PRESENT TENSE:TIME INC has a new wheeze, a personalised magazine called Mine. You log on, select your favourite publications from its stable, which includes In Style, Timeand Sports Illustrated, and then wait a couple of weeks for it to land. Unfortunately, Mine can't be mine. The offer is open only to readers who are US residents. However, one of Slate.com's writers has got a couple of issues, and has had his initial scepticism stripped away.
"Mine exposed me to stuff that I liked but probably wouldn't have sought out on my own," says Farhad Manjoo. "I don't have much of a patio, but I still found Mine'stips for organising my outdoor furniture pretty handy."
He loves it, but identifies flaws. It feels like a brochure rather than a magazine, he says, and reprints articles from back issues. Plus, it has personalised ads – courtesy of its sponsors Lexus – that Manjoo describes as “creepy”.
“The ad goes out of its way to prove that the page was printed just for me, mentioning both my name and full street address in the copy (as if I needed to know where I’d be driving my Lexus).”
Even if you can’t receive it, it’s worth looking up the online subscription page, which asks you to choose five magazines from eight, but also to answer unusual questions that will help make the magazine even more yours. Do you like to sing in the car? Are you a sushi or pizza person? Would you prefer to learn juggling or celebrity impersonation? Who knows how deadpan they’re being, but that’s a personality test you’d like to see the results of.
The magazine industry, in common with the print media in general, is going through twin crises at the moment: financial and existential. Many are losing readers almost as quickly as they’ve lost advertisers, but, even if the money comes back, the way that people consume their information will continue to mutate rapidly.
Even as readers turn to the internet, most magazines’ online business models turn out to have a self-destruct button at their core; these are terrible times, requiring unprecedented attempts to deal with them. Newsweek’s recent reinvention, for instance, actually involves halving its circulation and upping its cover price.
In Ireland, small magazines have always struggled, with few major successes managing to sustain themselves. And there’s no doubt that there will be further casualties thanks to the advertising departments turning into the Ground Zero of the recession.
I pick up magazines regularly, but I subscribe to only one. The Atlantic arrives from the US at what seem to be random moments, partly due to the fact that it publishes 10 times a year, but compounded by how the post between here and the States is so slow it must travel by sailboat via an overland through Greenland.
Sometimes I wonder why I pay for The Atlantic, because it is free online. Then it arrives and I remember why. Firstly, it automatically renews my subscription each year, and I'm too lazy to cancel it. Secondly, it's a treat every time.
The current issue has articles on the genius of Spongebob Squarepants, the true importance of CEOs and a seven-decade survey on happiness. It also taught me that 30 people vanished from cruise liners between 2003-2006. Poof. Or splash. Gone.
It’s a nugget of a fact, within a rich seam.
Of course, I could get all of that and more on the web either by looking in the right places or trusting the web’s habit of pushing the good stuff to the forefront of the hive mind.
I have enough RSS feeds set up, recommendations through Twitter, and links to websites that filter out the interesting stuff floating around out there. Unfortunately, the longer pieces need to be printed out to be enjoyed, and there’s not so much satisfaction in reading an A4 print-out as there is a glossy page. Besides, those 15 minutes could instead be spent watching something on the iPod or listening to a podcast.
Yet, by arriving as a hard copy, a magazine forces me to savour articles, get lost in them, stay with them over a couple of sittings if they’re particularly lengthy.
With the exception of some of the Sundays, a magazine also delivers something I don’t get from the punchier pieces in the newspapers and certainly not from the brevity of the web. Besides, there is a surprise value to the general interest mags, such as The Atlantic or New Yorker, that throw lots of ideas at you and hope you like most of them.
The success of Mine will be hard to gauge. Readers are not being asked to pay for it, and 200,000 will be sent out as online versions. But, from afar, it seems that all Mine is doing is being what a good magazine should be. If that was enough to save the print magazine world, it would have done so already.
shegarty@irishtimes.com
