Commuting

Most people’s commute:

My commute:

Abstract Thinking #1

I’m sitting in a coffeeshop that opened when I was in eighth grade: my past and future are all around me. An older man is wandering back and forth from table to counter, donning a sweater with my high school emblem. It is worn in, a shade of green between hunter and gray, a color only time can produce.

Beyond him, a teenaged drama unfolds. Young girls in tights and heels chatter about what happened that Tuesday in school; an older brother broods in the corner, angry he is chauffer but interested all the same in the girls surrounding his sister. Glances vibrate off of walls.

I am in the corner, tapping at another line in my resume, wondering when someone with the power to extract me from here will read it and call. No luck yet.

There are ties here that are not so easily broken. A former employer walks in– a reporter who gave me (I thought) the start to a globetrotting journalistic career. We nod at one another.

Why Eggers Might Have Saved the Magazine Industry

Note: As I wrote this post, Editor & Publisher announced they were closing down after 108 years. If the magazine that speculates about magazines is closing, well….

I spend a lot of time in my job thinking and talking about ways newspapers will evolve on the internet. But I’m suddenly obsessed by a new question: what about the magazine?

So much of the innovation in new media right now is news-oriented. From hyperlocals to Bay Area News Project to Google Living Stories and beyond, the industry is rightly worried about how to continue news coverage and watchdog journalism when no one will pay for it in print.

But what about those long, lovely magazines that are unlike any other media product out there? We hear a lot about magazines dying: when Gourmet folded, I died a little inside, but it’s been one of dozens in the past year that hasn’t been able to sustain itself.