Everyone's looking for a way to save print. Generally--and counterintuitively--we've turned to the internet. I have two pieces of anecdotal evidence that suggest a different way out--viz. be better.
First, from Jeremy Peters's piece on Rolling Stone in today's The New York Times (here):
But no more. Those same subversive tendencies that led Jann Wenner to help found the magazine in 1967 were reawakened under the presidency of George W. Bush. And now, rather unexpectedly, Mr. Wenner’s magazine is hitting its journalistic stride — aggressively tackling the American government on financial regulation, the environment and the war in Afghanistan — with a Democrat in the White House, one that Mr. Wenner supported. ...
Rolling Stone’s explosive piece “The Runaway General,” which last week brought a disgraceful end to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s career, was just the latest in a string of articles resonating in the nation’s corridors of power.
Its excoriating takedown of Goldman Sachs last summer was one of the most provocative and widely debated pieces of journalism to come out of the financial crisis. In the article, the writer Matt Taibbi described the investment bank as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
And this month, the magazine published a critical take on the Obama administration’s regulation of the oil industry, which started a firestorm on cable news and in the blogosphere. (The current issue contains a follow-up on BP’s plans to drill in the Arctic.)
And the result of this journalistic renaissance?
As many of his peers in the magazine world have gathered moss, Mr. Wenner has pushed Rolling Stone back uphill. While its single copy sales for the first three months of 2010 were down slightly from 2009, it has attracted enormous attention for its political coverage and consistently draws a young readership, with an average age of 30.
Over all, the biweekly magazine’s circulation has grown to about 1.5 million copies an issue from about 1.4 million in 2008.
That's right; the magazine grew! The point? Let your writers run. In the era of blogs and twitter and texts and everything else bemoaned by curmudgeons and worshiped by technophiles, perhaps there's a space--a need--for the kind of long-form, adversarial, and deep work championed by Rolling Stone.
And, dare I say it, Wilder Voice.
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