What would be great is an online magazine that is like POV Magazine. I really liked that magazine. It was all the male edge of Maxim, but with actual writing, actual news, and intelligent and beautiful women. POV had deeper articles (not just for bathroom reading) with actual useful information in them. The interviews were actual interviews - they didn’t focus on what the women liked in men they dated and how kinky they are. POV lacked the snarky flavor of Maxim - the stupid photo captions, the girls in nurse outfits in the health section, the testicle jokes every other paragraph, etc.
I have some ideas for what my magazine would include. See what you think.
My online magazine would include a video games section that actually reviews video games from a non-teen point of view. I’m tired of games receiving poor reviews only because they have less than cutting edge graphics. Some of my favorite games have been text-based. I want screenshots and videos for free, and I only want to see games in current or about to be current release. No previews, no Japan-only. And no bias for PS2, XBox, or Gamecube - I have very little doubt that Sony pays (or provides significant incentives to) magazine publishers and stores so that they take up most of the page/shelf space.
An aside: I enourage you to note this phenomenon and report back to me - Have you noticed that at the local video game store PS2 games litter the walls and the XBox section is comparatively small? Now count the PS2 games on the wall that utterly suck and compare that to the number of XBox games on the wall that utterly suck. Note the number of duplicate games appearing on the PlayStation side, too. Finally, get a list of XBox games that were popular last year and try to find them on the wall. Do the same for PS2 and compare. Who's telling the store to keep the crappy PS2 games on the wall, I wonder? And why don't they restock the old popular XBox games? Maybe I'm crazy, but this seems suspiscious to me.
I don’t really care if my magazine has girl photos in it, since you can find that anywhere online, in whatever racy or obscure setting your kinks require. If there were photos of people, I would hope that they would be accompanied by interviews of the class of Interview magazine, which are neat because the high-profile interviews are done by associates in their field. For example, Ashton Kutcher was recently interviewed by Brad Pitt.
Everybody loves science and gadgets (or they should). I think my magazine would distill the best of Engadget and Gizmodo and provide reviews and comparisons (Consumer Reports style) of useful equipment. This would not be everything that comes down the pipe, but mostly neat or innovative things that could change the way you live.
I subscribe to Entertainment Weekly for only a couple of their segments. I want to know how movies performed the week before. I want preview blurbs about what’s going to be on my favorite shows in the coming weeks. I want to know about movies that are scheduled for release on the weekend. I want to know what DVDs are coming out. EW’s interviews are mostly crap, their regular columns are mostly crap (although Stephen King’s back page is often an interesting read), and their TV reviews are the most worthless and degrading text in any magazine in print. Their music, book, and theater news is pretty useless to me, too. But convert all of the above to good content, and that’s what I would include in my magazine.
Has Wired become a liberal/leftist rag? There was a recent issue of Wired with lots of anti-copyright stuff in it (isn’t that every issue, though?) that had me wondering just that. I can do without another toothless screed by Cory Doctorow or Lawrence Lessig on the EFF belief system. Don’t get me wrong, I like the cause of the EFF, I’m just tired of hearing about failure all the time. Do something, guys. Apart from that, Wired is good for trend-watching, although I suspect that Wired now has more to do with driving the trends than it did in the past. The feature-length articles in Wired are darn solid most of the time, though. Berta understands the power of BitTorrent now from reading Wired better than any way I tried to describe it to her.
We get CMJ at home. It’s very irregularly published, and the only thing that’s truly worthwhile there is the CD, since the written description of music is often completely useless in determining whether you like the sound of an album. A web magazine could do this right. New artist track samples (in Flash or MP3, depending on the draconian licensing required by the label) would be available for every band, not just the ones that fit on the CD. But the magazine could recommend favorite tracks, just like the CMJ CD is a recommendation list from all of their album reviews.
Does fashion really interest men? I got GQ for a while after POV went down. It was interesting enough, but didn’t make me want to run out and buy the latest designer suits. I’m not clamoring for $40 silkscreened T-shirts that are synthetically vintage-aged. Maybe just a yearly fashion issue to see the trends in review? It that even worth it? Who cares.
Business and public interet stories would round out the whole thing. Something like Time Magazine-light, maybe. Stories such as: How to invest today for early retirement. The future of the DVD and other media formats. Why and how to get elected to your local government. Returning from Iraq - The new trials of veterans in the wars after Vietnam. The real story of the fall of Social Security and the government’s tenuous plan to fix it. American Schools - The handgun and education landfill. My after-dinner cigarette sent me to jail. Fire in the rainforests - the struggle for ecology. Welfare at the local native american casino. Any good ideas there?
So where’s my staff? I’ve got a domain all set up for this, all I need is an artist and a few writers.
