Amplification…
Mar 5th, 2007 by Simon
Another tip/link from Chungaiz originally – on the 51 best magazines ever.
But the bit I found really interesting was the summary written by Graydon Carter. The Vanity Fair editor. Anyway, he wrote this about the role of magazines…
“The essential strength of a magazine is its ability to amplify. An idea, or an image, or a story, set within the pages of a magazine and assembled by the right hands, can become the grist of breakfast chatter, dinner-party conversation, or elective body debate around the world. Until recently, with the advent of USA Today and the national editions of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, newspapers were by and large local endeavors. Magazines were national, and as they became international, their power of amplification grew exponentially. A woman photographs a dam. Nothing noteworthy in this, except that the woman is Margaret Bourke-White and the structure is the Fort Peck Dam. A photograph from that shoot appears on the cover of the first issue of Life and becomes one of the most known feats of human engineering in the world. That is amplification.”
He goes on to talk about what makes the individual magazines part of this uber-list, but there’s an obvious link with advertising here – and I just love the way he’s expressed it. “Becoming the grist of chatter, conversation and debate…” Something for all of us to aspire to…
Wa Wa We Wa…what a cool link.
How do you find these things?
As an ad guy I made a foray into magazine publishing last year – creating Idealog with some stalwarts of the publishing world here in little old (young) New Zealand, it is an interesting world that will succumb to major change soon (I’ll venture) as we become more and more willing to consume media through the laptop.
I’ll fire some hard copies of the mag to you to share with colleagues in the UK if you like…be more economical to ship to one address.
The mag’s site is http://www.idealog.co.nz
[...] MacGregor from New Zealand wrote in response to this post on Amplification, saying that he’d dipped his toe in the magazine waters with this magazine Idealog… [...]