When the dream ends
The death of the magazine industry has left an empty space for lovers of the genre, writes
“This is not just a magazine; it’s a shining beacon of hope ...” Apart from Miranda Priestly’s (played by Meryl Streep) perfectly timed zingers, this line from Stanley
Tucci’s Nigel on the cult classic The Devil Wears Prada is one I relate to. It’s the reason why the accelerated disappearance of magazines from the shelves feels like a personal loss.
Over the years declining circulation and ad revenue has resulted in the loss of many of our syndicated titles like ELLE and Marie Claire. Destiny magazine publisher Ndalo Media’s storied demise is a sticking sore point for many, but it’s the recent closures of heritage titles like Drum and Bona that truly set the alarm bells ringing for most. It’s been obvious for a while that the magazine publishing industry’s days were numbered, but the almost complete decimation of titles this year alone was rapid and decisive.
Growing up I spent a lot of time at my school and town libraries, reading Sweet Valley High and Archie comics, but it wouldn’t be too long before I became obsessed with magazines. I remember borrowing copies of the US edition of Seventeen. Never mind that it was overwhelmingly white, the Seventeen world of confident, beautiful young people is one I aspired to. I loved reading features providing a window into the lives of celebrities; agony aunts made me feel normal, and I revelled in book, music and movie reviews. If it was in a magazine, it must be good, I thought.
As I grew older, Y-Mag and VIBE would teach me that people who look like me can also be beautiful. SL Magazine’s fashion pages had me dreaming about wearing YDE threads; their club and bar vouchers had me dreaming about partying on Cape Town’s Long Street years before I ever boarded a flight to the mother city. Their monthly free CD is where I discovered acts like BLK JKS, Fokofpolisiekar, Sibot, Lark, Spoek Mathambo and others that radio never played.
I’d walk home to Alberton North from school at JG Strijdom in Johannesburg’s South Hills, having spent my transport money buying magazines as the list of titles I liked kept growing. Former True Love and Cosmopolitan magazine editor Sbu Mpongose, who grew up in Eshowe in KwaZulu-Natal, shares a similar experience.
“Magazines presented this very glamorous world and
Joburg was this cool place you wanted to go to because the magazines said so.”
Come to Joburg she did, becoming the youngest editorin-chief for the iconic True Love magazine. “Editing felt instinctive for me. I was passionate because I had been an avid reader way before I got the job. I used to tell my colleagues that we ought to feel privileged that people are taking their hard-earned money and choosing us over the many other options.”
For Janine Jellars, a former editor for the now defunct South African edition of Seventeen, reading was part of the culture at home. YOU magazine and Drum were weekly staples. “My love for magazines kicked in when I discovered Vogue UK, Teen and Seventeen magazines at the local library. Those titles were seminal. For a little girl growing up on the Cape Flats, they opened my eyes to a world I didn’t know existed.”
Jellars argues that the gap magazines leave behind is yet to be filled by anything else, in spite of the boom in digital content creation. “Magazines provide a different type of journalism that I think is still needed in society. Internet listicles aren’t literature, the brevity of newspapers don’t really allow for in-depth storytelling, sponsored content can’t give you objectivity,” she says.
With content creation no longer the domain of trained professionals and publishers having been slow to respond and adapt to the new reality, Mpungose says it became obvious that she was working in a sunset industry. “Magazines are driven by celebrity culture. So, if people already know what their favourite celebrity had for breakfast, lunch and dinner because they shared it on social media, what are we saying?”
Mpungose adds that she was fascinated by how agile and nimble individuals creating content on the Internet were and concluded that that’s where the future of content creation lies. Still, she believes there is a space for magazines. “Content needs to be organised in order for it to have value and to be monetised. Magazines are brands, they’ve got muscle and there’s still value in that.”
“Magazines have been ‘dying’ since I first set foot in the True Love office as an intern in 2005,” says Jellars. “Over my entire career in magazines there was a constant threat of closure and retrenchment. Magazines in this country fell short not necessarily because they didn’t adapt fast enough to the digital age, but because they didn’t adapt fast enough to a changing country.
“The fact that many titles and publishers only rolled out ‘first Black editor’ announcements within the last five years is such an indictment. How did we expect our readers or potential readers to care about us and our existence if we didn’t care about theirs?”
Says Mpungose: “I can’t imagine fighting with a publisher today about putting a dark-skinned black child on the cover, but there was a lot of that back then. There was no Black Lives Matter. Most of us didn’t have the language to defend what we felt about such things.”
Jellars decries the closure of Bona magazine specifically, adding that “its content truly spoke to South African women and the linguistic diversity of the title made it unique and special. I feel its loss on the shelves.
“If a magazine’s role is content generation then it will always be a failure. There’s a space for ‘slow journalism’ and actual storytelling in this fast-paced era. I still yearn to read something with depth, and I’m not the only one.”
In short, pretty posts of well-clad people, stunning food and endless livestreams notwithstanding, magazines are a “shining beacon of hope” whose loss feels personal for many.