First seen at Distracted by Star Wars. I have nothing to add here; just…wow!
When Magazines Go Bad
It’s happened a lot to me over the years. Well, maybe not a lot, since I’ve never been a big consumer of periodical literature, but still enough that I see a pattern. I discover a magazine that quickly becomes a regular part of my reading life, with me either subscribing or picking it up regularly at the bookstore or someplace else. I grow to love it, and the magazine goes through a “growth” period. Its page count grows, it packs in more and more articles, and it makes me happier and happier.
Then, at some point, this growth pattern simply…stops.
The magazine suddenly becomes substantially thinner. And worse, there is a “redesign” that guts interesting regular features, increases the amount of advertising in a magazine whose page count has gone down, and a general “new look” that somehow manages to always involve larger fonts and more white space on the pages.
This has happened again recently to a magazine we love here at Casa Jaquandor, Cooking Light. We’ve subscribed to Cooking Light for years. It’s never just been a magazine about low-cal food; it always had some wonderful travel articles and articles about exercise (alongside beauty tip articles that were admittedly not that useful to me). Most of all, though, we loved that it had a much more livable approach to “light cooking”, an attitude reflected in a recognition that bacon can have a place in the healthful diet, that fat and sugar need not be avoided at all costs, that food should taste good.
That last attitude is still there, but the magazine has unfortunately undergone a redesign that is just ghastly. Articles are uniformly designed throughout, with the same ugly fonts used for everything; more white space; fewer pages; and now the magazine feels like it’s mostly advertising.
Cooking Light hasn’t gone down the tubes, but they’ve made it into a magazine that they can obviously make cheaper, while also making it less pleasant to read. The Wife commented that reading Cooking Light now feels closely similar to reading Family Circle, and I couldn’t argue the point. And I don’t like reading Family Circle. Now, there’s a good chance we’ll allow our subscription to lapse.
I know, these aren’t good times for magazines, but it still would be nice if some of them would manage to rise above the fray.
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Sentential Links #197
Linkage time:
:: We’re in for some hard times. We need to pull in our belts, pay more taxes, demand more value for our taxes, and say no to an ideology that requires converting our health money into corporate profits. We should to raise the lowest wages, and lower the highest ones. We have to return to the saying my father quoted to me a hundred times: “A fair day’s work for fair day’s pay.” No, I don’t think everyone should be paid the same wage. If you earn a lot of money, you have a right to a lot of money. If you earn it. But when Wall Street bosses are paid millions in bonuses for bankrupting their firms, and their political tools in Congress oppose a better minimum wage, that’s plain wrong. It’s rotten. People who defend it with ideology are strapped to a cruel ideology. (Some of the comments are a hoot — you have the standard conservative talking points — “Government bad! Market good! Oooga booga!” — and then you have the people who evidently can’t tell a blog from a newspaper movie review site and therefore tell Roger Ebert that he should “go back” to reviewing movies. And of course, digging deep enough, you have my all-time favorite stupid conservative response to just about anything: “We don’t live in a democracy, we live in a republic!” Fun wow.)
:: She really is the best female character in superhero comics.
:: It seems like every time I tune in to watch the Olympics, instead of sports I see a couple of people sitting in comfortable chairs talking about sports and I get impatient but I don’t think that’s the whole reason. (Lynn prefers the NBC coverage to CBS’s old coverage. I don’t recall much about CBS, but I’m sick of NBC’s approach of mixing a bit of taped this with a bit of live that, interspersed with Bob Costas sitting by the fake fireplace and conducting what are frankly some of the worst interviews I’ve seen in years. I’m not sure if interviewing was ever Costas’s strength, but by the lights of merciful Jeebus, he’s been just bad this year. His interview with Even Lycasek, in which he really really wanted to bait Lycasek into expressing anger with Evgeni Plushenko (“Let me read you another quote by Plushenko and hear what you think!”) was utterly embarrassing.
Additionally, I’ve always loved the sense of world that the Olympics generate. NBC has undermined that by seemingly only showing medals ceremonies if the Gold winner was either the US or Canada. Those are the only anthems I heard in the entire course of the Games, and it annoyed me to no end.)
:: While there is no questioning the athleticism needed to succeed in figure skating, it’s still a performance sport. Costumes and makeup play into the overall appeal of the sport. How do those figure skaters keep up their look on and off the ice? (This is a new blog. As in, really new — only a few weeks old. I learned about it via Jennifer. The posts I looked at are about makeup, something I know nothing about, but as soon as I saw the masthead image over there — a pic from Spirited Away — I was intrigued. So, welcome to Blogistan!)
:: Hi. My name is Jason, and I have gout. (Ouch. I remember my father’s gout attacks, and at times it was scary to see him in so much pain. Not to make light, but I also remember an episode of King of the Hill in which Bobby suffers agonizing foot pain which Hank proudly diagnoses as turf toe — meaning his kid’s an athlete at last! — only to have it turn out to be gout because Bobby’s been eating three meals a day at the new Jewish restaurant that’s just opened in town.)
More next week!
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Wow….
I assume that NBC, in a story about the Georgian luger killed the day the Olympics began, just quoted the AE Housman poem that I quote in this old post, because I’m suddenly getting lots of search engine hits for the phrase “Shoulder high we bring you home”. The poem is “To an Athlete Dying Young”, and can be read in its entirety here.