Size matters. Or does it?
If you even remotely notice things about the periodical world, you might have seen recently a couple of interesting changes.
In most any other circumstance, when asked the question "What do the two magazines pictured here have in common?" the answer would likely be absolutely nothing. Yet, within the last six weeks, The Sporting News and Rolling Stone, two pioneers in the magazine publishing industry that have been around long enough to have both once published on pulp stock, unveiled radical changes to the sizes of their magazines.
The Sporting News has been trying to recapture its audience and spirit since it quit publishing baseball box scores in the late 1980s. Once a baseball only newspaper, it held the majority of national readership among the sport's fans with excellent columnists, team reports and the always reliable box scores, which can now only be found in print in the USA Today's Sports Weekly.
About six weeks ago, TSN announced it was scaling back from a weekly to a biweekly while increasing its width about a half inch. Personally, the size change makes the magazine harder to hold and thumb through. Its content has also changed from weekly team reports in the four major sports every week to 3-4 major features and an abundance of short, bite-size articles. Many items published are strictly responses to questions posed to athletes and put into a form to make them look like articles when in fact they are not. It's not necessarily a bad feature, just apparently another attempt to appeal to the ESPN The Magazine audience. Neither TSN -- or ESPN -- have ever had the quality of Sports Illustrated's overall writing, so they are instead appealing to the younger, shorter-attention-span reader with their layout, content and fast read look.
On the other side, after beginning as a pulp product and then slipping into a slicker stock with still an oversized, wider and taller presentation, Rolling Stone has now adopted the standard magazine size. Sadly, it no longer sticks out on the racks like it did before and it blends in too much with the endless array of periodicals on the shelves. In an obvious "out with the old, in with the new" political statement, a caricature of John McCain was featured on RS's last oversized edition two weeks ago, and a portrait of Barack Obama was featured on its smaller format premiere. It's the third time in seven months the magazine has put Obama on its cover, pretty much all you need to know about its political slant.
Politics aside, Rolling Stone continues to provide above average writing on what it's best at: music and those who make it.
A final observation on the changes to these time-honored publications: In 2008, more than a decade after the full-scale advent of the Internet, a medium from where most all people receive their news these days, do these changes really mean anything? I would think not. What's more, chances are millions of typical consumers, even those who call themselves sports and music fans, likely have not even noticed.
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