The argument that they matter because of their historical import shouldn't be too easily dismissed. But that feeling of familiarity and cultural obligation, of supporting these publications because they're black publications has essentially been their entire business model for their entire runs, even as the media landscape changed in cataclysmic ways.
In terms of functionality, they don't do anything so superlatively (or even competently enough) that it would make me, an admitted magazine junkie, ever seriously consider buying them. At this point, you're more likely to find thoughtful and well-researched journalism/essays on issues that affect black people -- por ejemplo, here, here, here or here -- in mainstream publications than you are in either of them. They've completely ceded that space. They're just not very good magazines by most measures.
I think this is basically true--all of it. For various reasons, I've had to think about the future of "ethnic" media. This isn't an Obama, post-racial problem--it's been going on since the 90s when I was in college. I think The Source and, more specifically, Vibe, in their heyday, really pointed the way forward. They both were, in many ways, black magazines. But they weren't in the old way. At their best, they used hip-hop, a cultural movement with roots in the black community, to look out at the broader world. I think Vibe and The Source messed up by not moving away from hip-hop, as music per se, circa 99. Hip-Hop should have been the lens, and sometimes--but not always--the subject matter. But they had the right idea.
The closest I've seen to what a black magazine--or any black media--might look like in this era died shortly after it was birthed. That would have been Suede, the urban fashion magazine launched with much fanfare a few years back. It really looked gorgeous, and it had some great people working on it--including the best copy-chief in the business, one Kenyatta Matthews.
The less said about Suede's end, the better. But I think they had the right idea, and one that folks haven't really followed up on. You can't really have--nor should you want to have--an exclusively "black" media product. But you can have a vehicle informed by a black perspective that looks everything from Jay-Z to Tom Cruise. And the Dallas Cowboys. And wood elves. And Star Trek. What? I'm just sayin...
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
I don't know, I think the current iteration of Essence gets it right.
Whatever happened to Savoy? i rather liked that magazine. It's a shame about Vibe and the Source. Though Vibe has gotten marginally better, I had to turn to The Fader, Paste, and Vice to find out what was really good. I'd rather read this blog then Essence, Black Enterprise, Jet, or Ebony.
Seeing a half-sized Jet mag takes me back to being 7 years old and getting my hair pressed in my grandmother's kitchen, reading Pink Lotion and State Farm ads. It doesn't make me think of innovation. Netiher Ebony nor Jet are publications that will give me up-to-date news on anything--black, white or otherwise. Have you been to the Ebony/Jet website? The most recent article I could find was from March 9th. Why would I bother reading that website when I can go to The Root and read fresher prose from fresher writers?
And you're totally right, TNC: when are "We As a People" going to accept that we can--and should--have interests outside of the black community? Why aren't weirdos and nerds of color getting more exposure from traditionally black media outlets? Rissi Palmer, TV on the Radio, Gym Class Heroes and Gnarls Barkley were never anywhere near BET or Ebony, and they should be. Our publications need to reflect our diversity. I mean, wouldn't you jump at the chance to do a black gamer column?
Ebony deserves at least another couple of years for that awesome Obama-in-shades cover.
Child, yes. That is the sexiest presidential photo ever in life.
I remember my mother telling me something along the lines of "when you grow up and get your own place, the first thing you have to do is get a subscription to Ebony/Jet". Well suffice it to say that I am both grown and paying my own bills every month, and neither Ebony nor Jet has yet to land in my mailbox. And probably never will either.
I've always had the feeling that those magazines were stuck in a time where Black folks were desperately trying to cling to a politics of respectability that acted as a kind of talisman against a world in which they felt dehumanized on the daily. And so a listing of Black America's most eligible bachelors, most beautiful debutantes, most successful celebrities, etc. effectively worked that kind of magic.
These days, when all that's bright and shiny about Black America can easily be a distraction from all that's ugly and unseen? Yeah, notsomuch on the best of Black America's debs and dudes.
I do give them credit though, for the effort to update. Since Ebony brought Harriet Cole onboard, I have seen some effort at adding some substance and depth to the magazine. But I think it's still lacking in the kind of breadth of Black experience that you mention above, TNC. And it hasn't inspired me to shell out for a subscription.
