The New York Review of Magazines

Fader

By Tom Meagher

IN New York City’s downtown social circles, “Williamsburg” and “L-train” have become code words to describe the young, relentlessly fashionable trendsetters who have colonized the gentrified North Brooklyn neighborhood and commandeered its subway line. Since its debut five years ago, the Fader has emerged as the L-train of magazines, taking its readers to the cutting edge of indie rock, hip-hop music and fashion. Like the much-discussed Williamsburg denizens, the magazine can be patronizing and solipsistic, but its allure lies in its style, energy and bravado.

The Manhattan-based bimonthly took its name from the vital equipment of hip-hop disc jockeys, the switch that allows them to play from two turntables at the same time. The Fader’s staff, however, looks beyond that narrow focus.

“Rock culture sort of exploded, and we found ourselves immersed in that,” said Knox Robinson, the editor-in-chief. “We’re trying to perceive the changing dynamic in rock culture.”

Robinson, who at 29 was promoted this winter to run the magazine, believes the Fader and its readers are concerned with more than just the coolest, most esoteric bands the city has to offer. “We use music as an excuse to look at various nuances in culture around the world,” he said. “Sometimes I say it’s a little ‘zine. That’s what we really try to do with it. It’s a ‘zine with amazing photography and paper quality.”

The magazine’s intent is to offer a casual, intimate read for the style-conscious and those whose tastes are too obscure or too elite to find anything of interest in the mainstream music magazines. For the rap and rock aficionados who consider themselves truly fashionable, magazines like Rolling Stone and Spin have approached complete obsolescence. The hip eschew them in favor of the Fader and its peers such as Tokion, Nylon and England’s The Face.

Like its readers, the Fader’s writers definitely believe they are into what’s good. Their articles read the way Robinson talks. They sound smug, sarcastic and condescending, but they have the sort of insider knowledge and good old-fashioned chutzpah that make you respect them. They are filled with the glib, self-referential wit that passes for insight in most music magazines. It may not be philosophical, but it is often funny.

In the December/January issue, an article hyping Loretta Lynn as the next best-selling country artist provides the perfect example: “The drink is Pabst, trucker hats are required, Johnny Cash records are essential and cowboy boots just look so hot with your Gloria Vanderbilt denim mini-skirt that there is no way they can be resisted,” Miguel Banuelos wrote. “But rest assured, after it’s all said and done, Loretta Lynn will outlast all of the outfits, the hairdos, and all of the insincerity.”

The real draw of the magazine is its visual flair. It initially caught my eye with its covers. Unlike most magazines, where the back is coveted advertising real estate, the Fader reserves both of its covers for the music and artists it champions. Every issue showcases different musicians, from Beck to Outkast to Joe Strummer, on the front and back.

It gives nearly as much space to fashion, art and photography as it devotes to music. Robinson said the goal has always been to capture the reader with the kind of dramatic layouts and photography that the mainstream titles don’t offer. The use of fashion spreads, including one recent shoot inside an L-train, helps break the monotony that could settle into a 192-page magazine. The photography informs the larger visual aesthetic of the magazine. A portfolio of partygoers in Mali, another of Northern Alliance guerillas in Afghanistan and a third of time-lapse photos of the streetlights of New York show how wide the magazine’s lens can be.

The fact that the magazine’s readers comprise an educated, cosmopolitan, artistic clique betrays its greatest weakness, though. Like many struggling rock bands, the Fader believes that it carries far more influence and import than it actually does. I’d wager most of its readers believe the same thing about themselves. But while such strut and swagger would be off-putting in an older magazine, the Fader can get away with it. The brash ego of youth is infectious in spite of itself.

The Fader ultimately succeeds in informing and entertaining the music-minded culture hound. It has the right mix of visual panache and ultra-hip condescension, and it forcefully exudes an air of authority. Here’s almost all you need to know to impress the other straphangers on the L-train.

Readers, Lament

Why you won't hear about the next James Joyce
By Tom Meagher

IN the past decade, the book review has gone from a serious, taken-for-granted ingredient of newspapers and newsmagazines to a near-endangered species. At least four major U.S. dailies, from San Jose to Philadelphia, stopped publishing Sunday review supplements. Many others reduced the weekly space they allotted to books. Whereas ten years ago, both Time and Newsweek featured regular, weekly book sections, finding a review in either today requires a good eye and a little luck. Only a halfdozen newspapers continue to publish standalone book sections. The coverage of literature as an art form, it seems, has been relegated to the space between the movie reviews and the personal ads.

Colorado’s Rocky Mountain News folded its eight-page book section three years ago when the paper stopped publishing on Sundays. “When I had the pullout, we had one regular ad,” books editor, Patti Thorn said. It was from Tattered Cover, a local bookstore. Thorn’s section became a part of the Friday entertainment coverage.

Shortly after, papers around the country felt the strain of the struggling economy. Book sections became one of the first places to cut. In the spring of 2001, The San Francisco Chronicle eliminated its twelve-page book section. After a great public outcry and letter-writing campaign, the paper revived the supplement that fall. Since then, The Philadelphia Inquirer has stopped its book section and wrapped it into another part of the paper. So did The Denver Post and the San Jose Mercury News.

In a recent spot check of seventeen major American newspapers, seven of them lost space devoted to books in the last ten years. Only two of those seventeen, the Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune, have increased the number of book pages.

