Why Curated Content is Better Than Clickbait
What we lost with the decline of print publications and physical albums and how we can recapture it
I grew up in the golden era of magazines. My parents, a lower-middle-class family, somehow managed to find the resources to subscribe to not only three newspapers but also a few magazines. I convinced them to subscribe to U.S. News and World Report, Time, Sports Illustrated, and a few other magazines. In high school, I paid for The National Review and Sporting News. How I loved getting a fresh new magazine in the mail! I’d stop anything I was doing and work through it.
At the beginning of my writing career, it was standard practice to send a typewritten query letter with a self-addressed stamped envelope to the publication where you hoped to get published. You’d send your idea, drop it in the mail, and wait. Sometimes it would take weeks. Most of the time, you’d not hear anything. Once, I queried two now-defunct magazines: Moody Monthly and Discipleship Journal. A month went by and I went to the mailbox and drew out my self-addressed, stamped envelope. It was the Moody editor. My heart left a bit as I unfolded the response letter:
Dear Daniel,
Your idea is a good one. However, I believe you intended to send this to Discipleship Journal. That’s a quality publication, but it’s not the one I edit, which is Moody Monthly.
Awkward. Years later, I saw the editor at a writing event where I was speaking. We had a good laugh about it. Today, the process is different. You email ideas to editors, and the responses (if you get them) are typically faster.
Print magazines still exist, thankfully, but they are mostly a niche luxury item. I still subscribe to a few print journals. Most of our content today is consumed online. I’m not writing this as an old crank who wants to go back to some nostalgic old era. I like the age we live in. I read most of what I read online.
Still, I do think we miss something when our content isn’t curated. This was the beauty of a magazine. It contained a variety of articles every month, some you loved, some you didn’t care for, and some you skipped past. The point is that you were exposed to a variety of ideas. To hold a publication together, it requires you to reach different parts of your audience. However, sometimes, in flipping through a periodical, you stumble on a fascinating article on a topic you might not have found by yourself. More than once, I’ve gone deep in an area I didn’t know I needed to know.
This is similar to the way we consume music now versus when the only way to get music was through an entire album. With vinyl, you had to listen to the whole collection of songs. CDs allowed you to skip. Streaming means you often just pick your favorite songs.
Again, I don’t want to go back. Streaming has actually allowed our family to have, at our whim, music from various eras and genres. On our long drives for family vacations, we’ll often pass the time by listening to artists from the past. You’d be surprised at how popular Elvis, The Beatles, 70’s rock, old country, Louie Armstrong, etc are with my Gen Z kids. And I can get caught up on new genres and artists they are discovering.
But . . . magazines, albums— they allowed content to be curated. They let us be exposed to authors, ideas, and creatives we wouldn’t have been exposed to before.
Curation still happens in the digital age, of course. The tribe we follow online posts their favorite books, songs, articles, artists, authors, etc. In some ways, we might discover things we would have never known before. But digital curation can also be tribal and singular. We might read an article we like without looking up and noticing the publication. Or we might dismiss good content because it’s published by a place that is coded against our preferred political tribe. Thus, we miss good content. We miss ideas that might challenge us.
There are ways in the digital age to have good content curated for us. One easy way to do this is to follow an eclectic mix of people online so that we are not just reading in our own increasingly narrow band of agreeables. We might also subscribe to whole publications and check the sites regularly to see what is being offered, what might be discovered, and what we might learn. I have to discipline myself to move out of my social media habit and just go check the websites of a few of my favorite publications. I also think curated, Substack newsletters are increasingly attractive, where folks post things they enjoyed from around the web.
Lastly, we can still subscribe to a handful of print journals. I do as the budget allows. Here I can still have the pleasure of holding a print publication in my hands, flipping through it, and delighting in articles I didn’t know I needed. Old habits, as they say.
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