Go to the New Yorker website at http://www.newyorker.com/. Post your top-of-the-head thoughts to your blog ... or as a comment to this post ... or to whatever post you're posting it to ... or both ... or all three.
How does today’s New Yorker website compare to the magazine that Harold Ross created? The one you’ve been reading about? How does the New Yorker reflect the spirit of our age? (Also see definition of "Zeitgeist" below.) How would you describe is the spirit of our age, anyway? Post your thoughts as comments to this item.
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A weblog for Pete Ellertsen's mass communications students at Benedictine University Springfield.
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- COMM 353: Extra credit
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About Me
- Pete
- Springfield (Ill.), United States
- I'm a retired English, journalism and cultural studies teacher at Springfield College in Illinois (acquired by Benedictine University and subsequently closed). I coordinate jam sessions for the "Clayville Pioneer Academy of Music" at Clayville Historic Site and the Prairieland Strings dulcimer club, and I sing in the choir and the contemporary praise team at Peace Lutheran Church in Springfield. On Hogfiddle I post links and video clips for our sessions and workshops on the mountain dulcimer (a.k.a. "hog fiddle"), as well as research notes on folklore and cultural studies, hymnody and traditional Anglo-Celtic and Scandinavian music. I also posted assignments and readings in my interdisciplinary humanities classes. The Mackerel Wrapper (now on hiatus), carried assignments and readings for my mass comm. students. I started teaching b/log when I chaired SCI-Benedictine's assessment committee, and reopened it as the privatization of public schools grew increasingly troubling and closer to home.
6 comments:
I feel it unfair to compare the past to the present editions of the same magazine. The satirically comic style still seems intact, and the writing remains crisp. But everything has changed: new editors, new writers, new this that and the other. I’m sure it draws greatly on inspirations from past iterations, but it is completely different, and there is no way around it. And truly, who could compare the now legendary (at least in my mind), Harold Ross. The extreme eccentric/genius left a legacy behind, that any would struggle to measure up to.
The magazine still has integrity, it still has an audience, but it is still not the same, and it never will be.
The more I read about Thurber's Ross, the more you can see the past influences resonate in today's New Yorker. What Ross set out to do in the past was to create a magazine that captured the intellectual zeitgeist of the "then" New York. He succeeded. At least, that's the stressful interpretation I glean from reading Thurber. While the writers, editors, and contributes have all changed and brought in their own biases, opinions, and other styles, I still feel the magazine does retain some of its original roots, contradictory to what I have posted before. They still have the shouts & murmurs, talk of the town, and culture desk which are all described as little sections of the magazine that Ross worked tirelessly to create, uphold, and influence the American consciousness. Sure the intellectual quality is still a topic for debate as reading abilities decline, but the skeleton is still the same. Sure some of the organs may have been changed, but the initial structure is still in tact, and it continues to capture the higher brow of the American-New York ideal.
The spirit of these times also are on a more universal level. With communication more globalized and interconnected, the spirit crosses boarders. The New Yorker covers everything from NCAA brackets, to Goldman Sachs, to the Afghan murders. I think the soul of our times is one of enormous volume. And that is why we feel overwhelmed. Instead of focusing on things more closer to home, we get wrapped up in what is happening everywhere. This kind of information is so immense, it makes us feel insignificant. Just to add on to what I said earlier.
As all things do, the New Yorker has changed with time. I think the fact that they have transcended medias demonstrates this very clearly. The spirit of our time has changed greatly from the spirit that the New Yorker originally catered to.
I feel that it is unfair to compare the both of these two just because they are at different times and they use different sources to edit. Harold Ross did a good job of editing without using all the extra technology, and now today we have the advantage to use different programs to make sure that what we write it right. All the editors have changed in the past years so therefore it is unfair to compare all of them.
Looking through the New Yorker, particularly in the Culture Desk, the first article that I noticed was the news about the Encyclopedia Britannica no longer being published in print. It does have a reflection of the times we are facing of everything being electronic now, even something as age-old as the E.B.
The rest of the articles revolve mostly around movies, literature, art, plays... the usual escapism that people face. While I also enjoy watching movies and reading good fiction, the fact that a single page is overloaded with it does tell me that escapism plays a key role in our culture today.
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