MAGAZINES AND ME
A backstory that foreshadowed my impulsive desire to write stuff without actually wanting to be a writer.
I love journalism. It all began with magazines. My love for the work that journalists do is not a casual thing. When I look back on my life, it is a foundational thing.
My father was a media director in the Mad Men era of the advertising industry. This meant that every issue of every magazine imaginable was mailed to my house because Dad was on the complimentary subscription list. Our postman had a hard job. I’d walk home from school, gather up the magazines on the stoop, drop them on the coffee table, get some milk and cookies from the kitchen, and then I would start reading as best I could for my age.
Newsweek, Variety, Vanity Fair, The Economist, Scientific American, Good Housekeeping, National Enquirer, Woman’s Day, Playboy, Vogue, Esquire, Time, Seventeen, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, National Geographic, US News and World Report, Saturday Evening Post, Forbes, Car and Driver, Road & Track, Fortune, Jet, Family Circle, True Confessions, Ebony, LIFE, The Atlantic, TV Guide, Sports Illustrated, Sports Afield, Barron’s, Ad Age, The NY Times Sunday Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Ladies’ Home Journal, Field & Stream.
I was reading all of these, or at least skimming them, issue by issue, for a half dozen years when my young adult brain was forming.
To their credit, my parents did not involve themselves in this after-school behavior. I was on my own to absorb magazine content without any filters or pre-conceived ideas about why the writing, pictures, captions, cartoons, and graphics were what they were. Nobody told me I had to read them or not to read them. Nobody decided what was “appropriate” content for me. I decided for myself each day. This went on for years, from 5th grade through 11th grade, more or less. Reading magazines after school was my informal and unstructured routine. It was the 1970’s. Magazines were important. Magazines were successful. Journalism was a very big deal.
I think we all have voices inside our head that talk to us. I suspect that mine are the evolution of all these journalists writing for all of these magazines.
I was not the “target audience” reader for any of these publications. These magazines arrived at my house because my dad had a lot of ability to influence where advertising got placed. Matching up the target consumers of his client’s products with the target readers of magazines was a core part of his skillset. But, for this ten-year-old boy, it was all amazing content coming at me like a river and I was swimming upstream.
Ironically, my mom paid for me to get a subscription to Boy’s Life. No disrespect, but that magazine seemed lame what with having to compete for my attention with the list above.
My personal sense for the definition of journalism was molded instinctually by this behavior and so was my world view. For me, “journalism” is a very big tent indeed; a review of good recipes for brownies, recapping a presidential election, an explanation of the universe, an interview with a famous movie star, fashion advice for Black people and fashion advice for teen girls, the migration habits of giraffes, and on and on – it was all intriguing journalism to me. Pictures of baseball games, pictures of naked women, pictures of the solar system, pictures of war, pictures of food, pictures of zebras – it was all interesting, awesome, and challenging to my unformed mind.
It’s hard to explain now, but I just was not aware that all this content was meant to be placed inside distinct buckets, or genres, if that is the better word. I never remember sorting it out in terms of what was boring and what was interesting. To use a modern phrase, it was all good.
My brain was a dry sponge soaking up whatever liquid was spilled across the coffee table on any given day. Sorry to mix metaphors but the river coming at me flowed like this…
The World Series > The mini skirt > Nixon > Vietnam > The Pill > Bob Dylan > The draft > Studio 54 > Watergate > Hugh Hefner > The Rolling Stones > Dating tips > Elvis Presley > Munich Olympics massacre > The Playboy mansion > Toll House cookies > Abortion > China diplomacy > Hunting deer > Terrorism > Patty Hearst > The solar system > The fall of Saigon > The Cold War > The Superbowl > Roe v. Wade > The Allman Brothers > Three Mile Island > Disco and Punk > CBGB > Apollo 13 > Spiro Agnew > Weather Underground > Jimi Hendrix dead > Janis Joplin dead > Kent State massacre > and on and on and on… All of it completely unstructured in terms of what I learned and when I learned it. How great is that?
I became sophisticated about the ways that content was organized and presented in each magazine. Obviously, there was no time or reason to read magazines cover-to-cover. I taught myself to use the table of contents for some magazines, I learned to start from the back with others. Sometimes, I would fly through The New Yorker just to read each of the cartoons and try to figure out why they were funny (come on, you’ve done that too!) Here is a more complex example: Scientific American was way over my head. I learned that the first and final paragraph of an article was comprehensible if I worked at it. In between, the pictures, graphics, and captions were usually something I could grasp if I tried hard enough. Reading Scientific American gave me a self-taught strategy for college textbooks that no teacher ever explained to me. Did I jump to the pictures in Playboy? Well, of course I did. But, I also found mind-blowing interviews with famous people like Frank Sinatra in Playboy too. For some magazines, the letters-to-the-editor were amazing, for others, boring. I knew which was which. After a while, I got hip to the idea that the stories in True Confessions were probably not true at all.
Decades later, I would look back to realize that the most valuable part of my education came from reading magazines without supervision. My grades in high school were nothing special but my English SAT score was off the charts. My parents and teachers were shocked that I was in the top 1% in the nation, and so was I. At the time, I had no ability to draw a connection between those hours spent with magazines and my SAT score and, as for everybody else, they had no idea that I had spent my time this way in the first place.
A valuable education reaches far beyond academics. I went through puberty learning about women from Cosmopolitan, Playboy, Seventeen and Esquire. Funny, but true.
My “superpower” during my career was the strategic ability to instantly and intuitively recognize how disparate things were related to each other – how tactical decisions in one area would cause outcomes in other areas – how the digital distribution of content would bring about the end of magazines. Stuff like that. I suspect that subconscious skill was nurtured in those formative years reading magazines.
It was all journalism to me, and it was all awesome.
I followed my father’s footsteps to also become a media director. My Dad shepherded clients through the growth of cable television. I shepherded them through the growth of the Internet. It is with no joy at all that I was among the very first executives to explain to magazine publishers why the business of printing content on paper was doomed.
My favorite thing about myself is also my greatest torment – my subconscious brain grinds hard on everything all the time. It’s not selective and it never turns off. It dawns on me only now that my formative years reading magazines in such a unique way just might explain it all.
Love it. A stack of paper magazines is not always an attention-grabber, but to your credit, I got sucked into the story!
You're totally right that the UNstructured nature of the experience was crucial. YOU got to roam free through the way the adult world thought... or wanted you to think they thought!
For me, the "marketing a-ha" moment occurred when a McDonald's opened down the street. It made me think, how did they decide to put this here? Why this brand on this corner? (It was Middle America in the 70s, people!)
At the time I was reading "News from Nowhere", the story of how TV news got CREATED -- it didn't just HAPPEN! Wow - that was a revelation to me. It woke me up to the active process that created action... which is what we were part of for the last few decades.
And yes, it was a nerdy topic for a nerdy kid. Let's just say I wasn't wasting my sports talent on, well, sports!
Great essay Mark. I love the reflective nature of how you came to acquire some of your attributes. With time comes wisdom and with wisdom comes- in my opinion- a responsibility to educate the next generation..:) Keep it going!