The last frontier in magazine content
March 25th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
Do you remember what you read in a magazine two weeks or two months ago? Have you read multiple issues of a magazine recently? And do you care about what anyone else thought about an article you read, way back when?
If so, then you must be a “Letters to the Editor” reader. Personally, I’ve never been that person. I read part or all of about a dozen different magazines in a given month, and until recently, I’ve never even bothered with the Letters section.
Unlike a blog, where the feedback is instantaneous and I can join in a conversation, it doesn’t serve me to see what Jim Smith from Des Moines thinks, because I can’t reply to him, and if I reply to the magazine, they won’t print it because they’re off printing letters about the next issue. So what’s the point of even giving the time of day to the Letters section?
Then Esquire magazine turned the Letters section upside down.
Crack open an issue (no link, because in actuality, the online version doesn’t replicate or do justice to the print version), and you’ll find in their recently re-named “The Sound and the Fury” things like:
- Graphs showing a breakdown of letter topics
- Highlights in, footnotes on, and annotations of letters
- Behind the scenes peeks at features in the current issue
- Funny quotes from unpublished letters, pulled completely out of context
- “Letter-Inspired Fiction,” where a highly-regarded writer improvises a micro-story using a reader letter as a jumping-off point
Just to name a few. I don’t know who’s responsible (and I’d like to) for the re-imagining of the Letters section at Esquire, but I gotta say, it’s one of the coolest changes in a magazine’s format I’ve seen in … gosh, I don’t know how many years. Maybe this decade?
I could also say in this century or millennium, considering it’s the same thing. Either way, kudos to Esquire for doing what I had once thought impossible - not only getting me to read a Letters section, not only getting me to enjoy it, and not only to get me to look forward to it.
Esquire actually changed the way I read their magazine, by making their Letters section so cool that it’s the first thing I read.
Many years ago, the Science Fiction magazines I read at the time always published the addresses of those whose letters to the editor they published. It was a terrific way — in the pre-internet days — of connecting with people: if you liked what somebody said, you sent ‘em a letter. All these years later, I still write to some of those pen-pals I made through the letters pages.
These days, I still read the letters section of most magazines because often times the most helpful tips and quotes you can find are in the letters, not the articles.
Comment by Jim Allen, The Big Life Guy — March 29, 2008 @ 12:26 pm
I agree. Esquire is one of the only magazines that I read from cover to cover and the presentation of the content is as important as the content itself. The blend of linear and non-linear web styling coupled with traditional journalism keeps my attention and informs. Good mix. Great blog.
Comment by Ian Alexander — March 31, 2008 @ 11:05 am