What are alumni magazines for? I always thought they were just a fund-raising tool posing as publications. After all, Grove City College sends mine along with donation requests, even though I dropped out a semester early to work for Gawker Media (which means I have a good twenty years to pay off my college loans before I think about handing over more money voluntarily). But the New York Times says their most important role is "dormitory common rooms for grown-ups." And now Facebook is replacing alumni magazines as the gathering place for graduates (and drop-outs!). Makes sense to me; I never thought of writing into GCC's alumni mag to report on my career, but I'll update my job title on Facebook and I do have all my college friends there. What about people who graduated before Facebook? Are you switching your social life to the site? Did you ever use your alumni mag for that sort of thing?

I can picture the sorts of classmates I had who would still use the magazine to keep up to date: the sad, provincial ones. They haven't found a closer group of friends in post-college life, because they got married early and settled down and only have a few family friends. Of course, even in this group I expect everyone's found church friends and soon they'll meet their fellow young parents at their kids' preschool. They have someone new to share their life with, and when the second baby comes they won't think to send a photo into the alumni mag.

But it's not just Facebook that replaces the magazine. I just don't get why anyone would still update their college friends through a magazine in a world of e-mail and photo sharing. A magazine is a bizarre place to share your personal story with people you already know (and I don't even want to know the people who specifically want to share their baby photo with everyone who's ever been associated with their school). I never talked to my classmates through the school paper (even when I edited it, heh), so why would I do so now? Any modern online version of the magazine would still be the same one-to-many-to-one medium, and only the least interesting members of my college community would still want to interact with it that way.

So what's left for the alumni magazine? Is there any hope of relevance? Whatever the Times offers, I say no!