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Book Cover for: Magazine, Jeff Jarvis

Magazine

Jeff Jarvis

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

For a century, magazines were the authors of culture and taste, of intelligence and policy - until they were overthrown by the voices of the public themselves online. Here is a tribute to all that magazines were, from their origins in London and on Ben Franklin's press; through their boom - enabled by new technologies - as creators of a new media aesthetic and a new mass culture; into their opulent days in advertising-supported conglomerates; and finally to their fall at the hands of the internet. This tale is told through the experience of a magazine founder, the creator of Entertainment Weekly at Time Inc., who was also TV critic at TV Guide and People and finally an executive at Condé Nast trying to shepherd its magazines into the digital age.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
  • Publish Date: Nov 2nd, 2023
  • Pages: 160
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 6.20in - 4.80in - 0.90in - 0.30lb
  • EAN: 9781501394959
  • Categories: Semiotics & TheoryAestheticsMedia Studies

About the Author

Bogost, Ian: - Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Director of Film & Media Studies, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. Bogost is author or co-author of ten books, including Alien Phenomenology (2012)and Play Anything (2016).
Schaberg, Christopher: - Christopher Schaberg is Director of the Program in Public Scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, and the author of The Textual Life of Airports (2012), The End of Airports (2015), Airportness (2017), The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (2018), Searching for the Anthropocene (2019), Pedagogy of the Depressed (2021), and Adventure: An Argument for Limits (2023), all published by Bloomsbury. He is also the founding co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons book series.
Jarvis, Jeff: - Jeff Jarvis holds the Leonard Tow Chair in Journalism Innovation and directs the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. He was creator and founding managing editor of Entertainment Weekly, TV critic for TV Guide and People, Sunday editor of the New York Daily News, a media columnist for The Guardian, and president and creative director of Advance.net. He blogs at Buzzmachine, cohosts the podcast This Week in Google, and is the author of five books: What Would Google Do? (2009), Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live (2011), Geeks Bearing Gifts: Imagining New Futures for News (2014), and Magazine (2023) in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series.

Praise for this book

"Few people have thought as hard or as well about magazines as Jeff Jarvis does. He describes Magazine as an elegy, and it's a beautiful one, but it's so much more-a love letter to the heyday of a glorious form, a roundhouse punch thrown at those who failed as its custodians, an elegant and insightful history of a medium, and a vivid, funny, unsparing memoir. It's a pleasure to read him, and a privilege to learn from him." --Mark Harris, journalist and author of Mike Nichols: A Life (2021)

"A starter, lover, student, and doubter of magazines, Jeff Jarvis is here to explain to us-in beautiful and entertaining prose-what the magazine was when it was great, and how the internet undid it, by wiring us together in a different way, and giving everyone a printing press. The call that magazines once answered is still heard, he argues. It is to 'set the idea of community free from geography.'" --Jay Rosen, Associate Professor of Journalism, New York University, USA

"Having devoted a chunk of my life to writing for and editing magazines, I wondered whether Jeff Jarvis's smart little chronicle, Magazine, would feel like nostalgia or PTSD.

He opened so well, it ceased to matter." --The Common Reader

"This is an insightful, succinct history of a cherished institution and a vivid, often funny and unsparing tribute to a fast-faltering entertainment medium." --The Irish Scene