When was the last time you discussed Time Magazine around the dinner table?

I found myself giving a dissertation on mass media at dinner the other night. It all started when one friend leaned into the table and spoke (in an almost embarrassed whisper), "Did any of you see the cover of Time Magazine? The one with the mother and her older child... breastfeeding?" I knew that they were talking about the issue dated May 21st, 2012 titled, Are You Mom Enough? by Kate Pickert. The article about Dr. Sears and the attachment parenting movement has created quite a stir, but I wanted to tease my friends, so I asked, "Does it offend you?" As is always the case, everybody clamed up hoping that someone else would fall on a sword (and we would either save that person and defend them or watch them squirm and then make fun of them on Facebook).

The real question is this: why did Time Magazine run with that cover story?

The answer to that question comes in the first line of this blog post: seriously, when was the last time you talked about Time Magazine? While the magazine continues to publish, it feels like it has been on some kind of paper diet for a while now. Thin, without much content, Time Magazine (once the weekly magazine that every smart person - or wanna be - had to have) has now become somewhat dated and tried. Without blaming the Internet, for their current state of affairs, it's apparent that magazines like The Economist, The New Yorker, Fast Company and The Atlantic are transcending the whole, "the Internet is killing the magazine business" discourse that is both unfounded and untrue. The Internet simply brought more choice. More choice does not create business challenges, so long as the quality and value is perceived by an audience. In fact, as those other magazines mentioned above prove, the Internet is finally starting to create new and interesting business models for these publications.

It's all about the PR.

The real reason that Time Magazine ran that cover is publicity. They need to sell magazines. The only way to sell magazines (if people aren't hooked on specific writers or stories that they can't find anywhere else) is to create controversy. The challenge with this publishing tactic is that it firmly places Time Magazine into the tabloid marketing camp: where it becomes a game of diminishing returns. Time Magazine will have to keep on being controversial (in fact, increasingly more controversial) to keep people coming back (and talking about them). Has Time Magazine lost its way?

The mass market is a tough market.

In creating a news magazine geared towards everyone, Time Magazine is quickly learning the same lessons that the Web portals had to learn: in an Internet world where people can grab content that is very niche oriented, the general (more mass) content needs to have particular angle. Time Magazine wins awards. Don't kid yourself. They have legitimate and great writers. They understand the magazine business. That all being said, don't kid yourself. That magazine cover was published for one reason... and one reason only: to sell more magazines. It shouldn't offend you. That's not true. They're actually hoping to offend you because the more people talk about it (like this article), the more likelihood it will have for commercial success. 

Doesn't it feel like too much of chasing the mass media dragon in a very different world?

The above posting is my twice-monthly column for The Huffington Post called, Media Hacker. I cross-post it here with all the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original version online here:

• The Huffington Post - Can Breastfeeding Save Time Magazine?

By Mitch Joel

Episode #305 of Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast is now live and ready for you to listen to.

Now, with the ubiquity of smartphones and mobile connectedness, it has never been easier to share with the world our each and every move (look no further than Facebook's one billion dollar acquisition of Instagram). And we're publishing our lives. All of the time - in text, images, audio and video - for the world to see. In fact, it's happening more and more with each and every passing day. Why are we doing all of this self-tracking? It's a topic that has fascinated Nora Young for a long while. The founding host and producer of CBC's Definitely Not The Opera and the current host of Spark (a radio show and podcast about the intersection of technology and culture - and it's one of my personal favorites) spent this past year digging deeper into self-tracking and what this means about our society and who we are. The culmination of her work is the recently published book, The Virtual Self - How Our Digital Lives Are Altering the World Around Us. Over the years, I've had the pleasure of being a guest on Spark on multiple occasions, so it was a lot of fun to turn the tables and interview Nora. Enjoy the conversation...

You can grab the latest episode of Six Pixels of Separation here (or feel free to subscribe via iTunes): Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast #305.

By Mitch Joel

93Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, the author of Complete Web Monitoring and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks), Hugh McGuire (The Book Oven, LibriVox, iambik, PressBooks, Media Hacks) and I decided that every week or so the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person "must see".

