Ako se netko pita je li Aeon najbolji intelektualni magazin na webu, znači da ima i vatre.
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Is Aeon Magazine the best magazine on the Internet?
By Hamish McKenzie
If “slow media” needs a poster child, it can find one in Aeon Magazine,
an online publication about culture and ideas that marks its first
birthday tomorrow. In the space of a year, the magazine, started by a
London-based Australian couple who have no background in media, has
established itself as a first-rate example of a modern-day magazine,
free from the constraints of legacy press and proudly aloof from the
pageview-chasing linkbaitery of the Web 2.0 era. It publishes top
writers, carries no ads, and encourages readers to save its stories for
reading later via the likes of Instapaper, Kindle, or Pocket. Publishing
just one essay a day, five days a week, it serves as a venue for
considered cultural critiques, thoughtful essays on existentialism, and
deep dives on science and nature.
Aeon is, right now, my favorite magazine. It is also, I
think, the best example of a magazine built for the age of mobile. It
focuses on reading over revenue. It favors contemplation over
consumption. In letting its articles travel anywhere its readers go, it
pays no heed to the “bundle.”
“We saw Aeon as something of a corrective to the sense that
a lot of people have of drowning in information,” says Paul Hains,
co-founder and managing director of the company. “We really try to look
at the deeper issues, the ideas, and the values that are animating the
news, and we focus on those things in particular.”
Standout stories published by Aeon in its first year include Ross Andersen’s 8,000-word report on the likelihood of imminent human extinction, neuroscientist Michael Graziano’s essay about a new theory of consciousness, Mary HK Choi’s paean to her mother, and Jessica Gamble’s rumination
on contemporary sleeping habits. The articles, grouped under categories
entitled “World Views,” “Nature & Cosmos,” “Being Human,” “Living
Together,” and “Altered States,” always run long and are sharply edited
(the editorial team includes editors with experience at The Daily
Telegraph, The New Statesman, and the Los Angeles Review of Books).
While the essays often trade in academic subjects, they are communicated
in plain terms accessible to a wide readership.
“We don’t want our pieces to feel abstruse or specialist,”
says Aeon’s editor Brigid Hains, who has an academic background, holding
a PhD in history and a graduate degree in anthropology. Instead, the
publication strives for what the Hainses call “idea egalitarianism.”
The Hainses are a married couple who wanted to start an
online forum for what is essentially the antidote to the Twitterized
hyper-torrent of information splidgets that now assault us on a daily
basis. “Brigid and I had a view that there were ideas and ways of
thinking that were under-represented in the cultural conversation,” says
Paul. “Aeon as a magazine is a vehicle to create a focus on these ideas
and foster discussion around them.”
Paul, who used to work in finance but has an abiding
interest in psychology and comparative religion, funds Aeon. He has put
up enough capital (he declines to say how much) to last for three years,
so the company can focus on the quality of its product without having
to worry about money. So if you’re looking to Aeon for magic solutions
to journalism’s business model problem, you won’t find it here.
“The longer we can defer making any commitments to a
specific business model, the better we’ll be,” says Paul, “because the
landscape is changing all the time.”
That means Aeon’s stories are free, even while the
publication pays its writers at rates comparable to those paid by
broadsheet newspapers. (The founders won’t say exactly what that rate
is, but Brigid says 60 cents a word is “not a bad guess.”) It also means
there are no ads, and the editors don’t mind if you leave the Aeon
website to read a story somewhere else. A link to “Read later or Kindle”
is placed on the same line as the by-line and the word-count, a subtle
indicator that the story is king, even if it means readers ultimately
spend less time on the site.
The content-first approach to modern publishing may turn
out to be a winner, even as the business challenges for journalism
remain significant and unresolved. Thanks to the distributive networks
such as Twitter, Facebook, and email, and the concurrent rise of mobile
devices as the mediums to which those networks pump content, the idea of
a homepage or a magazine bundle just simply doesn’t matter as much as
it did in the print age or the first two decades of the Web.