Re: Suede, I was so sad to see it go. I thought it was everything that a woman who's Black without boundaries could want in a magazine. (Felt the same way about the rise and demise of Honey too).
I am intrigued by this idea and would like to subscribe to your newsletter...
Wait. I already do. In a sense. Keep up the good work!
(Hey, someone had to say it)
I agree with dwhite about the quality and relevance of Essence Magazine, particularly for African American woman. For me -- an educated, professional and socially-conscious African American woman Essence magazine does a very good job of speaking to my interests and concerns. It could be better. And, frankly, I do feel that the quality of Essence did drop off when the long-time editor-and-chief Susan Taylor left.
But we are speaking about Ebony/Jet here. IMO, both have outlasted their significance and relevance. I do applaud Johnson Publications for producing both products and for creating magazines for black people during a time when we had no other media outlets that reflected us -- positively. This is no longer that time, so I question current the need for this fluff mags.
Oh yes....I remember Suede! I owned a Suede mag, and I remember being excited about it because it was a magazine outside of The Source and Vibe that was available. It's a shame its gone. I also remember Honey magazine, I thought that one was cool. Vibe Vixen was a spin-off of Vibe mag, I didn't care too much for Vibe Vixen. Honestly, Vibe lost its touch, I didn't renew my subscription. I just feel like it its stuck in a loop of hip hop and ridiculously over-priced advertising and product placement.
As for Ebony and Jet, they used to be staples in my household. My mother subscribed to both, There was a time when I couldn't wait till the next Ebony or Jet arrived in the mail. My father used to take a quick look at the Jet Beauty of the Week and put the mag down. I would flip through the pics and read the stories because they felt relevant to me. Now its sad to say that Jet and Ebony have just grown stale to me. They just feel outdated and its a shame but that's the way it is.
I do support Essence though, and the website is pretty good.
Wait. Kenyatta was copy chief?! That's a perverse relationship you guys have there.
Star Trek. I've been waiting my whole life for that magazine article. The first black character was a receptionist. Then the next major character was made blind and masked. The next major character was put in charge, but he wasn't allowed to go nowhere, he was stuck on a space station. With a new series, they desexualized the black character completely by making him a Vulcan. Someone with skills needs to write up on this.
No shouts for my favorites Emerge, YSB, & Code?.. I think "better than Ebony & Jet" has been done repeatedly but I guess not profitably? I really felt that something was lost when each of these fell by the wayside..
I honestly don't know the last time I've actually sat down and read an Ebony or Jet. Everytime I go home to my parents house I flip through it. Rarely does anything warrant a close reading.
I co-sign everyone's love of Essence though. I subscribe to it. Though it seems they can sometimes only fall into four categories with their covers and stories (celebs, money, relationships, fashion), I find it refreshing to read about these things from a Black female POV. They also often talk about black experiences outside of America, which I like. (I'm thinking of a recent article about violence and homophobia in Jamaica, which was particulary enlightening to my mother.) My former roommate (White and blonde girl from North Dakota) used to read and enjoy it, especially the section about relationships and thought the advice and articles were often more earnest than in comparable (mostly) White female magazines.
I think "Black" magazines that, as TNC says, present a spectrum of Black life and experience are going to be the ones that are able to succeed. We aren't the same people we were in Ebony and Jet first arrived on the scene, I feel as if they've been slow to adjusting to this.
(Gah! It took me like four tries to get a sig! Wordpress hates AOL, I think. Don't laugh at the AOL nerd, please.)
I got no beef with Captain Sisko, as I’m more interested in the convoluted politics than in running around bullying aliens and macking on their women. :-) (The one thing I took issue with would necessitate a series spoiler.) Plus, he got to be sexual and to be a nurturing family man. The others, I’ll grant.
