Thursday, June 13, 2013

Magazines are a brilliant invention, says Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter

Port magazine gathers together seven editors in celebration of 'a new golden age of magazine publishing'
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Seven enthusiastic magazine editors line up to boost their products in the Summer issue of Port. 

What does it take to make a great magazine? Seven editors who think they know are featured on the cover of the summer issue of Port magazine.
Port's editor-in-chief, Dan Crowe, decided on the cover story because he believes we are in "a new golden age of magazine publishing."
He contends that the current multi-platform offerings – in print and online, especially with apps – are a formidable enterprise.

So, to prove his point, he carries a series of interviews with Vanity Fair's famed editor Graydon Carter, the New York Times's Hugo Lindgren and GQ's Jim Nelson along with four others: Adam Moss of New York magazine; David Remnick of The New Yorker; Josh Tyrangiel of Bloomberg's BusinessWeek; and Scott Dadich of Wired.
He says it "proved radically difficult to get them all in the same room for the shoot" but he managed it, as you can see above. And all, not unnaturally, are enthusiastic about their products, and about the future of their trade.

Carter, editor of Vanity Fair since 1992, is quoted as saying: "A magazine is a brilliant invention. You take the best things you can find from around the world, you put together great stories, great photography and you give it to the consumers for $5.

"They can pass it on to somebody else; they can recycle it. If they lose it, they can buy another one. It's available everywhere, and we'll send it to their door for even less. That's a pretty good deal. Magazines are a very viable part of our lives and will be for as long as people are alive."
The writer, Matt Haber, is clearly unimpressed with what the net has to offer. After praising Vanity Fair's latest annual Hollywood issue (in February) for its "dizzying visual scrum" he writes:
"No internet slide-show, regardless of how many bells and whistles its developers add, could so effectively create the feeling of a real-life happening, captured imaginatively by a photographer and intelligently curated by an editor. That's the opposite of crowd-sourcing, the sloppily democratic ethos behind so much on the web."
That must be music to Carter's ears. He says: "Nothing in the magazine world has changed that much.
"It's still [uniting] a writer, a photographer, and a story, trying to get the right combination. We pace it the way an album is paced, create a mix that's pleasing."
Source: Port magazine

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