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get back their mojo
Welcome rebirth of National Geo and SI
By Don Wallace
On a Saturday after Labor Day last year, just back from a month away, I gathered in the mail, settled into the overstuffed chair, and opened the fall harvest of magazines.
A lot of magazines drifted through my fingers that day, to be set aside for later. Two stayed in my lap: National Geographic and Sports Illustrated. As the light faded, I read several issues of both cover to cover, forgetting all about the laundry, the dishes, the bills, the child in the other room (he's 14, so this is not considered abuse).
I got in some trouble that night for all the things I didn't do. But, later on, I realized I had an excuse; both magazines had quietly reinvented themselves, slipped under my busy-person's radar.
Most of us develop an internal device to cut through the clutter, but mine had been bamboozled. How?
Leafing through them, I saw a common theme: big bold photo treatments, personal stories told without the taint of celebrity fluff, a point of view that avoided the predictable, and tough choices that indicated a passionate individuality at work. The latter is particularly difficult to achieve in publications with large mainstream audiences that are known to operate by committee.
But the real trick was how both of these mags had shifted ground just enough to de-familiarize themselves.
They'd done more than a redesign (a concept that often fails because the design community is such a closed shop, anyway). They'd done less than throw out the baby with the bath water.
They'd figured out how to change while retaining and in some cases highlighting their traditional strengths.
When the ASME awards were decanted a couple of weeks ago, I felt a self-congratulatory buzz over how the two mags fared. (NG won for General Excellence, SI for Features and Profiles.)
I even felt as if I was in some way responsible. That sounds like sheer egotism, but isn't that how great magazines connect with their audiences? The devoted reader feels he or she has a stake in the project. It's irrational, maybe even a little creepy (we've all gotten those letters from the reader who believes we're talking directly to her, and now she wants to come visit). But it's the pulse of life.
Anyway, that two old chestnuts like NG and SI could turn me back into a fan, well, that's pretty good in my book.
When I thought back over my relationship with these two, I found a lot of parallels, and one glaring anomaly.
The parallels: they were part of my experience growing up; at adulthood, I felt I'd outgrown them; from the mid '80s on, both seemed a little overwhelmed by all the changes in the media world, and seemed uncomfortable with their identities.
NG kept coming up with these lifestyle reports that reminded me of those news photos we used to see of Henry Kissinger with Hollywood starlets: What is that bald little man doing with Jill St. John? What is NG doing with these stories of Pittsburgh Reborn and The Disco Queens of Peoria? Where are the Amazon natives and Egyptian tombs of yesteryear?
NG was getting whipped by Conde Nast Traveler, a case of a heavyweight beefsteak being TKO'd by a cucumber-and-watercress sandwich (and no crust, please, 'cuz we're Conde Nast, i.e., British). This was all wrong, but CNT was much more readable, lively, spunky. And then there was Outside, and Men's Journal, and the Patagonia Catalog (which was actually a real hairy adventure outdoors cultural-celebrating magazine for those in the early know).
NG was still all about putting on the puttees and pith helmet. It went on and on about its "mission," and like any other municipality ran these "Your tax dollars at work" pieces that had the taste of cod liver oil. It had Al Gore Syndrome.
SI, meanwhile, seemed unnerved by the cable-fed sports junkie world. As if infected with the "I Love You (Tom Wolfe)" virus, it started using extraordinary!!! amounts!!! Of!!! Exclamation!!! Points! And there was a vogue for all these whiteguy writers writing like inner-city brothers (in the Air Jordans of His Airness!!!)
And if SI wasn't NewJiveCity, it was pontificating about baseball in T.S. Eliot tones, and I'm talking about the late High Anglican T.S. Eliot. The one who wrote "Time present and time past/are both perhaps present in time future" (tell that to Steve Case, Norman Pearlstine).
In its defense, SI was living out the American racial thing in its pages. That our black sides and white sides just couldn't get along wasn't SI's fault.
But it didn't make good reading. Then ESPN Magazine came along and whacked SI, just like in a Scorsese movie. Young tough, local hoodlum, no respect. One minute hes kissing your pinkie ring, the next minute he's got your ad schedules up the wazoo.
At that point, the odds were nil of either mag mattering to Mr. Overstuffed Chair On Saturday Morning. But then the baby became a child and an uncle bestowed NG on him. He read it casually, never cover to cover. Not like his Dad.
Yes, Dad remembered all those days of leafing through Grandpa's yellowed pile of Geographics, looking for brown-breasted Samoan women peeping shyly at the camera.
And now the new NG took shape before his eyes: a commitment to endangered regions and species re-invigorated its photographs; a less stodgy kind of text, with first person narratives, burst the boundaries. And the ideas got fresher, and even the "Your Society Dollars At Work" stories became compelling. The contributors became presences, real people with passions. The real-world concerns were stitched into the travelogues with a crisper, more worldly hand, whether the subject was landmines, famine, corruption.
Of course, there were also the stories NG does so well: on the swimming man-eater tigers of Bangladesh, for instance; or the Mummies of Peru; or sharks.
I think the coin dropped for me when NG did a cover on the enormous Maui wave called "Jaws" and the madman, Laird Hamilton, who dared to ride it Our little family unit is, I confess, a tad agro when it comes to surf
(translation: we're nuts). It was unspeakably cool of NG to put Jaws on the cover.
It was also smart. Surfing was becoming huge, in the culture, in advertising, with Bruce Weber and Tom Hanks diving into surf-related work.
Today surfing is overdone to a turn, but NG was right on the edge.
The piece was funny, too. NG sounded slightly tongue-in-cheek, as if aware that taking surfing seriously would have caused old Gilbert Grosnevor Bell to do a 360-degree floater in his grave. And the graphic diagram that accompanied the story was priceless for a surfer awaiting Geographic-level validation.
As for SI, its turn came when my son became a Jets fan. I got him the subscription just in time to watch the venerable weekly go on a three-year quality tear.
The articles just got hotter and hotter. Forgetting about trying to seem hip, SI got deep into the sports revolution, the whole marketing thing. Unlike most sports journalism--print or broadcast--it questioned the big-money corporate assumptions, the racial fissures, the corruption inherent in officially sanctioned gambling, the silly posturing of athletic demi-gods and their oh-so-Socratic coaches.
It also cooled the whiteguy talking black stuff. Not entirely, but it no longer sounded like Vanilla Ice locked into a studio on KFAN with Martin Lawrence and Eddie Murphy.
In fact, SI has done powerful essays and articles on racial issues ever since the Sixties. For the Nineties, it has continued and broadened the tradition, including taking on sacred cows such as the whole child-out-of-wedlock thing in the pros, SAT testing and cheating in the colleges, the myths and scientific theories behind black excellence in certain sports, and the aforementioned demi-god syndrome.
On racial matters, I'd take SI's coverage over The New Republic's or even Time Magazine's during the last five years. Sure, you might have missed another story on Al Sharpton, but the take is fresher, less clouded by piety. And sports is where our racial theater plays itself out. One thing's for sure: SI would never have published an excerpt of the white supremacist-apologist book "The Bell Curve," as TNR did, without extensively examining its claims and methodology in its pages.
But what showed me that SI had the pulse was a photo that filled its Leading Off pages last year. It was a picture of a F-18A Hornet breaking the sound barrier, actually morphing through a lens of atmospheric moisture It was not really a sports photo, SI admitted in the caption. But it was too good not to run.
I thought that was unspeakably cool of SI. (And the photo won a Pulitzer this year.)
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Don Wallace is the magazine critic for Media Life.