I don’t remember the last time I read “Ebony,” and I don’t think we got “Jet” very much in our home, as my mom had snobbery issues. (She’s better now. Sort of. :-D) However, a major reason why I’m still very disturbed to see these titles go has less to do with content and more to do with the industry overall. I am constantly the only black face, wherever I happen to be, with rare exceptions. And I have peers who’ve been in situations like the following: where a colleague of mine attempts to apply for a job at [Insert Name Of Health-Oriented Magazine Here], and they ask her “Why don’t you want to go work for ‘Essence’?” Well the reason for that would be that she’s a fitness major and fitness professional who wants to possibly, maybe, perhaps, write a bit about fitness!) There’s a severe shunting of minorities, I think, and black ones in particular, towards “black” titles, which I see as a severe industry problem. (I don’t know if this is unique to women’s mags. Women’s mags have a whole set of exciting problems.)
So sad, because my grandmom still has copies of Ebony and Jet where they did groundbreaking coverage of anti-colonialist movements all over the Diaspora, and published poems by guys like Bob Kaufman, a brilliant Black poet and founding member of the Beat Poets. A professor of mine once explained that the audience prompted that shift from that kind of Black progressive coverage to the Fluff Bourgeoisie, middle-class aspirationalism it features now. IOW, the readers got older, got jobs, homes and families, and their taste for radical or leftist diaspora coverage faded away.
Unless Johnson Publications is willing to completely overhaul these magazines and their coverage, they might follow their aging audience into obscurity at some point in the near future.
"A professor of mine once explained that the audience prompted that shift from that kind of Black progressive coverage to the Fluff Bourgeoisie, middle-class aspirationalism it features now."
your professor was wrong. John H Johnson created Ebony for the purpose of showcasing "fluff bourgeoisie, middle class aspirationalism" as you put it. in the mainstream press, coverage of blacks was pretty much limited to the negative, so Johnson established his magazines as attempts to be corrective. instead of dwelling on the race problem, he thought it revolutionary to display blacks who were succeeding, achieving the American dream as it were.
the editorial from the first issue (November 1945) dedicates the magazine to "the happier side of Negro life", though it did promise to "talk turkey" when it came to the race issue. among scholarship on Ebony, there's debate on how well it held up to that promise.
if anything, dips in sales and criticism (from readers and writers in other magazines) during the ideological shifts of the 60s and 70s prompted changes to content. ebony had bougie individualist beginnings, but became a bit more group uplift oriented later on. but i can't really comment on how drastic that change was as i've spent more time with early issues of Ebony than ones from the 60s and 70s.
Im sure you felt like you came into the thread like Inspeckta Deck with your "Your professor was wrong!" opening salvo but you didnt actually prove him wrong. What you proved was that Jet and Ebony started out as "fluff bourgeoisie, middle class aspirationalism" or "the happier side of Negro life" and shifted with the ideological shifts of its audience in the 60s and 70s. Furthermore, you admit you arent very well-versed in the issues from that time so...you came into your critique blazing but left it limping.
Nevertheless, thanks for adding on to the cipher, Mute.
actually no Juba, i felt no such thing and there was no exclamation point at the end of my first sentence. i was just trying to add some information to the conversation, not to tell you off. if its not interesting to you, maybe someone else will find it useful. but i guess you're right, i should have addressed my comment more toward to impression your comment might give someone that's not familiar with ebony at all, rather than anything your professor said.
to me your comment gave the impression that Ebony was something once so uplift minded but it later got corrupted. i just wanted to clarify that that's not the case. what i was trying to say was that if the change in the tone of Ebony was indeed as drastic from the 60s/70s to later on, it was merely a return to form.
No shouts for my favorites Emerge, YSB, & Code?
Emerge was the bomb!
The next major character was put in charge, but he wasn't allowed to go nowhere, he was stuck on a space station.
Umm, no. Sisko was captain of the Defiant, the most BAD ASS ship in Starfleet, and even before that went halfway across the galaxy in Runabouts.
Emerge was a gem. A true gem.
But, I believe there is a need for Ebony and Jet. Essence has lost a lot of its quality since it was sold to Time.
I thought it was me (c) BBD. I really, really like dislike Essence's content and find no real value in it beyond beauty and hair tips.