Stories must now travel on their own, to be judged on their
individual strengths independent of the context within which they were
originally placed. Soon, if it’s not true already, magazine brands will
matter more as marks of quality or tone than they do as gatherers and
arrangers of content in a unified experience. By predicating its
publishing model on stories that can be pried from the bundle and whose
ideas stand on their own, Aeon confirms itself as a bankable brand
synonymous with quality and depth. It publishes stories based not on how
many clicks their headlines might generate, but on engaging people’s
attention for a meaningful period of time. That is the standard to which
magazines of the mobile era must aspire.
Of course, unlike other startup publications, Aeon can
afford such luxuries, because it doesn’t yet have to worry about making
money. In three years’ time, it may be forced to take a less
reader-friendly approach in a search for revenue. In terms of business,
all Aeon has proven in its first 12 months is that it can fund its own
boutique publishing operation. The real tests come as it scales, and
when the numbers in the bank account approach zero. For now, traffic on
the site seems to be doing okay. Some stories do much better than
others, with the most-circulated pieces attracting as many as 2,000
tweets or Facebook likes. But the founders decline to share traffic
numbers.
Next, Aeon will build on its brand by launching a companion
site dedicated to films (as distinct from “videos,” Paul stresses).
Aeon Film will reflect the ethos of the magazine, say the Hainses, with
an emphasis on short documentaries. The films showcased will be a mix of
material curated from around the Web and exclusives that the company
pays to license.
The film vertical, says Paul, will seed the transition from
the text-based digital publication to a multimedia product. At that
point, Aeon will be one step more unconventional than it already is. It
is the magazine that isn’t, the anti-aggregator, the publication that
insists on going slow when every other force of the Internet demands
that we speed up.
But considering how well traditional models are working in today’s media landscape, unconventional is probably a good thing. - pando.com/
Being Human
The madeleine effect
Why is the smell and taste of some foods so evocative of the past? I spent a day eating childhood favourites to find out
04 December 2013
Korean Thanksgiving
‘Take a photo of the spread,’ my mother says. ‘This way you can remember what to arrange when I’m dead.’
27 November 2013
The digital soul
My Facebook page may be part of my identity, but can it give me a virtual afterlife?
20 November 2013
Life after death
The idea of life after death lives on in near-death experiences and messages from beyond the grave. What’s the evidence?
13 November 2013
Are you looking at me?
What goes on in our minds when we see someone naked? The more we see of a person's body the stupider they seem
06 November 2013
Human stains
The laundry will never be done. Rather than pedalling faster and faster the answer is to surrender to the eternal tide
30 October 2013
The wanderer
My grandfather was a legend – a holy vagabond whose life spanned India’s 20th century. Why did I let him elude me?
23 October 2013
Je regrette
Our forward-charging culture sees regret as a sign of weakness and failure. But how else can we learn from our past?
16 October 2013
The mental block
Consciousness is the greatest mystery in science. Don’t believe the hype: the Hard Problem is here to stay
09 October 2013
Hot girl #2
Because I'm getting older, my days as a model are numbered – and I'm not sure what to do next
02 October 2013
Nature and Cosmos
Die, selfish gene, die
The selfish gene is one of the most successful science metaphors ever invented. Unfortunately, it’s wrong
03 December 2013
I, cockroach
Do insects feel pain? Are they conscious? A science kit for at-home cyborg cockroaches provokes the hard questions
19 November 2013
The calibrated cosmos
Is our universe fine-tuned for the existence of life – or does it just look that way from where we’re sitting?
12 November 2013
Keep smiling
Is there any reason to think dolphins and humans have a special relationship? Sure, but it might not be a friendly one
05 November 2013
Kindred spirits
Animals have friends, enemies, allies and life-long companions. Human relationships aren't so unique after all
22 October 2013
Embracing the void
The ancients had pyramids to tame the sky's mystery. We have Star Axis, a masterpiece forty years in the making
15 October 2013
Liquid history
The Thames has seen the riches of empire flow for centuries. But now the river is threatened by a super-port development
08 October 2013
The good catch
Hope for the world's devastated oceans rests on a change in the hearts of the fishermen that know them best
01 October 2013
Technobiophilia
We surf the net, stream our films and save stuff in the cloud. Can we get all the nature we need from the digital world?