Some critics, editors and observers blame the disappearances and stagnation on cultural tastes, economic cycles, poor standards and lost advertising revenue. Malcolm Jones, Newsweek’s books editor, started editing his first newspaper book section in 1977. He sees the shrinking book coverage as part of the print media’s falling influence. Page counts are down in newspapers and magazines, and arts coverage as a whole has been reduced. Newsweek publishes book reviews sporadically, as opposed to the weekly page or two it carried ten and twenty years ago, when prestigious critics Peter Prescott and Jean Strouse contributed regularly. Readers no longer have a regular page to turn to for book criticism.

“The fact is that you can sell ad pages in sports sections till the cows come home,” Jones said. “Almost nobody advertises for books in newspapers outside of the major papers like The [Washington] Post and The [New York] Times. Publishers, in turn, don’t have that much ad money to spend on any given book.”

At The San Diego Union-Tribune—which killed its semimonthly book supplement in 1995, only to bring it back as a weekly eightpage tabloid two years later—editor Arthur Salm believes the key to bolstering arts coverage is to publish it for non-financial reasons. “It’s not supposed to generate enough ad revenue to cover itself. If that were the case, no paper would have a metro section,” Salm said. “[The book section] informs people’s understanding of everything else that goes in the paper, not to mention everything else that goes on in the community.”

Only five other U.S. newspapers continue to publish standalone book sections: The New York Times Book Review supplement, which towers above them all; The Washington Post, which has kept a steady sixteen pages for nearly thirty years, the Los Angeles Times; the Chicago Tribune; and The San Francisco Chronicle.

Yet even The New York Times has cut back. Ten years ago, its Book Review regularly ran at twenty-eight to thirty-two pages. Today, the section weighs in at a svelte twenty pages.

Publishers don’t generally have the advertising budgets that newspapers seem to think they do. In a 2000 study for the Authors Guild, former New York Times book industry reporter David Kirkpatrick wrote that most books have less than $5,000 to cover the cost of advertising, author tours and all other promotions. That doesn’t leave much for newspapers.

For the critics, the fate of the print media is on a track parallel to that of the book section. Mary Ann Grossman, the book editor at the St. Paul Pioneer-Press, said, “People are paying far more attention to the reader comments on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com than [to] professional reviewers. That feeds into the whole idea of whether newspapers are going to exist anymore.” She added, “It’s like everything else in our society, people don’t feel they need experts anymore. They can find things by themselves.”

But perhaps critics and book review editors alone can’t make the case. People want to read intelligent book reviews that contribute to the public discourse, but until those readers make themselves heard, the editors fight for space unarmed. “I think the public, which reads a lot of books, needs to complain if they’re not getting book review coverage in papers,” said Jim Concannon, The Boston Globe’s book editor. “I think [that’s] something that eases the money pressure and something that assures publishers and editors that readers care. Public complaints tend to get a reply. If we’re waiting for the pressure to come internally, it could be a long wait.”

What Is A Magazine?

Before getting lost in Magazine, Arkansas, Tom Meagher fine-tunes a few definitions.

IT IS not so easy a question to answer, as we discovered while putting together this year's New York Review of Magazines. Can a Web site, for instance, be considered a legitimate magazine? Do NBC's infinite incarnations of "Dateline" qualify? Does a photocopied, self-produced fanzine measure up? Our research took us through a gauntlet of confounding interpretations. Internet search engines offered little help. Some searches produced dozens of definitions of the word "magazine," which derives from the French word magasin, meaning "storehouse," and from Arabic and Aramaic roots. To help you get out of the storeroom and into the sunshine of the magazine world, we humbly submit this grab bag of definitions.

Definitions: mag.a.zine (mag'e-zen', mag'e-zen') Noun

1. A periodic paperback publication aimed at a general, rather than scholarly, audience (University of Texas' Glossary of Library Terms). By this definition, nearly anything printed on paper can be considered a magazine, including the New York Post, the Weekly World News and those pesky Florida voting ballots. We found this to be too vague a definition. If, however, you are addicted to the tabloids, you ought to read Adam Pitluk's story.

2. According to the National Rifle Association's firearms glossary, a magazine is a spring-loaded container for bullet cartridges that allows a gun to be fired repeatedly without reloading. We won't be needing AK-4's here, but if that's your sort of thing, you can put Corey Pein in your crosshairs and read his review of Guns & Weapons for Law Enforcement.

3. A room or container used to store anything, especially military arms and provisions (Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary). For the high-concept interior decorators reading this, we can easily help you find a magazine that could be used to spiff up your shed, basement or supply closet. For design inspiration, turn to Rupal Parekh's review of a magazine that defies all of these definitions, Visionaire.

4. The compartment on the back of a camera that allows rolls of film to be fed through the exposure mechanism (The American Heritage Dictionary). Without the use of this kind of magazine, the pages you are reading would be just plain, typewritten text with a couple of stick figures drawn by hand to break up the monotony. We'd never have been able to display the stunning illustrations accompanying Karla Lightfoot's profile of artist Bob Grossman.

5. A city in western Arkansas with a population of 915 (U.S. Census Bureau). The 1.66-square-mile town sits about 125 miles northwest of Little Rock. Although we're sure i's a fine place to stop off on the drive between Fort Smith and Hot Springs, our expense account didn't permit a visit.

6. A television program that produces episodes on current events, including interviews and commentary (The American Heritage Dictionary). By this definition, not only does Dateline  pass muster, but so does "Larry King Live" and "The O'Reilly Factor." Not feeling so smug and superior now, are you, Stone Phillips?

Even though we eliminated small towns and film canisters from what the NYRM considers magazines, we still found plenty to write about. From a cover-design meeting to a newsstand, we examined illustrations, issues and people across the industry. No matter how you envision a magazine, you'll find it here—unless you're a fan of Smith & Wesson.