Editors' Note

In January of this year, I had the opportunity to attend a two-day symposium on Transnational Periodical Cultures at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. At that conference, I naïvely declared that we are now living in a post-periodical age, where 24-hour news cycles and global capitalism have made even imagined communities obsolete.

How that has changed with the advent of COVID-19. Just as we now have a heightened appreciation for healthcare workers and delivery drivers, periodicals have once again become important, perhaps essential. Daily totals of new COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths are anxiously awaited as residents of different states, counties, and municipalities assess reopening efforts. As the US federal government has left states and cities to fend for themselves in the wake of the pandemic, communities have depended on local news outlets—television stations, radio, and, if they still exist, newspapers and magazines—to keep them apprised of ongoing changes in policy, testing locations, reopening and shutdown plans, and travel restrictions. While television and Twitter have provided up-to-the-minute dissemination of the latest news, national periodicals have emerged as a key source of in-depth analysis, curation, and synthesis. Coverage and dissemination of data organized by newspapers including the New York Times and analysis offered in periodical publications such as the Atlantic and the Guardian in the UK have become timely, must-read material once again; in the face of governmental obfuscation and outright suppression of information, the press has never seemed as vital as it seems today.

Local media, especially, has never been so important. When rioting and violence broke out in Minneapolis after the killing of George Floyd at the end of May of this year, reporters from Twin Cities publications including the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Twin Cities alternative weekly City Pages, and the online Sahan Journal provided immediate, on-the-ground coverage and testimony that national news media could not. Sahan Journal's well-established connections with the Somali and Latino communities, whose businesses were hardest hit by vandalism and looting, enabled them to provide a critical perspective on this cataclysmic event that has remained invisible in national and international coverage. Jennifer Moore, journalism professor at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, commented at the time that to get the full story, the real story, one needed to "turn to the local reporters," because "national cable news will not give you the context you need to understand the situation." National media is only beginning to acknowledge now, months after it appeared in local media outlets, that a significant amount of the property damage experienced in the Twin Cities may have come at the hands of white nationalists and right-wing extremists from outside the area, even out of state, who seek to sow discord and foment violence that would trigger a full-blown "race war."

As the United States teeters on the precipice of an economic recession that may far surpass the Great Depression, the precarity of periodicals has never been so apparent, even as we also recognize how much we need them. If a "postperiodical" world seemed already to have arrived a year ago, the periodicals that remain seem more essential now than they ever did. Whether or not the American public recognizes that remains to be seen.

Issue 30.2 of American Periodicals includes three features that highlight the importance of periodicals in creating and sustaining communities and shaping identity. The Forum on "Locating the Practices of Editors in Multiethnic Periodicals" organized by Jim Casey and Sarah Salter presents a variety of case studies that elucidate ways that editorial practices including the selection and arrangement of content, collaboration, staffing, exchanges with other publications, solicitation of advertising, and use of multiple languages help to constitute readerships, literatures, and communities. Cynthia Patterson shows how Charlotte Perkins Gilman's connection to periodicals extends far beyond her editorship of the Forerunner; she argues that Gilman was, in fact, herself constituted by and through her reading of periodical material throughout her life, making her more than a journalist or editor, but a "magazinist." And in this issue...