Check out these six links that we're recommending to one another:

• Why Generation Y is Causing the Great Migration of the 21st Century - PlaceShakers And NewsMakers. "Nathan Morris makes a good case that 60 years of suburban dreams have ended, and that we'll no longer crave the suburbs. Technology, infrastructure, and lifestyle changes might turn the countryside into a ghost town the way the flight from urban cores has abandoned some cities." (Alistair for Hugh).
• Startups, this is how design works. "These days, it's all about the interface. With dozens of new companies emerging daily, those that are easy and intuitive get a head start. Wells Riley has a great (and well-designed) guidebook for startups that need to understand the fundamentals of design. It's a good read that illustrates common mistakes and underscores the fundamental reason for designing something: to solve a physical or virtual problem." (Alistair for Mitch).
• The Floppy Disk means Save, and 14 other old people Icons that don't make sense anymore - Computer Zen. "I don't know if you have this experience too, but I have a mother who asks me occasionally for help with her computer. She doesn't do it very often because I usually end up shouting at the phone. For whatever reason, my mother just doesn't seem to connect with the fundamental metaphors that computers are built on: file/folder structure, and layers of open-but-not-in-use applications. But what about the young people today, struggling to figure out why 'save' should be denoted by an icon of a floppy disk? What's a floppy disk? Here's a list of common computer iconography that no longer make much sense at all, since the things they refer to in order to help us 'understand' are - for many young people - long extinct and as baffling as the questions: 'what app are you in? what does the menu bar say?' are for my mother." (Hugh for Alistair).
• How Books Will Survive Amazon? - The New York Review of Books. "Jason Epstein is the cofounder of the New York Review of Books AND the co-founder of On Demand Books, which makes the Espresso Book Machine - an (industrial) photocopier-sized machine that'll print and bind a one-off of your favorite book in about a minute. So he's the co-founder of both one of the bastions of 'old' literary culture, and 'new' publishing technology. In this short piece, he tells everyone worried about the future of publishing to relax. The details don't matter so much as Epstein's conclusion: 'Barring a nuclear disaster, life will go on as it always has: past, present, and future all at once.'" (Hugh for Mitch).
• Dieter Rams On Good Design As A Key Business Advantage - Fast Company's Co.Design. "This is a beautiful speech given by Dieter Rams in New York in 1976. Rams is best-known for his design work at Braun (and for being a heavy influence on Jony Ive - Apple's superstar designer. Rams is 80 years old today, and this jump back in time is still an extremely fresh and compelling perspective on why design matters." (Mitch for Alistair).
• Prime-Time Stern - The New York Times. "On Monday night, the season premiere of America's Got Talent will be on. Anyone who thinks that Howard Stern is a lewd and crude shock jock, will see the side of him that I know and love: he is, without question, one of the smartest people on the plant who commands a conversation like no other. His celebrity interviews are second-to-none because he is no-nonsense and has an acute beat on the human condition. America (and the rest of the world) are going to fall in love with Stern because in a world of fake reality television, he is truly real." (Mitch for Hugh).

Now it's your turn: in the comment section below pick one thing that you saw this week that inspired you and share it.

By Mitch Joel

Believe it or not, you're constantly being inspired.

The trick with inspiration is being able to both acknowledge that moment and act on it when it happens. I was reminded of this earlier in the week. I was listening to Howard Stern interview Chris Martin from Coldplay (it was a repeat from earlier in the year). Martin was talking about how the hit song Yellow came to him. He said it happened very quickly - in maybe fifteen minutes. He was in the studio, messing around with his acoustic guitar and doing impersonations of Neil Young in between takes, when the line "Look at the stars. Look how they shine for you." came out in Young's quirky tone. He kept at it... "And everything you do. Yeah, they were all yellow." Something felt right, so he kept tinkering with the guitar chords and melodies and that's when the part, "Your skin, oh yeah, your skin and bones" came along. He told Stern that he knew it was a hit once it was written and the other members of Coldplay had their way with it.

Do you have that kind of courage?

There is a lot of mind space in between Martin's explanation. You have to have a serious ability for self-inflection to be able to recognize that what was, initially, a goof on Neil Young could be the germ of something more. Pushing it and letting the melody take you somewhere is the hardest part. This isn't about thinking up a great idea in a dream but not writing it down and then forgetting it by the time you wake up, this is about what happens to you - day in and day out - on a conscience level. It could be from staring out of your window or from reading this blog post. Inspiration is everywhere and one of the greatest gifts that you can give yourself is the ability to acknowledge it. Not every moment of inspiration will be a hit song like Coldplay's Yellow, but you just never know where it will come from.

Inspiration is (not) magic.

It may look, feel and act like magic, but it's a very real proactive acknowledgement of something - usually something quite small - that can take you to strange and beautiful places. I'm thankful that there are artists like Chris Martin who act as reminders that inspiration is not a flash of genius or something that just pops into someone's head. Our brains are constantly spurting thoughts out there and it's important - especially in the work that you do - to be cognizant when than thought is something that can be turned into something that is much bigger and brighter.

By Mitch Joel