Australian design magazine redesigns
Looks interesting – wish its international distribution was redesigned also. Speaking of which…

Graphic design magazines of the world
…unite! Michael Bojkowski, art director of Grafik, is writing up a series of excellent summaries of others in their field. Perhaps an interesting international content exchange of sorts could be arranged?

Subscribers don’t like magazine going online only
I’m sure there are sound financial reasons for not offering the option of a refund – and instead asking subscribers to give more for the privilege – but in PR terms, it does seem to have been handled poorly

The best and worst selling covers from 2010
Kate Middleton comes out pretty badly from this

Seven years of The Nation covers
Fiddly navigation aside, this site from designer Stephen Kling contains inside stories, rejected covers and a lot of sharp political cover satire. Hit “Table of Contents” for further tales (via Unbeige)

101 Ways to read the New York Times
Well, almost. Such is the power of diversification

Seven ways magazines are using social media
Not as witless as some of the articles on this topic

Emphas.is launches in beta to crowdfund important photojournalism
Part Kickstarter, part lobbying group, part community forum, it has an amazing board of reviewers, including many top magazines represented. I also love that anyone who funds 50% of a project gets first refusal rights on publishing the result (with the photographer’s approval)

This is the best time to be in magazines!
He’s right, though it’s certainly not the best time to be a publisher

Egoïste returns
Four years since the last one, and as heavy as it ever was (thanks Kati)

If you haven’t got a correspondent…
Call a phone box. Lovely sideways piece of thinking by the SZ magazine

JPG brings in a famous guest curator
Great concept that fits the mag well. Unfortunately, the online preview of the issue only features one photo from the set he chose

Archive magazines online alongside yearbooks, newsreels and music
This kind of contextual linking is only going to get bigger. Can’t wait

Test drive a car on a print ad
Via a natty iPhone app and some smart thinking

How the Businessweek cloud cover came about
Always assuming it wasn’t a conceptual copy of this Italian newspaper supplement cover from January. Sidenote: I’m really enjoying Richard’s tumblrlog experiments

New York is placing archives and unused cover concepts on Flickr
There’s a lot to enjoy right there – you can also follow art director Chris Dixon on Twitter

What happened to the staff after the newspaper closed
They should illustrate and publish their survey via The Newspaper Club, for irony kicks

Videogame magazine nostalgia
Cos it’s not just about the pixels

A Brit and a woman created and nurtured Newsweek. Now a British-born woman is moving it forward, pinning its hopes on a high-profile, print-digital merger. Can it survive – and is it any good?

I’m dividing this into two pieces, because I think that, in order to better judge and understand the magazine, it would be helpful first to understand something of the history and nature of American news weeklies, and their previous digital forays.

And so, here is a brief runthrough of the back story, gratefully gleaned from David Sumner’s comprehensive book The Magazine Century (2010) and his excellent 2003 piece on the subject, plus Carolyn Kitch’s Pages from the Past (2005), as well as further personal online research, linked to below where relevant.

Weekly news magazines have always been distinct from newspapers and their supplements. The first significant player in the market was/is Henry Luce’s Time, which launched in 1923 with the aim of creating a short, quick-to-read summary of the week’s general-interest news.

Newsweek followed nine years later (eight years before the other big American news weekly, US News & World Report – lesser known internationally because of its lack of overseas presence).

Newsweek was founded by Time‘s first foreign editor, a one-legged Brit called Thomas Martyn (he left the other leg in Yugoslavia during WWI). The prospectus for his “News-week” made it clear who his new publication would aim at: “Time is too inaccurate, too superficial, too flippant and imitative.”

The new magazine was also to be, its early ads stated, “an indispensable complement to newspaper reading, because it explains, expounds, clarifies.” On the cover of its first issue (shown above), there were seven photographs – one for each day of the week.

It struggled in its early years, before merging with another magazine called Today, and relaunching in 1937 without the hyphen and with the slogan “The magazine of news significance.” Newsweek became a success, with circulations topping a million – still less than Time, but more than enough to make it profitable and influential.

