Digging the digest
The print media is regularly predicting its own impending demise, but not Reader's Digest. The 83-year-old minimagazine is coming out with its 1,000th issue this week, and instead of detailing the journal's historical evolution from black-and-white recycled text to brightly illustrated original content, editor-in-chief Jackie Leo devoted the August issue to what's in store for the future, both in the short term (self-checkout at the supermarket) and decades away (flying cars).
For a historical milestone, though, why look to the future?
The expectation was that we'd do a retrospective. But we didn't want to be predictable. Besides, this is a new century, and we wanted to take a look at the trends affecting our readers.
One of those trends is the way people have more control over how they get information. How does Reader's Digest fit in?
We call it "Me Me Media." We're going to deliver it anyway our readers want it. We hope to podcast on a regular basis; we're putting this entire issue online and free. If people want Reader's Digest on a phone, they'll be getting it on one.
How will people read the magazine in another 80 years?
You'll be reading it on a hologram and paying for it with digital cash. You'll never touch paper.
Which of the futuristic predictions are you looking forward to?
The thing that struck us the most is that we'll be living 150 years. We'll be middle-aged at 75. Someone in the office was saying, "150 is the new 140." We're also looking at a merger of man and machine. There will be replaceable body parts and computers in our brains. Every song from the '60s will go into mine. Then there's the question of whether this is a good idea. With so many people living so long, how do we think about Medicare and Social Security?
Anything you're worried about for the future?
The media. The more people tailor everything to their needs, the more they're creating this dichotomy where people live in a global world but are becoming more provincial. They never listen to other views.
In such a fractured world, how come 40 million people still pick up Reader's Digest?
We tell them good stories. Unlike original Reader's Digest, which was excerpts of other magazine articles, most of our content is original. And at the end of the magazine, you feel uplifted because we bring stories of people triumphing over tragedy. We have this feature called "Everyday Heroes," and we recently did a profile of a guy who's an engineer who saw a paraplegic without a wheelchair. So he figured out how to make one from a plastic chair from Kmart and then made 30,000 of these for other people. When our readers read about this, the money started trickling in for him. That's quite gratifying.–Vicky Hallett
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