typing out loud

Occasionally I’ll just go hog wild with the magazines. Heaped before me at the moment are fresh copies of Eye, Frieze, How, CMYK, Print, Step, and I.D. Good Lord! But wait a moment...did I say “magazines?”

I had a teacher in college who referred to Rolling Stone – quite often, as a matter of fact – as a “journal.” He was a professor in the Department of American Studies who specialized in popular culture, so to him, the periodical was a legitimate subject for scholarly investigation. His issues, which dated to the early 1970s, were arranged neatly and in perfect chronological order on two bookshelves in his cramped office.

My 22 year-old sensibility invariably found it to be quite funny – and not a little pathetic – whenever he brought a copy to class and read from it at length, and my cynicism led me to question whether my four credits at $44.50 a pop were a good investment in the liberal arts. For this was the same magazine to which I subscribed: A sensationalist, sense-numbing biweekly that struck me as the Euclidean mean of People, Esquire, and Life, but lacking the focus of any of these; a confused jumble of music news, record reviews, and Q&As, with an investigative report thrown in here and there. Fodder, then, for the laundromat, the auto repair, or the trashbin, but certainly not the classroom.

Thirteen years hence, I’ve mellowed considerably, but I still wonder whether there is some sort of dichotomy that differentiates journal from magazine, or if printed periodicals lie on more of a continuum in this regard. Perhaps, more simply, it’s just relative to the reader. Certain cases are easy to define, of course; you won’t find Lancet, for example, at the local beauty salon. Bringing the question much closer to home, which of the several periodicals related to typography and graphic design are magazines and which are journals?

But is this even a legitimate question to ask? It seems that, before we attempt an answer, we must distinguish journal from magazine. The latter is certainly a broader category and would appear to comprise any periodically printed material that attempts to inform or entertain a more-or-less broad, nonspecialist audience. Time, Popular Science, and Q are all magazines by this definition, and so may be even Science and Nature, although they perhaps ride the line.

To me, a journal, then, is a periodical whose readership consists almost exclusively of specialists and whose intent is to advance scholarly investigation of the discipline to which it is devoted. And herein we come to the second fork in the road, for what distinguishes scholarly investigation from non-scholarly investigation? Or more generally, what is scholarship?

Consultation of my Webster’s proves disappointing; a scholar is merely “a learned person...one who has done advanced study in a special field” and scholarship is therefore “the character, qualities, or attainments” thereof. Frustrated, I then ask my wife, who, in the space of two minutes, crafts a definition as parsimonious and faultless as I could hope for: “The earnest pursuit of understanding as an end in itself.” Words like expertise, exhaustiveness, and context work their way into the subsequent discussion; they are all implied, too, of course.

Having established a definition, I nonetheless attempt to poke holes:

Ego: If I have read all of Jane Austen’s novels – novels as fine as any ever written – and know them well, am I a scholar?

Alterego: No, I am merely a fan of Jane Austen.

Ego: Hmmm. Okay, if I have read each issue of Rolling Stone over the past thirty years, and know them all well, and have attempted to understand the role and function of the magazine – of this genre of literature vis-à-vis other, similar periodicals as well as relative to popular culture, am I a scholar?

Alterego: Yes, absolutely. This implies studies of comparative literature and of American history – both perhaps being loosely defined, of course.

Touché, and only thirteen years to come full circle on this. Oh well, chalk one up for the professor.

At this point, I had better confess that I had originally planned to write a little opinion piece with the aim of persuading you that really, only one (and you may feel free to guess which) of the aforementioned design periodicals deserves to be considered a journal, and that the rest are merely magazines. But all of this fell apart because I began to worry about definitions. And now I see that this derailment cuts two ways. In one respect I am more muddled than ever; I must conclude that one person’s journal is apparently another’s magazine. Any persuasive attempt ultimately would have been futile; it is indeed relative to the reader.

But in another respect, my notion is absolutely clear: It is time to do more than feel the paper, look at the ads, and envy the design competition winners. I had better get reading, and I had better try to read as much as I can.

06-April 2003