This was because, Carolyn Kitch argues, in the 1930s to 1960s in particular, “media had joined the institutions of education, religion, and civic life as an important disseminator of political and cultural ideals. Magazines were leaders in this process because they were the only medium capable of reaching a national audience and using illustrations and then photographs in a large-scale and dramatic way… The stories the newsmagazines told… created and reinforced a particular view of the national character. If film offered varying versions of national identity, the newsmagazines collectively crafted a unified, patriotic vision.”

These were the arbiters of what was news, who the good guys and the bad guys were, and of how America saw itself and everyone else. With combined circulations of up to ten million, the “big three” of Time, Newsweek and US News & World Report had a huge cultural and political impact.

That’s not to say that its own house was in perfect order. In 1961, a rudderless Newsweek was purchased by The Washington Post Company. New editor Osborn Elliott later wrote that “Newsweek was in shambles.  Not only had the editor left, the whole staff was shot through with drunks, incompetents, and hacks.”

Following the suicide of Washington Post and Newsweek publisher Phil Graham, the company passed into the hands of his widow, Katherine Graham. She trebled Newsweek‘s editorial budget, improved its design, and made it genuinely become what it had originally been created to be: a serious competitor to Time.

Worthy of note in this period is the moment when, in 1970, 46 female employees filed a groundbreaking gender-discrimination case against the magazine, under the Civil Rights Act. The magazine promised to hire more senior female staff. The 40th anniversary of the event led to much discussion about whether things had much improved since.

There doesn’t seem much to report about the magazine during 1980s, other than that through occasional redesigns, the big three continued to be positioned at the heart of American culture, with Newsweek mostly seen as being politically closer to the Democrats than Time. The rise of cable TV had changed people’s media habits somewhat, but thanks in part to vastly discounted subscription rates, readership remained high.

In 1993, Newsweek was the first of the three to dabble with digital, launching an ill-fated quarterly CD ROM featuring “as many as three original articles” called Newsweek InterActive (“At first, “Newsweek Interactive” will be compatible only with the $999 portable multimedia player introduced last week by the Sony Corporation.”)

Later that year, Time started to have an online presence, teaming up with AOL, and Newsweek followed in late 1994, through a partnership with now-forgotten ISP Prodigy, before relaunching at the end of 1998 as Newsweek.com, combining magazine stories with updates from Washingtonpost.com and MSNBC.com

In the mid-2000s, as news audiences moved online and to 24-hour cable news, and one advertising slump followed another, the large expense of Newsweek combined with falling sales and ad revenues to make it a big financial liability. Its stated subscriber base dropped 50% during 2008-10 – though at 1.5 million, it was still not to be sniffed at.

In 2009, Newsweek relaunched as an opinion and commentary magazine, with some bold, polemic covers but little engaging content. The relaunch didn’t seem to stem the bleeding, and in August 2010, the magazine was sold to nonagenarian millionaire Sidney Harman. At the end of 2010, it merged with two-year-old news-aggregation-opinion-gossip website The Daily Beast, splitting ownership 50:50 between Harman and the owners of The Daily Beast, IAC (who also own ask.com, match.com, vimeo and others.)

Which brings us to today, and the relaunch of Newsweek featuring Thedailybeast.com written at the bottom of every page. Is there still a place for a weekly news magazine? Can it explain, expound, clarify news from the internet? Do Newsweek / The Daily Beast together point to a new hybrid model of publishing? Or is it – and perhaps much of the rest of print news media – destined to become a loss-making way for rich men to gain political access and influence?

Click here for my review the first issue of the relaunch.

Architecture has long been a popular subject of alternative magazines. Clip Stamp Fold covered the architecture zine culture of the 1960s and 1970s, and now Archi-zines is trying to do the same for the present day, curated by Elias Redstone.

It’s currently a small list, but growing quickly – sadly no RSS feed right now, but it’s well worth checking back regularly to follow this evergreen genre of alternative urban thought through magazines.

