Search Results for: D Magazine

Judging by the Cover: How the Magazine Industry’s Identity Crisis Is Playing Out on Its Front Page

Longreads Pick

Digitization has profoundly altered the way magazines sell and get produced, yet traditional print covers still have a strong cultural and economic impact. Cover designs now have to strike a delicate balance between satisfying loyal subscribers and attracting new digital readers who engage on social media.

Source: The Ringer
Published: Sep 4, 2018
Length: 20 minutes (5,184 words)

NYT Magazine’s Rita Dove on What Poetry Might Grant Unsuspecting News Readers

Longreads Pick

Brendan Fitzgerald interviews Rita Dove on how she plans to approach her upcoming one-year stint as poetry editor at New York Times Magazine. Taking over for Terrance Hayes this summer, Dove has free rein to select a poem that will appear in the magazine each week, along with her short introduction. Dove is the fourth poet to hold the poetry editor position.

Published: May 25, 2018
Length: 7 minutes (1,794 words)

When Sartre and Beauvoir Started a Magazine

(Photo: Getty)

Agnès Poirier | Excerpt adapted from Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-50 | Henry Holt and Co. | February 2018 | 20 minutes 5,275 words)

In September 1945, together with their band of students and friends, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were working night and day finalizing the first issue of their journal Les Temps modernes. They had launched the idea at the end of 1944, choosing the title as a tribute to Chaplin’s Modern Times, and, apart from Camus who was too busy editing Combat, they could rely on almost everyone else to write for them — Communists, Catholics, Gaullists, and Socialists: their schoolmate and liberal philosopher friend Raymond Aron, the Marxist phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, the anthropologist and art critic Michel Leiris, the Gallimard supremo Jean Paulhan, and even Picasso, who had agreed to design the cover and logo, along with a new generation of writers who were submitting articles and ideas such as Jacques-Laurent Bost. The British writer Philip Toynbee would contribute a Letter from London, while novels and essays the committee particularly liked would be serialized prior to their publication or with a view to attracting a potential publisher. Les Temps modernes would be a laboratory of new ideas and a talent scout rolled into one. Simone de Beauvoir had personally approached the minister of information, the Gaullist and résistant Jacques Soustelle, to ask for an allocation of paper.

Gallimard had agreed to finance the journal and to give the team a little office where they could hold their editorial meetings. The first issue was planned for October 1, 1945. Jean-Paul Sartre was made the head of the publication, “Monsieur le Directeur,” and he thought it important to make himself available to everyone. This would be democracy and public debate in action. He committed to receiving anyone who asked to see him at the magazine’s office at 5 rue Sébastien Bottin every Tuesday and Friday afternoon between five thirty and seven thirty. This commitment was printed at the beginning of the magazine, along with the telephone number Littré 28-91, where they could be reached. Sartre had decided to dedicate the first issue of Les Temps modernes “To Dolorès,” in all simplicity. Simone did not blink an eye.

In the first issue, Sartre announced loud and clear what Les Temps modernes stood for. It was to be the megaphone that would carry their thoughts far and wide.

Every writer of bourgeois origin has known the temptation of irresponsibility. I personally hold Flaubert personally responsible for the repression that followed the Commune because he did not write a line to try to stop it. It was not his business, people will perhaps say. Was the Calas trial Voltaire’s business? Was Dreyfus’s condemnation Zola’s business? We at Les Temps modernes do not want to miss a beat on the times we live in. Our intention is to influence the society we live in. Les Temps modernes will take sides.

The tone was set, the thinking promised to be muscular and the writing fearless.
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How to Run a Magazine in the Desert

AP Photo/Reed Saxon

Either you’re the kind of person who wants to start a magazine or the kind who can’t understand why anyone would start a magazine. Well, Ken Layne started the magazine Desert Oracle in Joshua Tree, California, and it’s struck a chord with readers.

At Pacific Standard, Max Genekov profiles the determined desert resident who designs, edits, and ships each issue of his independent magazine himself. Following a winding path through established media, Layne landed in this scorching, brown, 8,000-person town and decided the arid West needed its own literary outlet. Unlike many publications, Desert Oracle is funded entirely from subscriptions. Readership is brisk. The reception has been enthusiastic. Subscriptions are growing, but how does one person successfully run a small publication? Like the desert itself, Layne’s Oracle contains a peculiar magic that speaks to a particular but motley breed of people.

Of the people living in Joshua Tree, Layne imagines his work is most enjoyed by the “intentional desert residents” who came out to Joshua Tree and its environs for the same reasons of secluded beauty and personal growth that he did. This is, in fact, most people in Joshua Tree—the population nearly doubled between 2000 and 2010, according to Census data—but Layne is happy to have some long-time residents of the town as subscribers and retailers. But he knew that people would be interested throughout the desert and even in the country at large. At first, Layne focused on about 10 desert towns for marketing, taking the Oracle everywhere from Sedona to Moab. He would walk into stores and interpretive centers, knowing that most wouldn’t ever work but trying to sell nevertheless. But then he would show the guide to some people and he’d “see that sparkle,” and they would entirely understand what he was going for. The Twentynine Palms Inn was one such early adopter; all guests at the hotel can find a complimentary copy in their room.

“The Desert Oracle is one of those things that is so good you want to initially keep it to yourself, but we fought the urge and ordered the publication by the case knowing that these collections of stories would resonate with our guests,” says Breanne Dusastre, the marketing director at Twentynine Palms Inn. “There isn’t anyone else out there curating and telling stories the way Ken Layne is.”

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