Independent Magazines and the Power of Connection

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The way we serve our communities will not be bounded by any one medium, but I firmly believe that there will be a continued appreciation, even a new vogue, for these print artifacts we produce: the printed magazine is not going away and its unique values will become more apparent. Yes, magazines are conveniently portable -- you can read them in the bath tub. And they're tactile -- reading award-winner Bidoun, for instance, is a multi-sensate pleasure. But far more than that I think the pleasure of a physical magazine incorporates a temporal dimension as well -- a magazine is a medium that lends itself to self-pacing, thinking, admiration and engagement, to stories that stick, and change lives.

Each of us everyday is exposed to a fire hose of information, a torrent of blather. What's rare and precious -- and that is to say, worth paying for -- are opportunities for reflection, for context and connection, for connecting the dots. In my own ruminations about this talk, I had the pleasure of reading through selected issues of most of the winners, and here's what N+1 had to say recently about the blogosphere: "So much typing, so little communication . . . it's incredible. A bottomless labor market exists in which the free activity of the mind gets bartered away for something even less nourishing than a bowl of porridge . . ." Yes, our writers and editors will have to compete, in effect, with infinite free blah, blah, blah, and in dark moments I worry that it's a battle that could be lost. But the Utne winners today show how it can be done, and in their richness they give their audience deep satisfaction.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, there is the towering matter of trust. I'm not saying we live in a cynical age, but after nearly seven years of the Bush Administration, my b.s. detector may be permanently stuck at Threat Level Orange. My kids are even touchier than I am. "That's biased, Dad!,"  "How do you know?" We all want to know where our news is coming from but, because we can't check it all, we will gravitate to sources, probably multiple sources, we decide we can trust. And how will we decide? I posit that our publications, whose life blood is that kind of connection, can thrive by being not merely smart and creative, but also, at our deepest levels, honest and authentic, worthy of trust.

A little over ten years ago, for Mother Jones' 20th Anniversary issue, we asked the environmental writer Bill McKibben, the author of The
End of Nature, to look out over the next twenty years to see what he saw coming. He wrote that the greatest threat to the planet may derive from a consumer culture where "market forces pushing convenience, individualism and comfort are still stronger than the attraction of community, fellowship and connection." It was clear that, in his view, the fate of our children and grandchildren rested on our success in turning that tide.

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