Why fashion struggles with race
A really good piece on the colour barrier faced by fashion editorials and the catwalk – and why societally the “paint chip” theory doesn’t work

Eye gets a preview of Port
Review here when I can get my hands on it

Slate writer hates his iPad
The backlash is strong with this one

How a publisher is dealing with the OnePass/Apple subscription situation
Fascinating reading. The key for the big players seems to be “be everywhere, but hope Android on tablets gets big enough to force Apple to back down”

Marie Claire Brazil goes 3D
3D fashion apparently also featured in new mag Archetype X (about which I can find nothing at all except for descriptions of this shoot – does it even exist?)

A round up of books about zines / comic books / small magazines
Contains short summaries of a few things worth knowing about

i-jusi exhibition hits London next month
Well worth checking out their back issues at that. Speaking of which…

Mute offers complete set for 200 pounds
Intelligent mag that did some interesting design things in the late 90s (disclosure: I interviewed Cory Doctrow for them once, eight years ago)

Indiana University student magazine actually well designed
Text’s a bit ropey, but it sure is purrty

People create their own Top 10 magazines
No, don’t ask – I wouldn’t know where to begin

A fascinating-looking Chinese magazine blogger
Sadly, I suspect something is lost in the Google Translation

If you’re interested in the history of this strange industry, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’s entry on Edward Cave, the world’s first magazine proprietor (at least, the first to use the word) is available for free for the next three days.

His Gentleman’s Magazine seems to have been one part Wall Street Journal, one part New Yorker, one part Reader’s Digest, two parts The Week. Which might not do too badly today, though you’d probably have more problems with syndication fees.

Cave himself was a printer who worked for the Post Office. Professional production and confirmed distribution – no wonder the magazine was a success.

An excellent roundup of where we are, iPad-wise
New tablets – and a new iPad – this year might shake things up again

A list of American magazine distributors
One of those lists that you didn’t know you didn’t have before. Can we expand it internationally in the comments section?

Nike makes shoes out of old magazines
But will they do it out of magazines of my choice? Then we’ll talk

What readers want in their iPad magazine ads
Until someone makes something else they want

UK’s Channel 4 launches anti-fashion mag game
Contains fake versions of Photoshop tools to make its point, along with thinly disguised spoofs of Vogue, Heat, Nuts, Glamour and Men’s Health. It’s a smart idea – however, playing it simply feels too much like work. Remember kids: Photoshop isn’t fun

The Last Newspaper exhibition catalog is now available
Get them while they last (disclosure: I advised them on it, and wrote a couple of pieces). Full content listing here

Cardiff University’s Mapping the Magazine 3 conference calls for papers
Should be a fascinating event

Chinese literary magazine gets closed down after one issue
“If things continue like this, China will only be known for tea and pandas”

Texts from a secret magazine made by children in the Terezín ghetto
Published weekly for two years, until most of them were sent to Auschwitz. A documentary is apparently in the works; Wikipedia has more

It’s been a fascinating year for magazines.

Redesigns from Creative Review (by Paul Pensom) and icon (by Ken Leung) have added new flair to two of the strongest design titles on the newsstand, while Grafik fell but will rise again very soon.

Elsewhere, Little White Lies reached five years of great covers and thematic movie coverage and then promptly changed its logo, Elle UK made some gorgeous subscriber covers and Elle Collections made me look again at the catwalk with fresh eyes, Monocle continued to defy expectations with further expansion and two newspaper-magazine hybrids for the sea and ski elite, Wallpaper* has continued to experiment boldly with form and content, and GOOD made a tiny shift in its vocabulary to turn its subscribers into “members” of their wider community, a move that others will doubtless seek to emulate.

Self-publishers were given a lift by an improved MagCloud offering, while The Newspaper Club got wider recognition and is now eyeing up an American expansion. And the whole Roger Black/design templates controversy faded away almost as quickly as it swept in.

Pop under Dasha Zhukova did some lovely things, and I’m looking forward to seeing how its former editorial director Ashley Heath will continue the bold, eclectic approach. On the geek side, Wired UK continued to differentiate itself from its American big brother with Europe-focused stories and graphic playfulness. Worth it for the Warren Ellis and Russell Davies columns alone.

So many smaller independent magazines have produced creative, exciting, groundbreaking work in print this year. The Kasino crew unveiled their new project, showing how they can still create an entertaining publication even while using all four colours. Residing several miles further west than leftfield, Dodgem Logic is silly, funny, angry, smart, and subversive in all the right ways – and highly affordable too, as is Manzine which gets better and better with every issue, reaching far beyond its early in-jokiness to become an essential and witty read for people of both sexes.

