Magazine Reviews

Geotimes renamed and the online Jewish mag Tablet

By Steve Black -- Library Journal, 01/01/2010

New Reviews for January:
Aging Well | Earth | Labletter | She Pedals | Tablet

Aging Well. 2008. bi-m. free. Ed: Barbara Worthington. ISSN 1530-0101. illus. adv. Aud: GA (Subject: Aging. Issues examined: Vol. 2, No. 1, Jan./Feb. 2009; No. 2, Mar./Apr. 2009)
Aging Well is a 42-page glossy targeted to health-care workers, social workers, and counselors who are involved with the elderly. While well suited to these readers, it is also a good magazine for the older people those professionals serve and their family members. Its pitch to professionals gives readers a different angle on the health, wellness, and financial topics covered by AARP’s magazines. The writing style is straightforward and jargon free. Articles in the examined issues cover topics such as heart health, benefits of probiotics for digestive health, reverse mortgages, life choices after retirement, and determining whether someone is legally capable of entering into contracts. A magazine’s ad-to-content ratio can be overwhelming when free subscriptions are supported by advertising and mailing list sales, but (at least so far) Aging Well has a reasonable balance of articles and ads. A fine addition for collections serving older patrons.

Earth. 2008. m. $34.50. Ed: Christopher M. Keane. ISSN 1943-345X. illus. adv. Aud: GA, Ac (Subject: Earth Sciences. Issue examined: Vol. 54, No. 10, Oct. 2009)
Earth is the American Geological Institute's renamed and redesigned magazine, after Geotimes. This publication is not to be confused with Kalmbach Publishing’s Earth (ISSN 1056-148X), which folded in 1998. The redesigned magazine is a bit more colorful and more heavily illustrated than its predecessor but otherwise will be familiar to longtime readers. The publisher is to be commended for not changing the subscription price. Each issue has a few features on major topics in geosciences, an extensive section of brief news articles, commentary by earth scientists, and reviews of books, web sites, and other media. The publisher’s mission to explain the science behind the headlines is executed well. Earth admirably continues Geotimes’ role as an essential magazine for science collections in public and academic libraries.

The Labletter. 2009. a. $24. Ed: Robert Kotchen. illus. Aud: GA, Ac (Subject: Arts. Issue examined: 2009)
Labletter began in 1998 as a very small circulation newsletter that recorded an annual gathering of artists known as the Oregon Lab. Its founders decided to expand the publication beyond the workshop and its former 25-copy print run to embrace more artists and a wider reading audience. Labletter contains short fiction, drama, photography, and images of paintings and sculptures. The web site has a selection of writings and images from earlier Oregon Labs and doesn’t duplicate the print edition. The color printing on heavy paper is of good but not exceptional quality. Despite the fine content, Labletter, as a small-circulation magazine of arts and literature, may struggle to distinguish itself and establish an audience. Still, this is a good magazine of original content worth including in larger collections of arts and literature.

She Pedals: The Journal of Women in Cycling. 2009. q. $30. Ed: Dena Eaton. illus. adv. Aud: GA (Subject: Cycling for Women. Issue examined: No. 1, Fall 2009)
She Pedals is a niche magazine for female bicycle racers. Cyclists who don’t race may enjoy the fine photography, inspirational stories of highly accomplished riders, and travelogs, but the primary audience is fairly accomplished athletes. Unlike some cycling magazines, She Pedals avoids equipment fetishism, so it’s not for gearheads. Articles in the inaugural issue focus on remarkable race locations and on individual women who’ve made notable accomplishments in road- or mountain-bike racing. She Pedals is nicely produced on heavy, glossy paper and has sharp, colorful images. It’s a good effort, but the audience is relatively small and very specialized. For that reason, it’s an optional purchase for all but extensive sports or women’s studies collections.

Tablet: A New Read on Jewish Life (online). 2009. updated daily. free. Ed: Alana Newhouse. illus. adv. Aud: GA (Subject: Jewish Way of Life. Examined: December 2009).

Tablet’s appeal should extend beyond the target audience of Jewish readers. Content is neatly organized on the homepage into four sections: Arts & Culture, Life & Religion, News & Politics, and The Scroll (a blog of news stories). The editors accurately describe the project as a newspaper-magazine-blog hybrid. Tablet’s daily updates paired with longer reports successfully add a magazine’s depth to a blog’s immediacy. Recent features discuss Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s opposition to a public option in the health-care reform bill, the characters in Avatar as compared to the Maccabees and other groups forced to defend their ways of life, and the top ten Christmas songs written by Jews. The web site’s design is crisp and easily navigated, the writing interesting and well composed, and the advertisements few and unobtrusive. Tablet is an excellent online magazine that deserves to be linked to as appropriate from libraries’ web sites.

See Magazine Reviews for Sept.–Dec. 2009