This weeks Weekly Geek challenge (courtesy of Dewey at The Hidden Side of a Leaf) is about magazines. Right now, I don’t subscribe to any magazines, mostly because I can’t afford them and my living situation is in limbo. I did subscribe to The New Yorker awhile ago, but while I was in school I just didn’t have time to read each issue like I wanted to and I ended up being wracked with guilt as my magazine pile kept growing. I tried just clipping the articles I was interested in and throwing out the rest, but even then I just had so many pieces I wanted to read that I never had the chance to get through the pile. I am clearly not a weekly magazine sort of person — I need more time to digest things than that.
One website I really like is NewPages.com, a website devoted to “News, information and guides to independent bookstores, independent publishers, literary magazines, alternative periodicals, independent record labels, alternative newsweeklies and more.” 
From the website you can find links to many online literary journals, news magazines, and other book related sites. They’re sorted in a number of different ways — topic, online versus print, or alphabetically — so it makes it easy to find something you might be interested in.
As I’ve mentioned a couple times before, I am moving to Madison, Wisconsin this fall to start graduate school in journalism. Eventually, I hope to write for magazines, so I suppose I should start reading more. I want to write for magazines because I like the longer form stories get to take — I like to take my time, explore stories from many angles, and use telling details to really bring an event or person to life, and newspapers just don’t have the space to do that well.
That said, I should probably do more reading of my craft if it is what I really want to get into. So here are some questions: What are some good literary/creative nonfiction magazines? What are some good magazines on journalism or writing? What are good lifestyle or arts magazines?
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Re: literary/creative nonfiction– quite a few of us weekly geeksters talked about The Sun magazine. It’s a wonderful one. You can read more about it on my blog. http://teelgee7.blogspot.com/
Thanks for the New Pages link, that looks great!
You might try The Atlantic Monthly. I think the quality of their reporting is superb and they really get in depth with their news articles.
I had the same problem with The New Yorker. I loved it but could never finish it in less than two weeks. At the end of the 1 year subscription, I had six months to go.
Thanks for the NewPages nod. You can certainly do a lot of online reading for *free* these days. Many lit mags have started putting their content online as well as in print, and a few, like Agni, have even begun posting web-only content separate from their print pub. NewPages also lists alternative magazines, where you will find those “other” types of reading you’re looking for. On the Alt Mag Guide, there is also a link to online alt mags, all free to read. There are many quality online publications out there, which is what we try to list, with growing reputations. Dzanc Books just came out with their Best of the Web 2008 anthology. They list the contents on their site, so you can see some of the online publications they recognize. Also, StorySouth gives a best of the web award each year, acknowledging the quality of online publications. And of course, there’s always the library for free reads. Our tax dollars pay for it! And I agree – The Sun is fabulous.
Terri: Thanks, I am going to look at The Sun, I like that it has a variety of writing formats and styles in it.
Julie: The Atlantic Monthly is a magazine I always meant to look more at and then never did. It might be more manageable than The New Yorker though.
Rebecca: I’m glad I’m not the only one who can’t handle that magazine 🙂
Denise: Thanks for the recommendations!
I like getting my news online, it seems like it is easier and cheaper that way.