Great story in New York Magazine titled “The Wail of the 1%.“  Just amazing quotes.  Here’s one genius:

“People just don’t get it,” she says. “I’m attached to my BlackBerry. I was at my doctor the other day, and my doctor said to me, ‘You know, I like that when I leave the office, I leave.’ I get calls at two in the morning, when the market moves. That costs money. If they keep compensation capped, I don’t know how the deals get done. They’re taking Wall Street and throwing it in the East River.”

How did all these people make so much money?  The lack of intelligence or rationality is amazing.  Just morons.  Don’t you get it?  Your value was based on how much Wall Street made…Wall Street HAS CRASHED.  Without tax payer money none of you are getting anything.  And, believe me, the most basic job that involves manual labor is a million times tougher than yours.

Reading their crap truly embarrasses me to be a fellow American, let alone a fellow human being.  Shut the fuck up, grow up and grow a brain.  Whiny babies.

Three blog posts made an impression on me last week. Two offer a welcome reminder of the continuing value that the market places on quality content, the third agrees, but tells editors to take this notion seriously and start delivering.

The good news first. Gabriel Sherman, a contributing editor at New York magazine, says that the magazine isn’t dying. Citing the growing list of magazines that have ceased publication, Sherman acknowledges that the closure count might suggest the magazine industry is locked in the same “death spiral” as the newspaper industry. But he argues that it’s more complex, and more hopeful, in the magazine sector.

Sherman believes that there are too many mediocre magazines created simply as weapons in the battle for market share and with little reference to real reader need. Line extensions and me-too titles shoe-horned into former growth areas like property are imploding under the weight of the credit crunch.

Sherman says the publishers of these titles put advertising first and editorial excellence second, and they are paying the price:

Magazines still retain emotional capital, and publishers need to remember that they’re not in the advertising-delivery business. If a magazine can speak directly to the reader, advertising dollars will follow. Titles launched to capitalize on a booming market segment will never  survive.

In the online context, but echoing Sherman’s call for quality content, interactive marketing man Seth Godin says media execs choosing between the high road and the low road  need to realise that readers have a choice. The low road of “manipulative media” substitutes audience grabbing tricks for real value and only works when the audience continues to show up.  Godin contrasts all-too familiar attempts at get-rich-quick gimmickry with useful content that delivers traffic, click-throughs and, ultimately, sustainable revenue. He sumarises simply:

If you need to be manipulative or non-transparent to make a buck, time to rethink the plan.

That’s all good then. Content is still King. Editorial excellence is back at the top of the agenda… except, if you believe Mark Newman writing in Folio, where he blames editors for the implosion in the magazine market, not the greedy commercial types that Sherman and Godin take to task.

According to Newman, for too many senior editors, the notion of editorial excellence is frozen in the amber of  ”this is how we’ve always done it”. He says he is “baffled” by editors that settle for the status quo:

I’ve seen that time and time again, especially at some of my past publications, many of which have died painful, pitiful deaths—usually because the top editor was fine with things just the way they always were when they first started at the magazine 20 years ago!

Veteran editor Newman, currently at Southern Breeze, runs through a list of things that editors should be doing to improve their titles. He focuses on design and fresh editorial topics and ideas; I would add serious attention to new digital formats. The specifics depend on the title involved, but the point is to keep your magazine relevant to readers. 

Considering these three blog posts together I’m left with one pretty clear thought. Quality content is a valuable commodity, but only if we deliver it. We know this instinctively as magazine professionals, the problem is when the word doesn’t match the deed and we get stuck in the past, ignoring contemporary reader needs.

We all need to keep our magazines, online or off, relevant and the only way that is going to happen is if we…  well I’ll let Mark Newman tell you:

Get off your hands, pull your head out of the dirt, and remember what it was that made you get into this field in the first place. Otherwise, learn the difference between “large” and “super-size” because you’re deadweight in the magazine industry’s future.

The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, Germany.

Gabriel Sherman
The New Republic

On February 3, Berkley Books, the mass-market division of the Penguin Group, is slated to publish a Holocaust memoir titled Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived. The author, Herman Rosenblat, who is a retired television repairman now living in Miami, recounts his experience as a teenage boy during the Holocaust at Schlieben, a sub-division of the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp. In the winter of 1945, Herman meets a nine-year-old girl–herself a Jew masquerading as a Christian at a nearby farm–when she shows up one day outside the camp and tosses him an apple over the barbed-wire fence. For the next seven months, the girl at the fence delivers Herman food each day, until he is suddenly transferred to another camp. Fast forward to Coney Island, 1957: Herman, now in his 20s and settled in New York, reluctantly agrees to a blind date with a young Polish immigrant named Roma Radzicki. They speak of their time during the war. Roma mentions a boy she had helped to survive in a camp. She said she fed him apples. A flash of recognition. Months later, Herman marries Roma, his angel at the fence.

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