06.02.08
Social Networks Usurping Alumni Magazine Audiences?
Today’s New York Times (print edition and here) carries a story about how social networks-with the promise and growing reality of 24/7 real-time updates about the minutiae of an individual’s life-are having an impact on alumni magazines.
Institutions that have moved to embrace various online forms of communication-either alumni-only communities powered or publicly accessible communities-are used to the more free-form style of communication common to social networks, rather than the structured, print-like milestones of birth, marriage, childbirth, death.
For example:
The online version of Colgate’s alumni magazine is a blog, so people can leave comments about articles and one another, said Charlie Melichar, a spokesman for the university. “Alumni overwhelmingly are the ones making comments on stories, about faculty, to congratulate a team on victory,” he said. “Alumni are certainly not just heavy users — they’re heavy engagers.”
Engagement. That’s long been a goal of the pioneers who adopted email, listservs, and other pre-Facebook forms of online networking and communications. It’s now coming to pass as Millennials, Gen Xers, and even Boomers make applications like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter an integral part of their work lives, as well as their social lives.
I think the Times was making a specious observation. Social networking may some day have an impact on the class notes section of a college magazine. It’s true: Why would folks wait three months for updates from classmates when they don’t want to wait three hours?
But readers turn to college magazines for far more than class notes.
They read college magazines—the good ones, anyway—for the same reason that they read periodicals like The New Yorker, Smithsonian, or The Atlantic. To read intellectually engaging stories that make them think, laugh, cry, or growl with rage.
Colleges and universities are incubators for ideas, personalities, and issues that feed creative storytelling, storytelling that is a natural fit for a printed magazine.
Social networking serves a valuable purpose, and higher ed instiutions would be wise to embrace the movement. But to say that it usurps or detracts from the value of a quality magazine is folly, indeed.
Posted on June 4, 2008 by Matt Jennings
You’re right, Matt. I didn’t read the NYT article as indicating that print magazines will go away (or even should go away).
I, too, believe print is extremely valuable. I really do see print and the Net reinforcing each other. But as you know, I’ve long believed that the challenge for magazine editors is to figure out how to add value to their content by embracing the Internet appropriately. The advent of social networking sites that now have millions of users, especially young people, makes it even more compelling to do this.
Posted on June 9, 2008 by Michael Stoner