2/9 链接 https://evan.atavist.com/the-life-and-death-and-life-of-magazines
Title ：The Life and Death and Life of Magazines
部分原文：
Before you delve into what will no doubt be the final edition ofThe Best American Magazine Writing,let us all pause to memorialize the demise of the great magazine story. Indeed, you may be deciding to purchase this volume as a kind of collectors’ edition, one to pull down from the shelf one day and regale your kids with tales of a time when quality magazines thrived. Perhaps you hope to later pawn it off on eBay to some Brooklyn hotel proprietor, seeking a touch of classy nostalgia for the lobby.
It’s been a good run for magazine writing—at least 150 years, by most calculations. But I’ve been reading up on the state of the business and I can report back that the future is dire. The enemy, it turns out, is you and I. Or rather, it is what the demon Internet has done to us, through the Web and the smartphones upon which it is consumed. Always in the pocket, always bleeping its siren call of apps and games, Twitter and Snapchat, and every other flashing distraction—or, as us magazine-lovers might say, affliction. Always conspiring to eliminate our desire for prose longer than a brunch photo caption.
Now, of course, the Internet has decimated the tattered remains of our attention span. Worse, we’re told that it has paradoxically fostered a new scourge for great magazine writing: more of it. In just the last five years, web sites and magazines new and old—from Nautilus to BuzzFeed to Matter toThe Atavist Magazine, which I edit—have added to an ambitious resurgence in long, serious magazine writing. While this might seem like a sign of life, critics have explained that in fact such efforts are diminishing this great craft. Terms like “longform” and #hashtags like #longreads—through which readers recommend work they appreciate to other potential readers—only serve to dilute what was once the purview of discriminating enthusiasts alone. “The problem,” Jonathan Mahler wrote in the New York Times in 2014, “is that long-form stories are too often celebrated simply because they exist.” It was bad enough when our capacity to produce and read great stories collapsed. Now it seems we’ve turned around and loved magazine writing to death.
Title ：The Life and Death and Life of Magazines
部分原文：
Before you delve into what will no doubt be the final edition ofThe Best American Magazine Writing,let us all pause to memorialize the demise of the great magazine story. Indeed, you may be deciding to purchase this volume as a kind of collectors’ edition, one to pull down from the shelf one day and regale your kids with tales of a time when quality magazines thrived. Perhaps you hope to later pawn it off on eBay to some Brooklyn hotel proprietor, seeking a touch of classy nostalgia for the lobby.
It’s been a good run for magazine writing—at least 150 years, by most calculations. But I’ve been reading up on the state of the business and I can report back that the future is dire. The enemy, it turns out, is you and I. Or rather, it is what the demon Internet has done to us, through the Web and the smartphones upon which it is consumed. Always in the pocket, always bleeping its siren call of apps and games, Twitter and Snapchat, and every other flashing distraction—or, as us magazine-lovers might say, affliction. Always conspiring to eliminate our desire for prose longer than a brunch photo caption.
Now, of course, the Internet has decimated the tattered remains of our attention span. Worse, we’re told that it has paradoxically fostered a new scourge for great magazine writing: more of it. In just the last five years, web sites and magazines new and old—from Nautilus to BuzzFeed to Matter toThe Atavist Magazine, which I edit—have added to an ambitious resurgence in long, serious magazine writing. While this might seem like a sign of life, critics have explained that in fact such efforts are diminishing this great craft. Terms like “longform” and #hashtags like #longreads—through which readers recommend work they appreciate to other potential readers—only serve to dilute what was once the purview of discriminating enthusiasts alone. “The problem,” Jonathan Mahler wrote in the New York Times in 2014, “is that long-form stories are too often celebrated simply because they exist.” It was bad enough when our capacity to produce and read great stories collapsed. Now it seems we’ve turned around and loved magazine writing to death.
2楼2016-02-09 22:01收起回复
