Some guidance on our path toward greatness.
In a February post titled Worth Saving, I said I'd like Linux Journal to be for technology what The New Yorker is for New York and National Geographic is for geography. Meaning it should be two things: 1) a magazine readers value enough not to throw away; and 2) about much more than what the name says, while staying true to the name as well.
The only push-back I got was from a guy whose comment called both those model pubs "fanatically progressive liberal whatever" and said he hoped we're not "*planning* to emulate those tainted styles." I said we are not. And, in case that's not clear, I'm saying it here again.
Another commenter asked, "Is there another publication that you'd offer up as an example to emulate?" I replied, "Three come quickly to mind: Scientific American, Dr. Dobb's Journal and Byte. Just think of all three when they were at their best. I want Linux Journal to honor those and be better as well."
Alas, Scientific American is the only one of those three that's still alive, and it's not exactly what it once was: the most authoritative yet popular science magazine in the world. Or at least that's how it looked when my parents gave me a subscription when I was twelve. Back then wanted to read everything I could about science—when I wasn't beeping code to other ham radio operators from my bedroom or otherwise avoiding homework assignments.
Today, Scientific American is probably as close as it can get to that legacy ideal while surviving in the mainstream of magazine publishing—meaning it persists in print and digital form while also maintaining a constant stream of topical stories on its website.
That last thing is the main work of most magazines these days—or so it seems. As a result there isn't much difference between Scientific American, Smithsonian, Wired, Ars Technica and Inverse. To demonstrate what I mean, here are stories from those five publications' websites. See if you can guess (without clicking on the links) where each one ran :
The problem with all of them isn't just that they could run anywhere, but that they are all just content. Or seem to be, no matter how good they actually are. (While they can be very good, one example of how they often aren't is that I had to fix the spelling in one of those headlines.)
Here's what I said in The Problem With Content (in the March 2017 Linux Journal):
Back in the early '00s, John Perry Barlow said "I didn't start hearing about 'content' until the container business felt threatened." Linux Journal was one of those containers—so was every other magazine, newspaper and broadcast station. Today, those containers are bobbing around in an ocean of "content" on the Internet. Worse, the stuff inside the containers, which we used to call "editorial", is now a breed of "content" too.
In the old days, editorial lived on one side of a "Chinese wall" between itself and the publishing side of a newspaper or magazine. The same went for the programming and advertising sides of a commercial broadcast station or network. The wall was transparent, meaning it was possible for a writer, a photographer, a newscaster or a performing artist to see what funded the operation, but the ethical thing was to ignore what happened on the other side of that wall. Which was easy to do, because everything on the other side of that wall was somebody else's job.
Today that wall has been destroyed by the imperatives of "content production", which is the new job of journalists and everybody else devoted to "generating content" in maximum volumes, all the better to attract "programmatic" advertising.
This has had the effect of drowning journalism in a sea of content. So we're not swimming there.
By doing no advertising (or, perhaps eventually, only the old-fashioned kind that simply sponsors our work and carries no tracking), we're free to zero-base something different and better than you'll see elsewhere. And that applies both here inside the magazine and in other media as well, starting with the website.
So far I see three requirements for becoming as great* as we want to be.
First is featuring great writers you know by name, and who you expect to produce great stuff. We already have some of those in our stable of veteran contributors, but we want more.
Second is by being as fun, practical and authoritative as we can on Linux topics. A nice model for that, among successful contemporaries, is Make. We should be for Linux what Make is for the maker movement.
Third is by going deep. I want us to drill down on topics that are important and relevant to our readers, but not covered elsewhere. (Or not covered well enough.)
As always, we invite guidance from readers toward all of those.
* I'm not sure OMNI magazine (1978-1995) was great, but it sure tried hard. I was part of that, contributing humorous pieces to early issues. When that failed to pan into a full-time gig, I did what many other journalists do when they reach their rope's end: started an ad agency. That grew into one of the biggest in Silicon Valley before I got pulled back to journalism again in the '90s—by Linux Journal.