• by January 11, 2008

Re your riff on tired eyes - the following story was told to me by someone who claims to have been there.

Leo Burnett, the great advertising writer and entrepreneur, looked at all new ad campaigns before they were presented to clients. As he got older, his eyesight began to fail. In order to get through the review process, art directors began setting headlines in bigger, bolder type. Pretty soon all the work coming out of the agency was being set very large, and in Cooper Black -- a kind of Sherman tank of typefaces.

Re magazines: Last time I looked they were still being measured in terms of ad pages. Which means they think in terms of producing something that comes off a press, goes in the mail or sits at a newsstand.

But the word magazine actually means "storehouse" -- and Time or The New Yorker are really storehouses of content. People want that content delivered in a variety of ways -- and eventually, I think, the smart people in the business will figure that out.