"David Cassidy Love Child Deathbed Bombshell!”
There I was in the checkout line at Fred’s with an armful of Christmas lights, when that headline on the cover of The National Enquirer caught my eye and wouldn’t let go. Several thoughts went through my head in no particular order. 1: David Cassidy had a love child!? 2: Whose deathbed—David’s or the child’s? 3: Somewhere in the National Enquirer’s office there’s a headline writer who really enjoys his/her job. 4: Does anyone really buy the National Enquirer? I bought the paper, and was duly disappointed because in time-honored tabloid fashion, the article had little to do with the headline. I’m not convinced the headline writer actually read it before composing his/her masterpiece.
But the headline served its purpose, which is to be bait in the water for gullible, easily amused fish such as me, and the other 6,500,000 readers the Enquirer claims on its website to have. Anyone dismayed by the sudden ubiquity of fake news can be consoled by the fact that the Enquirer has been misleading readers in their millions with more or less the same formula since 1926. Why does it work? Because as psychologists know, first impressions really do matter. The number of people who read an article (or buy a magazine they don’t want) is highly dependent on whether it has a headline that draws them in. Or not. “What we see, feel, hear, or experience in our first encounter with something colors how we process the rest of it,” wrote Maria Konnikova in a New Yorker article entitled “How Headlines Change the Way We Think.” I read that article too, and the difference between it and the Enquirer’s David Cassidy piece was that it went on to actually deliver what the headline promised. So even though I threw away my Enquirer outside Fred’s in a fit of self-loathing, the experience made me wonder whether Country Roads could do with more sensationalist headlines in 2018. The last few years have been a challenging time for print media, to say the least. Perhaps what we need is more fake news! It seems to be working for the Enquirer. And Facebook, for that matter. There’s a 2018 resolution for you: Write more misleading headlines! Have a look through this issue and tell me how we’re doing.
Actually we won’t be doing that. At Country Roads we spend a lot of time and effort trying to get the stories right. We have such a dread of publishing something then hearing that we got a detail wrong, I think that being accused of having deliberately published a fake story would be too much to bear. I like to think that this—paired with a dedication to presenting carefully curated, well-written stories that celebrate the best of Louisiana and Mississippi—is why, in a time when so many magazines have gone the way of the dodo, we’re still here. Country Roads turns thirty-five years old in 2018 and the magazine has never been more popular. In an age when you can get anything online, why would this be? I think that, with so much information coming at us from our computers and phones (and watches and thermostats and other digital things), a printed magazine—even a free one—has become something of a luxury. It is a finite thing with a beginning and an end. It is curated by humans who care that the stories fit together in a way that shines a little light into the culture of this great part of the world. In some ways I think that Country Roads is not so much a magazine as it is a synthesis of everything we have learned about what our audience enjoys, aspires to, and loves. So as long as you keep reading, we’ll be here.
In 2018, we’re marking thirty-five years by launching a quest to identify thirty-five quintessential Country Roads readers. We’ll fête them, and the cultural discoveries they’ve made that have enriched their experience of life in this region, in our September, thirty-fifth anniversary special issue. That’ll be some sensational reading … no headline required.
Happy New Year, one and all. It’s great to have you along for the ride.
—James Fox-Smith, publisher
james@countryroadsmag.com
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