issue from Holland or the one-for-all interview of Robert Pattinson in the April 2010 issue of Spain’s magazine. Publishing an article of Q&A is unacceptable, unless you are the Proust Questionnaire of VF. You may as well give us the interview tape! I will hand it to the women at Spanish Glamour, though; their photo spreads are quite poised.

Anyhow, growing out of Glamour has been a slow process. I still find some of their content relevant to my lifestyle, as I have previously blogged about. Pandora Young rather acerbically points out at Media Bistro, it’s “Barbie feminism” enjoying accolades for airy copy, but as long as their readers find it relevant, it will continue to reign as queen.

Category: magazines

Paul Ford: What is Code?

Spring Magazine Round -Up: Glamour