S. Worthen | Weblog

To me, if there are staples involved in any way, it's a school project or a 'zine. Magazines are glued and newspapers are simply folded.

It it's ringbound it could well be a conference proceedings -- though lots of places give you them on CD now to save costs.

The saddle stitch is used for too many items. Our Call for Papers, for example, is bound in that way - but I don't think it could be argued as either magazine or newspaper.

I consider the paper used - newsprint is a newspaper or other temporary news source (like the newsletters the school district sends monthly) and although usually merely folded, I've seen larger issues fastened on rare occasions. Glossy (even if only the cover) indicates a magazine, and then there is a subsection that includes the miscellany that are sizable Calls for Papers and other ostensibly temporary publications, usually printed on standard 20lb, that are still neither newspaper nor magazine.

This is a really interesting question. I can think of leaflets, tracts, pamphlets, bulletins, or brochures that would be paper and stapled, however.

The whole question kind of puts me in mind of when I worked in an environment where a lot of Russian official documents where processed. In the '90s, at least, many of their "work history" books were bound with beautiful red ribbon and thread. I even used to save the ribbons!

The Economist is stapled and firmly asserts itself to be a weekly newspaper, which I find hard to disagree with.

To be fair, I think I revised my view later in our conversation to something more along the lines of "If it's stapled, it may be a magazine or a newspaper, but if it isn't stapled it definitely isn't a magazine." As a couple of people have commented, the finish of the paper matters too - but I don't think that would be an entirely reliable way of distinguishing between a newspaper and some comics.

Having been involved in such publications myself, I would say paper quality and printing methods are far more important in determining the sort of publication you're reading than the binding. The journals on the Tube are made from newsprint, so they're newspapers.

But things are changing very rapidly in the world of periodicals, so I'm not sure any sort of distinction like this is really relevant; after all, not very many years ago at all, you were only a quality newspaper in Britain if you were a broadsheet. The format defined the categorisation, but now, that's most definitely not the case.

What separates a newspaper from a magazine might become entirely a content thing, therefore -- and with lifestyle sections et al. in regular papers these days, even that distinction is blurred.

I put magazine, but I recognize that a) some news magazines (specifically the Economist, which is stapled) call themselves newspapers and b) that some news papers staple their newsprint together (both free newspapers here in Toronto). My thought was that strictly speaking (if you want to employ a formal universal definition) all newspapers are magazines, but not all magazines are newspapers. Note I don't think all staple bound papers are magazines, but at least some of them are. So of the three I thought the first was more correct (none are strictly true as I understood the statements, but they are ambiguous).

I think the key feature of a magazine is a periodical collecting together more than one thing (so multiple articles, stories etc.). A non-periodical collection of multiple things would I guess be an anthology rather than a magazine. A one-off monograph stapled would be a book (again strictly speaking), even if a small one (arguably all collections of papers are books in a strict sense).