Non Reading
Ok so a few months back Joe Cool hooked me up with a free magazine subscription to FHM. Now I'm not a much of a magazine type of guy. I usually read novels or collections of short stories for my light reading but hey I'll take free.
So after a couple of months and no magazine I figured it wasn't coming and had really forgotten about it. Then it shows up in my mail box this month. I guess the target audience is college males. Try to get em at the beginning of their "year." Anyway on the cover is a scantly clad celebrity and I think "not bad." Then I open the magazine and begin to peruse it.
Note that I did not say read. Yes there are words in the magazine but mostly as captions or humorous commentary. Almost every page has some variation on the them of provocative nude female, even the advertisements, especially the advertisements. Speaking of ads, you flip through a couple pages of them just to get to the table of contents and then flip through a couple more pages to get to the next page. I don't think there is a multi page written article in the entire magazine. There are eight to ten page pictorial spreads with captions on every page but nothing to spend any time on. And this is one of the magazines that is out selling Playboy left and right.
While Playboy has airbrushed silicone enhanced nude distortions of reality, it is also a real magazine. It has articles and product reviews. Every month you get a real story usually written by one of the noted authors of the time. (Jack Kerouac, Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates just to name a few).
This leads me to believe that Playboy is losing it's hold on the market not because the advertisers want to go with magazines that are less revealing. The women in FHM leave very little to the imagination. I would almost say that the photo spreads are really more exploitational and degrading than the full nudes in Playboy. The terrible truth is that people just don't want to read. And that makes me sad.
Now some picture links. Because I like em.
More Laters
So after a couple of months and no magazine I figured it wasn't coming and had really forgotten about it. Then it shows up in my mail box this month. I guess the target audience is college males. Try to get em at the beginning of their "year." Anyway on the cover is a scantly clad celebrity and I think "not bad." Then I open the magazine and begin to peruse it.
Note that I did not say read. Yes there are words in the magazine but mostly as captions or humorous commentary. Almost every page has some variation on the them of provocative nude female, even the advertisements, especially the advertisements. Speaking of ads, you flip through a couple pages of them just to get to the table of contents and then flip through a couple more pages to get to the next page. I don't think there is a multi page written article in the entire magazine. There are eight to ten page pictorial spreads with captions on every page but nothing to spend any time on. And this is one of the magazines that is out selling Playboy left and right.
While Playboy has airbrushed silicone enhanced nude distortions of reality, it is also a real magazine. It has articles and product reviews. Every month you get a real story usually written by one of the noted authors of the time. (Jack Kerouac, Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates just to name a few).
This leads me to believe that Playboy is losing it's hold on the market not because the advertisers want to go with magazines that are less revealing. The women in FHM leave very little to the imagination. I would almost say that the photo spreads are really more exploitational and degrading than the full nudes in Playboy. The terrible truth is that people just don't want to read. And that makes me sad.
Now some picture links. Because I like em.
More Laters
posted by Rich Rosenthal II at 11:36 PM
2 Comments:
People seem to want to read books still. According to some info on some websites lately(ok, only Neil Gaiman, but he links other sites), booksales are going well.
I would guess that people just don't want to read magazines anymore, or pay $5 for one when they aren't interested in all the stuff in it. About this I don't have a theory. For once.
Gaimen has a very cross genre appeal. First there are his hardcore "sandman" fans. He attracted fans with the mini series of neverwhere and with the novel. He has Coraline which has a sort of harry potter effect in that it appeals to adults and children (haven't picked it up yet). Some of his short stories from "smoke and mirrors" where recorded as radio plays (Brian Denahey stars in one of em. Very food stuff, plus he drags in a theatre fan base) Then there is the entire british aspect. British humor sells to americans. It jsut sounds funny.
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