This piece, from the Toronto Globe and Mail, starts to get at something true: that newsstand magazines increasingly suck.

This pains me. I love magazines. I’ve spent a fair amount of my life making magazines — and, if I may be so bold, some pretty damned good ones. All too often, though, I find myself turning away from newsstands empty-handed.

A couple of months ago, I spent a few minutes in one of the huge magazine stores in Penn Station. The “laddie” mags (Maxim, HFM, Stuff) were set up next to the skin mags. Of the maybe 35 titles on display between the two categories, the one with the most restrained and dignified cover was Hustler.

The covers are only part of it. So much the inside of magazines these days is vapid. Sure, there are exceptions. But what editors and publishers have decided is the shrinking attention span of the reading public has resulted in entire magazines that look and read like frenetic fronts of the magazine — the thing that you used to browse past to find the real meat. Now, the browse is the meat.

Here’s what the Globe and Mail says:

Off-the-rack magazines, while claiming they preach self-love, in fact teach self-hate, including to those who pose for them. Female readers are told they’re failures; male readers are treated as stupid….

Summary: Most magazines are bad because they are forced by their owners to be Enron-level greedy, their mandate is to bankrupt their readers and their content is unspeakable because it’s easier to write badly than well. As for the weird numbered advice on their covers, as in 106 Ways to Perk Up Your Glutes/Kitchen/Wardrobe/Face/Life, there aren’t 106 ways to improve anything.

It’s what I’ve been saying for years and years: public ownership of media companies creates disincentives for excellence. The investment cycles required to build long-lasting media properties are directly antithetical to short-term financial performance. To cite an extreme case, it took Sports Illustrated 35 years to turn a profit. (Most magazines take five years, which is tough enough when you have to justify results quarter by quarter.) That Time Inc. is both public and devoted to franchise development is a miracle of corporate enlightenment. That Time Inc. stands nearly alone as an excellent public publishing company exactly proves my point.

Funny thing is, it used to be that celebrity magazines were the dumbest thing going; to be seen with a copy of Photoplay was to advertise that you were not a Serious Person. Now, of course, you have to be at least passingly familiar with People if you are to have a water-cooler conversation in most places. Full disclosure: I am an enthusiastic and long-time subscriber to Entertainment Weekly, but EW at least tries to be more about the entertainment than the entertainer. The line is sometimes fine, but it’s what keeps the cred.

Maybe the lesson is that cheese is what sells, but it’s possible to do cheese well enough that you don’t have to close your eyes when you read it.

Lovely piece in the NYTimes today about a particularly unlovely road, Coney Island Avenue.

I’m working these days deep in New Jersey, past the Mall Belt.. This means I get in my car every morning in Brooklyn, point it north and west, and drive 30 miles. Besides the distinct lack of physical activity (and the welcome acquisition of paycheck), the major change I sense in my life is that on a daily basis I’m seeing fewer people than I used to — and those I do see are in a vastly compressed cultural range.

It’s not like New Jersey is monocultural; Hudson County (Jersey City and environs) in particular is spectacularly diverse. But you sure don’t see it from a car on the highway. That’s one reason I find Los Angeles such an antiseptic place; I see and the cars and buildings, but where are the people?

This business of having so many different cultures pressing on each other in such close quarters cannot be anything but healthy and exciting for the cultures themselves, and the nation (and world) as a whole. It’s why Coney Island Avenue is one of the most important places in New York.

One of the reasons I’m sure that the Cosmos has a sense of humor is that I have somehow found myself on President Bush’s re-election e-mail list. I remain subscribed for the same reason I read the WSJ editorial page: a firm belief that externally generated spikes in blood pressure are ultimately a Good Thing.

Today came a missive declaring April 29 “National Party for the President Day.” The deal is, you’re supposed to gather your remaining loser friends for a grass-roots party to express your love and devotion for Esteemed Leader. If you register in advance and promise more than five attendees, you will be included in a conference call from a local cadre (um, I mean) “senior campaign leader [who] will answer questions and deliver a political briefing on the progress of the campaign.”

The promise that questions will be answered, of course, puts your party well ahead of the media or even congressional investigators. And if you don’t have enough loser friends to put together a party of five, they’ll even find some for you.

To ensure the grass-roots nature of the parties, there’s online help provided to create invitations, download brochures, and even buy “party packs.”

Then there’s this:

all party hosts receive a special package from the campaign with an exclusive Bush-Cheney ’04 video, bumper stickers, other campaign materials and a letter from President Bush. These fun, informal events will help grow the President’s strong base of support in local communities throughout the country…

There’s fine print saying you can’t spend more than $1000 on one of these parties, lest you fall afoul of campaign finance law.

