How magazines responded
By Geoff Van Dyke Posted Sat, Dec 1 2001
After two days of constant television coverage, Internet updates and wall-to-wall newspaper coverage of Sept. 11 disaster, people in New York were walking with the new Time- the first magazine on the newsstands after the attacks- tucked under their arms, the familiar red cover border replaced by somber black. Between the twin towers, the lone cover line reads: “September 11 2001.” Within hours, newsstands in midtown Manhattam had sold out of the issue.
The next day, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report released special issues, and People and Business Week published new issues, both with special sections on the attacks.
As the shock began to wear off and really returned-changed forever-it became clear that magazines were much more than glossy paper and smiling celebrities. Indeed, they were real somehow necessary, both historically, as documents that recorded what had happened, but also psychologically, as cultural objects that tried to make sense of everything.
Editorially, the weeklies' special issues consisted mostly of images that we had seen on television, but which achieved new poignancy as stills. By the time these magazines were printed, the tapes of two planes flying into the World Trade Center towers had become numbing in their ubiquity. The photos provided a different perspective and offered the time to examine and to find things that got lost on TV-a woman's glasses glazed over with dust and debris, the crumpled body of the New York City Fire Department's chaplain, Mychal Judge.
The special issues were thin-they ran without any advertisements, but there was something remarkable about the speed with which they were produced. Magazines that reahced newsstands on Thursday and Friday were turned around in 24 hours. Though New York Mayor Rudolf Giuliani had encouraged most workers in the city to stay home on Sept. 12, editors and reporters for Time and People put together the issues, according to Time Inc. spokesman Peter Costiglo.
Because the tragedy occurred on a Tuesday, editorial scheduling worked out for the weeklies. “We have ripped up issues for news before,” writes Times' managing editor James Kelly in a letter to readers in the special issue. “In this case, since we now close on Saturdays, the workweek had just begun, so we didn't have to throw anything out; we just started from scratch.”
That the weeklies made it to newsstands around the country only a couple of days after the 11th is something of a logistical miracle, too. With airplanes grounded, distribution became a challenge. Printers that normally ship magazines to wholesalers via air arranged for ground transportation. Hudson News, the primary wholsaler in the New York City area, had to switch its normal delivery schedule so that it could deliver magazines in Manhattan on Thursday.
Magazines are secondary when it comes to breaking news. But, within a matter of days, these magazines had published stunning photographs, detailed graphics, and news analysis that couldn't be found anywhere else. Television carried the moving images and the breaking news; the Internet rivaled TV with the speed in which it delivered news. Newspapers were unparalleled in the depth and breadth of their coverage. But magazines did what they do best: They captured moments suspended in time with photos and provided thoughtful news analysis. Appropriately, perhaps one of the most moving magazines to appear just after the tragedy was the September 24 issue of The New Yorker. It showed us that narratives are still integral to how we make sense of the world. From its black-on-black cover by Art Spiegelman to the back page poem, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World”, The New Yorker balanced reportage, essays and an unusually large number of photos.
Unlike the weeklies, monthly magazines faced a unique challenge in covering the events and the aftermath of the 11th. By September, many monthlies were in the process of closing the November issues, leaving them with a dilemma: Leave the issues as they were pre-September 11 and risk looking completely out-of-date-and potentially offensive when they hit the newsstand, or tear up the issue at the last minute to include coverage of the events.
Esquire, which had brilliantly and unconventionally covered the Vietnam war, was closing its November issue on the 11th. The actress Cameron Diaz was slated to be on the cover; the theme was “Don't Worry, Be Happy”. “After spending the morning watching the television images from downtown, [deputy editor] Peter Griffin and I went out for a walk to talk about what we could do,” says editor-in-chief David Granger. “We knew we wanted to change the cover, but not what we might do to offer some perspectibe on what had happened that would hold up for three or four weeks, until we were on newsstand.”
The editors replaced the Diaz cover with one that read “What They Saw: Stories From Inside an American Tragedy.” Included in the issue is an eight-page package, with reports from veteran war correspondents Scott Anderson and John Falk, and an essay titled “Notes from the Next War” by Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
At the American Magazine Conference in October, Conde Nast President Steve Florio said that magazines are operating in the worst marketplace since World War II. With a deepening ad slump, newsstand and subscription circulation woes and budget cuts at nearly all magazines, the next year will provide myriad challenges for editors and publishers alike.
But just as the tragedy of September 11 has shown us all the generosity and bravery of American citizens, we have also seen the best of magazines in the disaster's wake. For a medium that more than a few critics called outdated and passe during the heady days of the Internet boom, September 11 and its aftermath has shown that magazines are vital to our present-day multi-media mix. And with the United States and its allies settling into what appears will be a protracted war against terrorism, magazines will continue to bring the public news, analysis and service in a manner uniquely suited to the medium.