Kansas Snapshots by Gloria Freeland - April 25, 2025

Paper storehouses

To say we enjoy magazines would be an understatement. I have subscriptions to six and husband Art has a couple more.

So, are we oddballs in this regard? After all, it's well known that paper-and-ink newspapers are losing circulation. Pew Research's graph of general readership from 1940 to the present looks like an upside-down bowl with the peak occurring in the 1970s and '80s. The same number of newspapers were sold in 2013 as in 1940, while the population of the U.S. grew from 133 million to 315 million in that same period.

But magazines are not newspapers, and magazines are doing well. Data from newsmediaalliance.org shows the number of magazine readers is now more than 10 times the number of newspaper subscriptions with nine out of ten arriving in the mail in that old-fashioned print format!

News media, whether print or electronic, compete for the immediate, but magazines appear to appeal to that part of us that is a bit more laid back. While newspapers are usually read and discarded the same day as publication, one in five magazine readers are perusing older issues.

We are typical in this regard. Our magazines often sit on the coffee table or next to the bed until we take a break to enjoy them. While Art generally prefers to get his news and most other information online, even he seems to occasionally enjoy the traditional print form.

These publications contain a wide range of topics that appeal to me - home decor, cleaning tips, organizing ideas, and features on history, travel, genealogy, scientific discoveries, places to visit. None of these emphasize immediacy.

My latest edition of Real Simple contained the article, "Magazines: Learn all about this very thing you’re reading right now!" I did learn the English word comes from the Arabic makhāzin, meaning "depot" or "storehouse," with a stop in France as "magasin."

The first magazines came from Europe in the 1660s, and were initially scholarly in nature. The Gentleman's Magazine, published in 1731 in London, was the first to use the term. Its editor, Edward Cave, was using the "storehouse" meaning to describe his mix of news, advice, riddles, and recipes.

Benjamin Franklin, who had already been publishing his yearly Poor Richard's Almanack (sic), started his General Magazine in 1741 with news, essays, poetry, and puzzles. But it wasn't until the 19th century that magazines really took off in the U.S., thanks to declining printing costs, inexpensive postage, and a large population of rural isolated readers. National Geographic, Scientific American, and Vogue were founded during this era and are still around.

Zines (pronounced “zeens”) or fanzines are comparatively recent entries into the field. They are usually self-published works produced by enthusiasts of a particular cultural phenomenon, such as literature, music, or pop culture. The 2021 Amy Poehler movie "Moxie" is about a 16-year-old high school student who starts a feminist zine for the women at her school. I thought the word was relatively new, but discovered it was coined in October 1940 by Russ Chauvenet, a U.S. champion chess player and one of the founders of science fiction fandom. "Zine" entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1949.

Daughter Mariya teaches a Kansas State University English class, in which she has her students publish a zine as an end-of-the-semester project. The goal is for each student to contribute to the whole in a cooperative way. After all the items are submitted, she combines them and gives each student a copy - a memento of their joint efforts.

The Tate in London and other museums have collections of zines. The Brooklyn Museum's 2023-2024 exhibit was titled "Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines." A description said it was the first:

... dedicated to the rich history of artists' zines produced in North America. Since the 1970s, zines have given a voice and visibility to many operating outside of mainstream culture.

So even with people facing proliferating leisure-time options, an expanding number of ways for delivering entertainment, and changing reading habits, traditional magazines are performing well. The total number of readers in the U.S. has remained above 220 million in recent times.

One of the reasons was touched on earlier: much as with a book, a reader can choose a convenient moment when to partake. In addition, market research by MRI-Simmons, indicates thirty percent of readers save at least some copies. I saved the September 1953 National Geographic and the 1953 Time Review so I can look at them from time to time to see what was happening during my birth year. A rather amusing finding of the research was that two out of three magazine readers mentioned liking the "touch and feel" of print.

All three of these describe me. So am I an oddball? Nope! It seems I am completely average!