Blender No More

Yesterday morning, upon retrieving the mail, I found a Maxim in my mailbox. On it was this sticker, which read:

Welcome to Maxim!
This note is to inform you that Blender has ceased publishing with the April 2009 issue. The balance of your paid subscription will be fulfilled with Maxim. If you are already a subscriber of Maxim, the balance of your Blender subscription will be added to your Maxim subscription.

I had missed this when it hit the news this spring; it wasn't a surprise. Blender had noticeably succumbed to magazine anorexia, the shrinking page-count of a publication on its way out. I'm a subscriber to both Blender and Maxim thanks to FreeBizMag.com, so there would have been no real loss if Blender stopped arriving (in fact, I hadn't noticed that the May through July issues were even missing), which is probably a further clue to Blender's relevance. Maxim isn't a great magazine either, but I tend to find something worth reading in it more than I did in Blender. I shouldn't get too attached, though: others have noticed symptoms of magazine anorexia in Maxim, too, so the clues are leading to an internet-only Maxim in the near future. Stuff magazine was the first casualty in 2007, but it was repeated content with Maxim for the most part; they, too, were rolled over into the Maxim subscriber's list (frankly, I liked Stuff better). If the magazines are being condensed into one better-quality publication, it might help...but, flipping through this new erstaz-Blender issue of Maxim, it doesn't look like the loss of one title resulted in extra effort in the sister publication.

Interview Magazine's New Style

I've been getting Interview magazine for about a year now, and I've enjoyed most every issue. One of the magazine's major premise is that the interviewers are just about as famous as the person they're talking to: Jonah Hill by Edward Norton, Danny McBride by Seth Rogan, John Waters by Gary Indiana. With the September 2008 issue, Interview has relaunched with a new style:

Flipping through the featured interviews in the magazine, I was a little disappointed; the number of celebrity interviews was smaller, and fewer recognizable names at either end of the interview. Hopefully this will improve, or else I'll probably get bored with the magazine. September is traditionally the 'fall fashion' issue, so the greater focus on looking pretty may be an anomaly. As long as I've read it, Interview has been weighed down with a Cosmopolitan-degree of fashion advertisements. That, sadly, continues, but a magazine has to print itself, right?

Unlike Rolling Stone's upcoming destruction of all things holy, Interview is actually larger than it was before, by a good inch. I've always like the tabloid-sized feel of Interview, so I'm glad they didn't go smaller. This 'premiere redesign' issue has a glued spine, instead of the more common saddle-stich, but last year's fashion issue was also glue instead of staples, so it's no indicator of what will come. The paper is also glossier, and although it feels heavier I noticed more bleed-through of text than in my older issues.

A subtle change I didn't notice at first is the logo:

Previous Logo

New Logo
The new logo is sharper, but fails with readability. The original title had a nice space around the R and V in the middle, to help readability, but this new one mushes it all together; even with the dot on the 'i', it looks like Interrew.

The biggest change, it seems, is in font usage.

Before -- Serifs banned:

Now -- Serifs everywhere:
I've always found sans-serif fonts hard to read, but Interview used them in everything -- captions, titles, text were pretty much all Helvetica. The addition of serifs in the readable text will definitely help. The serif font they use in titles and captions looks like the beautiful child of Caslon and Bodoni, which has a nice sharp style about it, and the article text (thankfully for everyone's eyes) looks like Garamond. My first thought was that this looked older, more Rolling Stone-ish and classic-fashion-mag-ish. It could be a good thing; the all-Helvetica look had the feel of a badly-designed blog at times.

A few things I noticed, that I hadn't seen in the magazine before:

• Capture, a section of cellphone-camera photos that had been sent to the magazine. They don't say how best to send them to the magazine, which I'm sure is to avoid having their email boxes filled with pictures of readers' penises. I mean, more pictures of readers' penises.
• Nominations, and interesting turn on "fame's reaction to fame," where established artists recommend an up-and-coming artist for future fame.
  
• Blogs, which focuses on, um...blogs. It's nice to see the art and literature of the amateur internet get some attention, so I'm curious to see where it goes. Interview has long been at the fringes and cutting edges of art, and it is excellent to see them acknowledging what there is online without trying to shoehorn it in as an author/blogger or artist/blogger who's promoting their new marketable product and (by the way) they got started in blogging. Their premiere entry in this category is The Affected Provincial's Almanack, which I had never heard of before.
  

These three additions to their standard fare really make me look forward to the next issue -- they're things that aren't seen everywhere. One-page looks at new musicians aren't uncommon, four-page interviews of movie stars are everywhere, but a page or two of reader-submitted photos and interviews with bloggers have a lot of potential. Hopefully next month the magazine will have less fashion, and be back to more interviews of famous people talking to famous people.

Print Isn't Dead, It's Different

Reading online is the dissemination and absorption of information -- pleasure reading is like a day at a spa, effortless and engaging. Friend Gracie has had this problem at sex-kitten.net (NSFW, and I designed it), difficulty finding readers online willing to read a couple-thousand word article, but their book sells pretty well. We've long said we won't publish eBooks, because of the pain of reading them online. Short, informational pieces work better online? No wonder newspapers are declining in their corporeal influence.

So, where will long-form writing go? That's why people say print isn't dead - it does something online doesn't do. It is, however, why blogs took off but online magazines haven't -- blogs are easier to read, and easier to write, and the cost is right. Produce something people want in large quantities, for very little cost, and it's a good product.

Business 2.0 Closing Up Shop

Business 2.0 is closing up shop -- but they say it's because of a lack of advertisers, not a lack of readers. Part of me wonders if this will (or should) drive a shift to book publishing on topics formerly dominated by magazines; the impermanence of a magazine is supplanted by websites and blogs, but the internet can't produce the permanent-reference aspect of a book. Magazines on paper: not worth the expense. Books on paper: still worth the money spent. Readers will always be readers; give them something they'll value, rather than something advertisers value. This should add up for publishers looking at how to publish their words.