Over the past 12 months, Mono.kultur and Gym Class have exemplified how fantastic one-person operations can be, when that person has talent, a clear vision and the confidence to make what they want to read, while Put A Egg On It deservedly got enough attention to turn it into a going concern.

Apartamento‘s star continues to rise, taking over the mantle of Fantastic Man as the hip mag to be seen with first – only because FM has now all but established itself as a fixture in the alternative mainstream. It continues to innovate with features that merit its chosen adjective. Its new sister, The Gentlewoman, has yet to settle, but there’s certainly an audience for it out there.

OK Periodicals has moved forward boldly, and now runs its own events as well – bravo, say I. Independent publishing needs as many gathering points as it can get. Elsewhere, my fellow Colophon curator Mike’s Nico gets better and better, and The Gopher Illustrated is a top tip to watch in 2011. Its first issue was adventurous, entertaining, and featured stickers of all the images in colour, for you to place on the pages (or elsewhere) yourself. Its creators recently moved from Venezuela to the creative hub of Austin. I’m looking forward to seeing the results.

Elsewhere, IL, Eureka and the Suddeutsche Zeitung Magazin‘s designs this year suggest that the golden age of magazine supplements isn’t over. Freed from the pressures of the open newsstand, supplements should be brave and bold enough to drive the purchase of the newspaper. And speaking of newspapers, i has had another great year of design work. Its art director, Nick Mrozowski, is on his way back to the States – but we should certainly keep an eye on what his successor gets up to.

As for myself, this was the first year of Stack America, and I’m indebted to the makers of Meatpaper, Megawords, Pin-Up, d[x]i, Beautiful/Decay, Little White Lies, GOOD, Embrocation, Put A Egg On It, The Oxford American, PWR Paper, Bad Day, MYMAG, and Abe’s Penny for agreeing to let me share their creative work with subscribers. Choosing the right publications hasn’t been an easy decision, not because they’re hard to find, but because so much fascinating work is out there. There will be plenty more of that to come in 2011. (Subscribe now!)

I’ve also given talks in Bulgaria, Spain and the USA, written about magazines and associated industries for Eye magazine among many others, and wrote the copy for Turning Pages, a weighty tome filled with snapshots of inspiring contemporary editorial design. We also announced a bold new move for Colophon – lots of excitement around that, some of which should bear some fruit soon.

And of course I got trapped by a volcano and made Stranded, a print-on-demand magazine about the experience, created by those in the same situation. Sales continue to come through; so far, it’s raised more than $1300 for the International Rescue Committee. (Buy one now!)

I’m sure I’ve missed a bunch of great work that I really should have mentioned. Apologies if I didn’t include something you’ve worked on – please excuse it as an omission of forgetfulness, and not any kind of implied criticism. I hereby endeavour to review more titles, and faster, than I was able to this year.

There are, however three magazines that have had an outstanding 2010, and which I haven’t mentioned here. This was deliberate, because in the coming days, I’m going to announce my personal top three magazines of the year. It’s an individual selection, and entirely dependent on my mood at the moment of writing.

Though quite different in subject matter, what they have in common is an ability to make my brain expand and my fingers tingle when I turn the pages. No perspex blocks or shiny designer trophys will be handed out, only my respect and admiration.

And of course, there’s been the iPad. We’re in its early stages, but Letter to Jane, The New Yorker, Flipboard, Mag+ and my favourite mainstream magazine app of the year, The Times’ Eureka point to some fascinating new strides in publishing on their way very shortly. I haven’t written too much about iPad publications on Magtastic this year, a function of real-life preoccupations rather than a philosophical standpoint. That will change, quite significantly, early in 2011 – but not here. More on that very soon.

Recession be damned. It’s been a heck of year, and I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who has shared their projects with me. Here’s to an even bolder, better year for contemporary storytelling in 2011. As I said in my intro to Turning Pages, this is truly The Golden Age of Print.

So what did I miss out?

