What Does It Mean to Be a Magazine?
The ongoing saga of the tennis magazine, Racquet, is interesting to read about but sad to think about.
I love tennis; I just wrote about it. And I love the magazine; I had a subscription for a while.
It was a quarterly, and the books themselves were works of art. But, in the cold, hard light of business, those aren't the features of a money-making endeavor. The company's co-founders are currently counter-suing each other, but the heart of their dispute is rather quaint: What is the purpose of a magazine? Or a media company?
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It's not quaint because those are necessarily easy questions to answer, but rather the options feel both obvious and quite far apart.
One founder wanted to be a magazine company, where the star product is the physical periodical. It is a purist's pursuit of publication.
The other wanted more, bigger, better; she wanted Racquet to be a name that straddled the media world and the tennis world. She wanted to host events and collaborations and generally find ways to make money.
My heart is with the purist. Always and forever. There is nothing like working on a physical media product. When I was working at Vox Magazine in graduate school, I was in charge of features in the print edition. When I was a newspaper reporter, my feature writing was often the anchor story for one of the two main section's of the print issue. I love the satisfaction of holding something I helped create; it's the best.
But my head wants the magazine to survive, and I know that right now, in this day and age, partnerships and collaborations are the bare minimum that many publications have to consider to make ends meet. I don't care about the lifestyle elements quite as much, but that's because I'm not the high-roller they would be aimed at. To me, the magazine itself is more than enough, but I'm probably an outlier in that sense.
I hate that these differences tore the founders apart; I really like them together because I liked the thing they'd brought into the world. It's given us a second upstart tennis publication though, which I love. So I wish them both well, and I'll greedily gobble up the quality contents of both.