Journals & Magazines

Librarian is the 46th best job for 2009...according to the Wall Street Journal. Five criteria determined ranking...environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress. However, it is clearly not among the best paid positions by far.

Best? Actuary. Worst (out of 200)...would you believe 'Roustabout'??

It's the bane of many a public librarian. The phone rings, you answer it, and then politely decline the caller's offer to donate the last 60 years of National Georgraphic magazine to your library.

"Yes, I'm sure they're in fine condition. Oh? Been in your mother-in-law's house for the last 60 years huh? Yes, I know you want to help out, but we've got several years of it already. Yes, sir I can tell you're happy she's dead but we just don't have any use for that many magazines. No, actually they're not all that valuable - you do realize they print several hundred thousand at a time, right? Yes, so they're not exactly rare or anything."

Now there's a much easier way to get every single issue of National Geographic from the last 120 years and it doesn't involve any donations. You can buy it on its very own hard drive. That's right, you can get every issue of National Geographic since the dawn of humankind on a 160 GB external drive. As a bonus, the collection only takes up 60 GB, so you've got another 100GB to do with as you please.

I wonder if that'd be enough room for every issue of Popular Mechanics...

Analysis of yesterday's news story by Jerome Kramer, an independent publishing consultant in his blog, Publishing Perspectives.

It's December, not the first of April, but none the less, this came as something of a shock: "Nielsen Business Media has made the decision to cease operations for Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Reviews."

More from Poynter Online.

Over in the blogs at ZDNet, Tom Foremski raises an interesting point. While conventional thinking would paint as folly the statements by News Corp about pulling out of the Google search infrastructure, Google may lose far more than News Corp might in the matter.

The NYTimes First Look Blog asks: Have you visited a library Web site lately? Maybe you think you have no reason to, especially if you’re not a regular patron of your local library. But on most library sites, you can do much more than look for a book: public branches offer everything from digital photo archives to podcasts to holiday cards. With so many services available, you might even forget to search the catalog.

Here's the Dallas Public Library's homepage, featuring the bestseller list.

It should not have come as a surprise to former Alaska governor Sarah Palin and her publisher that somebody would take the title of her upcoming memoir, flip two letters and come up with a parody.

That's exactly what's happened. As Entertainment Weekly reports, editors of The Nation plan to publish Going Rouge: Sarah Palin, An American Nightmare on Nov. 17 -- the same day that the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee's Going Rogue: An American Life hits bookstores. NPR offers a poll on which title is more to your liking.

It's the end of the road for Gourmet Magazine. Petit fours anyone?

But what does a world without Gourmet portend for an age when millions prefer to share recipes online, restaurant criticism is becoming crowd-sourced and newspaper food sections are thinner and thinner?

“It has a certain doomsday quality because it’s not just a food magazine. It represents so much more,” said James Oseland, editor in chief of Saveur, a smaller, younger food magazine. “It’s an American cultural icon.”

The magazine, founded in 1941, thrived on a rush of postwar aspiration and became a touchstone for readers who wanted lives filled with dinner parties, reservations at important restaurants and exotic but comfortable travel.

Issues remain about who will inherit the archives and enormous recipe database. There's also a new book edited by Ruth Reichl, Gourmet Today, which came out just last month.

Conde Nast will close four magazines -- Modern Bride, Elegant Bride, Gourmet and Cookie -- following a review the publisher undertook to find ways to cut costs and staff in the face of the advertising recession.

Conde Nast, also the publisher of magazines like The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, previously closed its Portfolio business magazine and home decor magazine Domino. Reuters and Wall Street Journal report.

In an effort to expand their readership and sales, both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are planning to start San Francisco editions, the NYT reported. The new editions would offer more local news for the San Francisco Bay Area in a bid to win new readers and advertisers.

Neither paper has released details of their plans, but the NYT spoke to anonymous sources about the Journal's project who explained that the SF edition would contain a page or two of general interest news from California, probably once a week. It anticipates starting the new edition in November or December.

The Wall Street Journal is also looking at a weekly arts and culture section focused on New York City, according to reports in July. This has been interpreted as an attempt to compete more directly with the Times, and a San Francisco edition, if it does indeed include general interest rather than business news, is likely to be viewed in the same light. The Times itself is considering regional editions based in other cities, according to the NYT article.

Pat Holt of Holt Uncensored decries the plummeting of print newspaper sales, and offers several serious suggestions to publishers.

"After our 30-year honeymoon with computers, and 20 solid years on the Internet, people are getting tired of screens and starting to miss the newsprint experience. It’s time for newspapers to earn their way back into readers’ minds and pocketbooks. Here are some suggestions:

Fight for Your Paper - Everybody’s waiting for publishers to do something — to, in the first place, define the benefits of newspapers that computers can’t offer. If you run a newspaper, the time has come to get out there and tell readers: Our paper publishes the kind of stories in print that you can’t find on the Internet.

This means that the newsprint version will be different from the website version, so you have to believe in it. If you don’t think that newspapers are far ahead of the Internet in key ways, get outta the biz."

The Reader’s Digest Association Monday became the latest magazine publisher weighted down by severe debt to file for bankruptcy protection. RDA said it reached an agreement in principle with a majority of its senior secured lenders on terms of a restructuring plan to reduce the company’s debt from $2.2 billion to $550 million, and expects to file a pre-packaged Chapter 11 petition for its U.S. business within the next 30 days.

RDA's lender group will also provide the company with $150 million in debtor-in-possession financing which, it said, will be convertible into exit financing upon emergence from Chapter 11.

But, there will always be Reader's Digests....won't there?