Time and space and the literary journal

Yesterday I read the most scintillating post over at Nieman Journalism Lab: ‘Following up on the need for follow-up’. It was the kind of piece you read and wish you’d written, and can be summarised thusly: we need to move beyond our news cycles – ‘the daily paper, the nightly newscast, the monthly magazine’ – because our reality is no longer confined by them. Here’s Megan Garber (author of the post) quoting Matt Thompson (from NPR and Snarkmarket):

Journalism can now exist outside of time. The only reason we’re constrained to promoting news on a minutely, hourly, daily or weekly basis is because we’ve inherited that notion from media that really do operate in fixed time cycles.

And this got me, an associate editor at a literary journal, pondering the relativity of journalism and literary journals and their relationship to time, information and identity.

At one point in time, long ago, say the 1970s, we had quarterly journals. No electronic publishing, no blogs and far fewer submissions. Mr Ted Genoways, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, estimated: ‘Back in the 1930s, magazines like the Yale Review or VQR saw maybe 500 submissions in a year; today, we receive more like 15,000.’

A majority of the quarter of the year dedicated to each issue was spent commissioning, collecting submissions, reading submissions, communicating with authors, editing, proofreading, designing and sending off to typesetters. The journal itself would be bought from a bookstore or mailed out to subscribers. Everything about the production and nature of the journal would exist in that temporal and spatial cycle. This cycle can also be applied to the newspaper but on a different scale of frequency of publication.

Largely, publications have moved beyond these temporal and spatial constraints, albeit in varying and limited ways. Generally, we’re still guided by a firm and paternal timeline (which prevents worlds or time periods colliding and has proved a boon in this uncertain frontier).

For the quarterly journal, the advent of the web created an obligation for an online presence. So journals took to publishing their journal content online, post-journal sales period. Originally it was selected content, rather than all, from each edition. Yet, as more and more readers took to the interwebs, the pressure to publish more content and more regularly online was inexorable. Publications began producing content monthly, then weekly, and now many journals have bloggers who are producing content daily – and with the advent of Twitter, hourly. Readers have come to expect and appreciate this.

(Eventually someone will design the technology to drill an updating device under the skin so we will always know precisely what literary editors are doing, where they are, what they’re eating, and so forth – frightening!)

Yet, as Overland editor Jeff Sparrow wrote:

In this era of intertubes and Twitterfication, we still employ an economic model from the age of the linotype keyboard. That is, though the journal is sold in bookshops, Overland depends mostly on subscribers, who pay a certain amount each year for four copies of a paper journal.

Overland and Meanjin are examples of two journals with a strong web presence that are also producing regular, original content online. Between them, they have 3000 twitter followers and countless facebook friends. While this number isn’t more than their combined print subscriptions, a good portion of these followers don’t subscribe to the journals. In fact, we would be hard-pressed to identify who, without conducting a reading survey, the readers of our journal are.

Merely republishing content from our journals or newspapers does not use, nor does it develop the potential of the digital medium; the electronic versions of the publication simply become that. Neither dynamic, nor original, there seems little point for purely digitised versions, other than immediacy (like if there was an article emergency, for example, where a reader needed to instantly access a journal article online).

Consequently, are we actually making new (digital) identities for our publications that are separate to our print identities? I suspect we are. What we need to do is forge these mediums that have, in some ways, become separate entities or publications.

The Age newspaper is an example of a publication that has a strong identity; reading it in print or online, we know what we will find between those pages. However, the Age doesn’t take advantage of the digital medium, and their publication is not growing in readership or influence, nor is it forging ahead technologically, as a result.

This is the next major technological hurdle: after deciding what information we publish, and when we publish it, we need to decide how to work within our chosen mediums as a single identity. We need information our journals and newspapers are publishing, while cognisant of and experimenting with the limitless technology we now employ on a daily basis. When the information and timing exploit the medium, this is where we will find a seamlessly merged print and electronic identity. Then we will be unstoppable.

(By the by, Meanland was recently added to #bankablejournalism, a project imagined by Abraham Hyatt, the production editor from Read Write Web, that curates ‘daily news about the business of journalism’. We at Meanland thought this a kind of big deal, so have been scouring the other sites to see what’s expected of us now we’re indexed as possessing cutting-edge ideas about journalism and writing.)