It turns out that I’m busy that night — no, really! — but I have this vision of hundreds of Democrats putting together parties of their own, registering on the site, and having a wee bit of fun on these conference calls. The rules don’t say that you’ve gotta be a Republican to play.

I imagine you could come up with some questions of your own for the Bush campaign….

I’m just marveling at the part where the kid got the key into the ignition and turned it far enough to get the starter motor cranking:

TAMPA (AP) – Authorities said a [2-year-old] toddler slipped out of his mother’s locked motel room, climbed into his family’s car and accidentally drove it through the room’s door and window….

[Hillsborough County sheriff’s Lt. Rod] Reder said while Rex’s mother was showering, the youngster managed to get the car keys, unlock the motel room door, and go outside and enter the unlocked car.

Once he started the manual-transmission vehicle, it lurched forward about eight feet, crashing through the door and window of Room 133, Reder said. Hopkins had left the car in first gear, Reder said.

Why, yes, I have 21-month-old twin boys. Why do you ask?

Update on that asteroid:

A newly discovered asteroid has zero chance of colliding with Earth in 11 years, although preliminary data had suggested such a doomsday scenario was possible, astronomers said this week.

New data allowed a more refined projection of the orbit of the space rock, dubbed 2003 QQ47 — ruling out more than a dozen possible strike dates, according to the Near Earth Objects Information Center.

Now, had this been from the White House, with its distinguished record of lying to the American People only when it moves its lips, I’d suggest that it would really be time to worry. But I do love this graf from the story:

Despite cautioning that the odds were almost 1 in a million and that further study would probably rule out any possibility, the center could not stem sensationalist stories from some media outlets worldwide.

My own point was that people routinely accept odds much greater than one in a million in their everyday lives — and that people don’t really thing that “one-in-a-million” is especially rare.

British scientists say they’re tracking an asteroid that might strike Earth on March 21, 2014.

The odds of this happening about 900,000 to 1 against, the article says. The odds of my hitting NY Lotto are about 22.5 million to 1 against. I buy Lotto tickets every so often, but don’t plan to worry about asteroids — which I hope says more about human nature in general and less about me specifically.

(I also note that one of the Lottery’s FAQs is “Can you give me the winning numbers for the next drawing?” The answer is, “No. Each drawing is a completely random live occurrence.”)

From the Independent (U.K.), by Andrew Gumbel:

Cast your mind forward to the morning of 3 November 2004. Imagine, just for a moment, that George W Bush has gone down to ignominious defeat in the US presidential election, his once sky-high popularity ratings pickaxed and bludgeoned into the ground like some rotten fencepost on a Texas ranch. All across the nation, people are asking where it all went wrong for the chief executive who had seemed so immune from criticism for so long.

And the answer, they all agree, is the moment that the mighty Fox News Channel – the red-meat chomping, propaganda-spewing, flag-waving, all-screaming, ratings-topping cable station doubling as chief baggage carrier for the Bush administration – was reduced to utter humiliation by a single pesky New York comedian.

-more-

I once had an ex-girlfriend who said that I type for a living. (Since at the time I was a reporter for UPI — and UPI was the second-largest news organization in the world — you understand why she was ex.) Closer to the truth is that I talk to people people for a living. And e-mail has changed that.

It is one thing to get face-to-face with someone and interview them. You can pick up a lot from the non-verbal stuff — sometimes more than from the verbal. It’s not as good to get someone on the phone and talk to them that way; there’s the inevitable loss of personal contact and inflection. On the other hand, it’s vastly more efficient, and with some practice and careful listening, it’s pretty much worth the trade-off.

But now everyone has e-mail. Even executives. And this I do not like at all.

First of all, there’s a spectacular lack of spontaneity. You submit your precise questions, and the interviewee responds (or doesn’t) precisely. There’s the chance for follow-up (you have an e-mail address, after all), but the give-and-take that makes for excellent and revealing conversation is irretrievably lost. Furthermore, you never know if you’re talking to the person himself or his flak. And if you’ve arranged the interview through a flak, you’d better believe that the responses have been massaged, if not entirely written by the PR department. It wouldn’t surprise me, in some cases, if the person being quoted were entirely unaware that he had “granted” an “interview.”

It may be something, and it may even be journalism, but too much of it makes for a sorry watered-down version of journalism.

The trade magazine Editor & Publisher had a good piece on this recently:

Before resorting to e-mail interviews, reporters should ask “Why?” If e-mail is being used for the reporter’s or source’s convenience, a telephone or face-to-face interview is more appropriate. Telephone interviews capture tone of a voice. Onsite interviews reveal a source’s demeanor or surroundings so that the reporter can add an element of human interest or spontaneity to the story while enhancing the writing and building trust with the reader.

In other words: resist e-mail. A good choice.