Magazine page jumps — just say no

Magazines tend to pile up at my house, so that I can read them during my too-frequent business travel. Jettisoning a well-read magazine mid-trip is truly a pleasure.

It’s not a pleasure, though, when a feature story starts in the front of the magazine, and then you must jump to the back of the magazine to finish the story. You return to the front of the magazine to begin the next story, then jump to the back again to finish it, and so-on.

Jumps (where stories run non-linearly) are a “reader disservice” by a magazine’s editors and art directors.

As someone who has been in the magazine business for a long time — more than two decades — it’s always been my goal to minimize jumps in the publications I work on. Alas, Wired (and I took three recent issues with me to read) just loves jumps. Argh!

In “the old days,” jumps were sometimes necessary because only some parts of the magazine were printed with a four-color (4C) process, and other parts were printed in black-and-white (BW). It was common to start stories with opening artwork on 4C pages, and then jump them to the BW back-of-the-book.

Today, very few magazines, at least in the mainstream publishing world, are printed with BW pages. Nearly everything is 4C throughout. So, why still have the jumps?

They’re certainly not necessary. Nearly all of my favorite leisure-reading magazines, from The Economist to BusinessWeek to The New Yorker, eschew jumps entirely. BZ Media’s own Software Test & Performance also runs without jumps. Granted, ST&P isn’t Wired. But there’s no reason why Wired has to (continued page 149)