Sisko is a great character and Avery Brooks made it even better, but quibbles aside, he wasn't given command of a ship with exploration as its mission and the fact that he commanded auxiliary craft (yeah! A Runabout!) doesn't negate the fact that command of a space station is not as sexy as command of the Enterprise or Voyager.
Hee -- man, "sexy" is TOTALLY subjective! I found the politics of DS9 far more compelling -- all that human interaction, clashing, machination and resolution. (But then, I also liked Babylon Five.)
The Magical Messiah bit gave me pause, though.
I don't see the point in complaining that "the black captain" wasn't the same as the other Captains.
He had an awesome role, good plots, an awesome actor, and most importantly, an awesome character.
I think some of y'all should really give Ebony another look. They've definitely stepped up the quality and substance of the articles in the past year.
Jet still is what it is: the Jet Beauty of the Week and to see if you recognized who got married. (-:
I think it may be too late for Ebony to recapture their audience- I grew up seeing them as irrelevant fluff and haven't bothered to do much other than check out the Obama covers from time to time.
At least Black Enterprise provides useful lists of wealthy Black folk that I can use at my day job from time to time. Ebony has just been too bad for too long, and with the media in the shape it's currently in, there is little opportunity to pick up new readers and adherents it would seem.
And there's not really anything to talk about WRT Jet is there?
All good, Mute. That wasnt my point, sorry. Nor how I intended to paraphrase said professor. What I intended to convey was that the audience demanded these publications evolve in both directions--away from its initial tone, which you rightly clarified (I did appreciate that, cause Grandma didnt have Jet mags from the 40s or 50s) and back towards it--and that was the explanation he gave for the contrast in content. It was the publication shifting with its audience.
If they wish to capture a newer, younger audience, they will need to again shift or risk irrelevance.
I think our generation of black Americans can be regarded as second-generation immigrants.
The story of "normal" immigration begins with generation zero, the adults who leave their home country to make new lives here. They settle into ethnic enclaves -- neighborhoods like Chinatown, Little Italy, Swede Hollow. Their children, the first generation, straddle two worlds -- they feel torn between cultures, but also feel at home in both worlds. They also feel the brunt of native prejudice. The grandchildren (2nd generation) are fully assimilated, probably do not speak the ancestral language, and regard the grandparents as quaint throwbacks to a stultifying village culture. Almost always, by the 3rd or 4th generation all but trace vestiges of the "old country" are gone (except for a handful of nerds, like Scottish descendants who obsess over clan tartans, or Welsh descendants who indulge a rear-guard fetish of saving the language of Wales from extinction).
Native-language media sprang up to serve successive waves of immigrants, which among other things feeds generation 0 information essential for survival in the new land. Generation 1 subscribes out of habit, and comfort, but no longer needs a niche media for survival. Perhaps the habit survives into generation 2, but it's doubtful that generation 3 tunes in at all. There was a Yiddish radio station in New York, for instance, which closed down in the 1980s or 1990s after something like 60 years on the air.
Of course this analogy is not exact for descendants of African slaves, who were locked by law and prejudice for centuries in a no-man's generation. But the civil rights revolution of the 1960s & 1970s unlocked the black ghettoes, whose inhabitants found themselves in roughly the same situation as generation 0 immigrants. They were free to move about the country, but had a hard time relating to any but their own kind.
I think, Tah-Nehisi, in this analogy you and I fit somewhere between the 1st & 2nd generations. Your dad, as a young adult during the civil-rights upheavals, helped establish a media for his peers, the new "immigrants". You, like most kids in a first generation, strongly identify with the ways and familiarity of the old neighborhood, but move relatively easily between the native enclave and the larger society. Your college experience gave you a half-leg up into vantage points more broadly reserved for the 2nd generation. Your son (or surely, your grandson) will roll his eyes at Grandpa's antiquated and quirky worldview, and will think of himself as "black" in the same way that Caroline Kennedy thinks of herself as "Irish". That is, hardly at all.
By then, Ebony et al will have gone the way of the Yiddish radio station. Welcome riddance, I say; 'tis but evidence of how another American immigration story is ending happily! (Ebonics, however, might persist awhile longer as a line of humorous greeting cards.)