The Hall of Femmes is an important idea, realised immaculately in their first publication. Neat title, too.

It’s a creation of Swedish studio Hjärta Smärta to highlight overlooked yet inspiringly brilliant women in the design world. Their first book, 9 inches x 5.25 inches, is an extended interview with Ruth Ansel, the smart, skillful former art director of Harper’s Bazaar (a job she shared with Bea Feitler when aged 24), Vanity Fair (under Tina Brown), The New York Times Magazine, and more.

The questions are informed and low-key. Now aged 70, Ansel’s answers are revealing and smart, with the images well chosen to illustrate her examples, shown without further comment. She’s a great subject, with fascinating tales from her remarkable career; often working with Richard Avedon (whose precise touch-up notes are written on the first image, above) she was the first to put a man on the cover of a women’s magazine (Steve McQueen, above), the first to feature a black model in a haute couture dress, the first to feature a topless socialite in a fashion magazine.

She played with gatefolds and text in a playful, eyecatching manner that’s reminiscent of some of Alexey Brodovitch’s work at Harper’s Bazaar.

The impetus of the project is to highlight forgotten women in design, and to ask why there aren’t more of them. Perhaps it’s also telling that I found out about this series from Arem Duplessis – one of Ansel’s successors at the New York Times Magazine, and one of very few black design directors in the business. Ansel talks candidly about the glass ceiling, and how uneven the industry remains, at various points in the 72-page book, without letting this overwhelm what is, ultimately, a well-deserved celebration of her work.

The text is set carefully in Whitney, and is both clear and unobtrusive.

It’s the first in a series of beautiful little books, sold under the banner of Oyster Press. The next two, Carin Goldberg and Lillian Bassman, just came out; they’ve also published a list of titles to come (above) on their blog. I have to confess that, although I knew some of her work, I had never heard of Ansel, nor of some of the other names in this list. All the more reason for this elegant little series to exist.

Badges are also available.

It’s a little pricey for such a small book, but it’s well made, and worth splashing out on. Pick up your copy – signed, no less – here.

A history of Apple tablets
It’s been a long time coming. Check out the Macintosh Folio, designed by Jonathan Ive

Opium100 needs your help
Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em laugh

Ann Summers releases Cosmo tie-in range
Because diamonds are no longer a girl’s best friend. Men have to make do with Loaded’s Stamina Shot

Variety releases “slanguage” glossary
What the infopike has been waiting for

Lovely-looking new design mag launches
In an edition of only 100, sadly. Fortunately, its content is also here, and features many Magtastic Blogfavourites, including Jörg Koch and Mark Kiessling

Interview with Mono.kultur‘s Kai
The new issue is unsurprisingly gorgeous

Some Magazine looks interesting
Features unusual use of the comma,

Punk zine archive
Anarchy in the PDF

Put A Egg On It #3 announced
Lifetime subscriptions are available

Bidoun runs beautiful, individualised covers
They printed 5,000 copies, and stapled to the cover of each a photograph from a Cairo fleamarket

Stack America now offers six-month subscriptions
In case you need your independent magazine fix in smaller installments. Get ready for more seasonal offers from December 1st

Geeky mag injoke ahoy with the new cover of Gym Class. I’m afraid I might well be to blame.

I’m also responsible for the cover story – the great Mr Lois agreed to a 30-minute interview, for which I scheduled an hour just in case. Two hours in, I’m late for my next meeting, and he’s only got as far as question four.

A few choice excerpts:

“[My school was] the greatest seat of learning since Alexander sat at the feet of Aristotle.”

“Harold called me up and he said, I never saw a cover like this in my life. I said, Yeah, that’s my job.”

“My covers promised a hot shit magazine. If you bought it, and you said, Dull, boring, dull, as you turned the pages, the cover would have been ludicrous.”

“If I had the backing today… I’d do a magazine that would knock you on the goddamn ass, and millions of people would [read] it.”

And just wait till you hear who played second base for Esquire‘s softball team the day that George came to play.

The man can talk, the poor shrinking violet that he is. I’ll post an audio excerpt or two up here soon, to whet appetites while we wait for Gym Class to come back from the printers. Fun.