Can the “Bookazine” Save Magazines?
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 10 April 2024
⏱️ 33 minutes
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Summary
Magazines have fallen on hard times – especially the weekly news, fashion, and celebrity mags that once dominated newsstands. The revenue from magazine racks has plummeted in recent years, and many magazines have stopped appearing in print or shut down altogether.
And yet, there is something growing in the checkout aisle: one-off publications, each devoted to a single topic, known as “bookazines.” Last year, over 1,200 different bookazines went on sale across the country. They cover topics ranging from Taylor Swift, Star Wars, the Kennedy assassination, K-Pop, the British royal family, and as host Willa Paskin recently observed, the career of retired movie star Robert Redford.
In today’s episode, Willa looks behind the racks to investigate this new-ish format. Who is writing, publishing, and reading all these one-off magazines – and why? Is the bookazine a way forward for magazines, or their last gasp?
Voices you’ll hear in this episode include Caragh Donley, longtime magazine journalist turned prolific writer of bookazines; Eric Szegda, executive at bookazine publisher a360 media; and Erik Radvon, comic book creator and bookazine fan.
This episode was produced by Max Freedman and edited by Evan Chung, who produce the show with Katie Shepherd. Derek John is Executive Producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Wow, is busy in here. |
| 0:09.4 | I find myself at CVS all the time, looking for toothpaste, aspirin, scotch tape. |
| 0:15.2 | Who knows? I wander back and forth in the aisles, trying to find what I'm looking for. |
| 0:19.7 | For someone who can point me in the right direction. Excuse me? Do you know where the magazines are? Oh, right in this corner. Okay, cool. Thank you very much. I don't know if you've looked at the magazines available in a CVS or a Walgreens or a right aid or a supermarket lately. Years ago, they were full of monthly and weekly news, fashion food, and |
| 0:38.9 | celebrity magazines. And of course, tabloids. As a little kid, I loved reading headlines about aliens |
| 0:44.8 | and ghosts and tawdry celebrity scandals while I was helping my parents at the checkout line. |
| 0:50.3 | But the magazines available at CVS don't look anything like this anymore. |
| 0:55.2 | So I'm looking at a story of Jesus, the essential tax guide. |
| 1:00.5 | Lucille Ball, her life, love, and legacy, the history of the occult. |
| 1:05.1 | Sure, there's a handful of familiar titles, a vogue, a vanity fair, |
| 1:09.5 | but mostly there are dozens and dozens of one-off |
| 1:12.8 | publications, each devoted to a single topic. |
| 1:17.1 | Taylor, the Music and the Magic, a Walter Payton Memorial, the Kennedy assassination |
| 1:21.4 | six years later, the story of Ellis Island, ultimate guide to Pokemon A hundred percent unofficial. I first noticed this |
| 1:30.3 | phenomenon a few months ago. I was wandering in the aisles when my eye caught on what I thought |
| 1:34.9 | was the monthly women's magazine, Red Book. But when I looked more closely, I realized it was |
| 1:40.7 | actually Redford, as in Robert Redford, the now-retired, 87-year-old movie star of |
| 1:49.6 | such films as The Sting, All the President's Men, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. |
| 1:55.7 | Don't tell me how to rob a bank. I know how to rob a bank. |
| 1:59.0 | I'm a journalist. I've worked at print magazines. I thought I knew |
| 2:02.7 | the gist of how they worked. |
| 2:04.9 | But staring at Robert Redford's |
... |
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