The higher journalisn't
Wilson Quarterly to End Print Publication
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLERThe Wilson Quarterly, the 36-year-old general interest magazine published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, has announced that it will put out its final print issue in July.
“We’re not going on the Web per se,” Steven Lagerfeld, the magazine’s editor, said in an interview. “We already have a Web site. The magazine will simply be published in a somewhat different form as an app,” first in the iTunes store and later on the Android platform.
Mr. Lagerfeld said he did not know the magazine’s current circulation figures, but a blog post at the Nieman Journalism Lab noted that the Wilson Center spent $1.96 million on the magazine against $950,000 revenue in 2010. The Wilson Quarterly’s spring issue, currently on newsstands, is titled “The Age of Connection,” and includes several articles on the promise and perils of the digital age.
- Scott Lahti
- North Berwick, Maine
The Wilson Quarterly in print form was one of the better-kept secrets in American cultural publishing, a sort of throwback to what the tonier and much smaller-circulation Reader's Digest of the 1920s and 1930s was at least in part: a satellite's-eye harvest of what the latter called "articles of enduring significance, in condensed permanent booklet form", cherry-picked from the leading opinion weeklies, general and scientific monthlies, and even literary quarterlies, with, in the case of The Wilson Quarterly, an additional section summarizing notable research papers from social scientists of interest to a general educated public, and, as the post herein indicates, a half-dozen or so thematic survey articles on long-term changes in our social, political and technical landscape. With the only partial exceptions of the much-compromised American Scholar and perhaps Daedalus, Prospect, The New York Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement, I'm hard-pressed to recall a comparable surviving journal, and shall miss it as I miss the now-retiring hard-copy Encyclopædia Britannica, not least in the case of the latter due to its lonely position as almost sole surviving flame-bearer of the character "æ" ...
- Larry
- The Fifth Circle
Reader's Digest was "tonier?"
- Scott Lahti
- North Berwick, Maine
For its first twenty years (1922-1941) and with a smaller circulation that, adjusted to today's US population, would put it at or slightly under a million, and with the articles it condensed coming more often than not from the tier of The Atlantic Monthly, The American Mercury, Harper's, The Nation, The New Yorker, Saturday Review, Scientific American and Vanity Fair (the glorious old Frank Crowninshield incarnation, whose covers alone are to swoon over), and when compared to its diluted postwar versions whose expansion took its circulation c. 1975 to an all-time high of around 18 million, when it became the Bob Hope, Paul Harvey, Art Linkletter, Arnold Palmer and Andy Williams among US magazines, yes, tonier by a good newsstand yard. Borrow a free copy of The Reader's Digest Reader from 1940 through Archive.org and prepare to be amazed.
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