Death of Print vs. Print ♥ Digital: Jettison Quarterly, Couture, and Advertising

If you roll up a copy of any major American newspaper and hold it to your ear, what many people say you will hear is the swan song of print as a viable mass medium for information dissemination. While you don't seem to see new print magazines launching nearly as often as you see new online magazines launching, the former is never far from the latter, influencing content, infrastructure, formatting...

This is especially apparent when you look at a magazine like Chicago's Jettison Quarterly, an online arts, entertainment and culture  magazine that reads exactly -- exactly -- like a print magazine.

Yes, true, you can get a thumbnail view of all the pages and pick the page you want to go to...


and you can also get to what you want quickly using the "go to page" gadget in the corner. But to flip through the magazine, or to turn the page on the article you're reading, you pull one leaf across another just like you would flip through a bound print publication. The result is that reading Jettison feels closer to the tactile experience of idly leafing through a print magazine than it does to the linking-and-looking-through-tabs experience of, say, Slate magazine.

Which is interesting, considering people cite the tactile more than any other reason when explaining why they don't think e-media will ever totally eclipse print media. People like to touch stuff.  People like to touch stuff they're reading. The sensation of holding a book or magazine does seem to affect readers' experience of text. It makes about as much ostensible sense as turning your car radio down when you're looking for an address, but still, everybody does it.

I know I personally absorb and digest text more thoroughly when I can write all over it as I'm reading it. I also can't be the only one who finds reading much more spontaneously enjoyable when it doesn't involve lugging around yet another heavy electrical device with an exorbitant price tag, special carrying case, and monthly data plan.

Jettison fashion editor Jamie Roelofs also points out another difference between print fashion glossies and their online counterparts: space for big, beautiful couture ads. Online ads have a tendency to be banners that are easy to avoid looking at, animated or flashing boxes that are annoying to look at, or pop-ups that your computer blocks altogether. In print magazines, particularly fashion magazines, the ads are a part of the actual reading experience; the whole art-as-advertising-as-art aspect of couture producing beautifully styled and designed full - or even double - page ads that draw your eye and capture your attention using a blend of fine art and marketing techniques that you simply don't see in a pop-up ad.

2010 Elle.com ad

2008 print ad appearing in Elle magazine

While you can't roll a Kindle up in your back pocket and take it to the beach like you can a thrift store paperback, thrift store paperback revenue doesn't drive an enormous chunk of the economy. The juggernaut that is advertising, on the other hand, does. So as long as Advertising <3 Print, Print won't be singing a swan song any time soon.

-Originally appeared in July 2010 on the blog of the Chicago Underground Library, as part of our lead-up to Printers Ball