After 6 Decades, 'Jet' Magazine Decides To Go All-Digital : Code Switch : NPR: When I was growing up, my aunt used to stack dozens of magazines high on a side table at the top of her stairs. It was an accidental library of black magazines — lots of Ebony and Essence, the stray Black Enterprise here and there, but especially the digest-sized Jet. When I was at that age where kids want to consume every written word, I would blow through those old issues of Jet by the pile. That's probably the only real way to "read" Jet, since every article seemed to be shorter than 300 words. It was black news, bite-size.
And Jet was everywhere — barbershops, salons, waiting rooms. It was as if John H. Johnson, the magazine's publisher, had decided to gift any black person born before 1975 with a subscription on the occasion of his or her 18th birthday, and folks just never got around to canceling it.