24 September 2013
Deep chill
The Arctic Seed Vault puts apocalyptic talk of climate change in perspective – but not how you might think
17 September 2013
Altered States
Last words
As we mourn the poet, do we not mourn the loss of what he had in his keeping: a way of living that served us for aeons?
06 December 2013
Night life
Back on the islands of my childhood, I’m clinging to sobriety, searching for a rare bird that’s also on the brink
26 November 2013
Dark side of the moon
Like evangelists, astronauts travel far and return with glad tidings. But however high they ascend, they’re only human
15 November 2013
Get your kicks
No wonder adolescents jump off cliffs and fall in crazy love – they are constantly stifled by school and society alike
08 November 2013
A drop in the sea
What are the odds that Jesus rose or Moses parted the waves? Even with the best witnesses, vanishingly small
01 November 2013
The mummy’s curse
It came from an Egyptian tomb... Well no, actually, it didn’t. But once a myth lurches into life, there’s no stopping it
25 October 2013
Unhinged
Travel the world, but work on New York time. This is what I learned about circadian rhythms by unravelling my own
18 October 2013
The uncertainty machine
Forget prophecy and wisdom. Using the I Ching is a weirdly useful way to open your mind to life’s unexpected twists
11 October 2013
I’d rather be dissected
There are not enough whole-body donations to science. Why don’t people want their death to help the living?
04 October 2013
Learning to fall apart
My OCD had been creating vivid, painful rituals for years. So could Buddhist ritual give me a means to fight back?
27 September 2013
World Views
Family feuds
The ancient God of Judaism and Islam was no distant immortal, but a god of domestic life, infertility and fratricide
02 December 2013
The fire burns yet
Native American peoples are still here and still caring for their land. Can their conquerors say the same?
25 November 2013
Deep play
Like the world fairs of old, Silicon Valley runs on booms, busts, and showboating impresarios. That's a good thing
18 November 2013
Master of many trades
Our age reveres the specialist but humans are natural polymaths, at our best when we turn our minds to many things
04 November 2013
Emancipation
Each tree and farm, street and courthouse of my home county rests on shallow-buried stories of slavery and Civil War
28 October 2013
I’m not a feminist but...
These American teens look up to their strong mothers and believe in equal rights. So why won’t they use the F-word?
14 October 2013
The attention economy
It costs nothing to click, respond and retweet. But what price do we pay in our relationships and our peace of mind?
07 October 2013
Life in the fishbowl
In the future, most people will live in a total surveillance state – and some of us might even like it
30 September 2013
Talk with me
Philosophy should be conversation, not dogma – face-to-face talk about our place in the cosmos and how we should live
23 September 2013
The meanings of life
Happiness is not the same as a sense of meaning. How do we go about finding a meaningful life, not just a happy one?
16 September 2013
Living Together
Ad nauseam
The more we hate it, the more it agrees with us. How advertising turned anti-consumerism into a secret weapon
21 November 2013
Prometheus Inc
Biotechnology and other life sciences promise to transform our health, identity, even our brains. Should we be worried?
14 November 2013
Families made us human
The evolution of human culture can be explained, not by the size of our brains, but by the quality of our relationships
07 November 2013
The ghost commune
Unplugging from the electrical grid was relatively easy. What we didn’t realise was that we needed the human grid, too
31 October 2013
Ninety-degree revolution
Right and Left are fading away. The real question in politics will be: do you look to the earth or aspire to the skies?
24 October 2013
Kept women
Mistresses are big business in China, where no official is a real man without his own ernai. What’s in it for the girls?
10 October 2013
Kids these days
Millennials are as hard-working as anyone else – so why does pop culture pretend that all we do is party?
03 October 2013
The good fight
When it can’t use troops, the UN’s last peacekeeping tool is its moral voice. What is that worth in the real world?
26 September 2013
Is there a war instinct?
Many evolutionists believe that humans have a drive for waging war. But they are wrong and the idea is dangerous
19 September 2013
I’m no terrorist
Young Pakistanis have more opportunity than ever to change the country. But what will they do with their freedom?
12 September 2013
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