Title: A Magazine
Concept: It's a horrible pudding of every magazine in every place you are forced to read magazines. My dentist has photography magazines, Architectural Digest and People - a little of those. Auto shops have Road & Track, Car & Driver, Motor Trend series - a little of that. Airplanes have Tennis, Golf Digest, the proprietary travel magazine and SkyMall - some of that, too.
A Magazine is NOT intended to be read by anyone. It's meant to sit on a table or stay in the back of an airplane seat or in a bathroom's magazine rack and occassionaly be thumbed through. A Magazine gets its name from the popular, bored expression, "Hand me a magazine" - often uttered in airplanes, waiting rooms and at awful parties. The expression now becomes "Hand me A Magazine."
Execution: The magazine will be around 200-220 pages each month and it will be about 85% ads. The stories will be short - 2 pages at most - or be full of pictures. The stories will be drawn from the previous month's page filler at other magazines. If Wolverine Enthusiast ran a feature on training your pet wolverine to roller skate, A Magazine would have the same story, except with roller blades or ice skates. Or if Weasel Fancier has tips on how to keep your weasel safe in the summer, we have the same list except it's for something similar or even imaginary ("#56. Keep your clogfox inside during July 4 celebrations. Plan calming games to play with your clogfox.") I have a feeling it will be inspired by pet magazines a lot.
To help distinguish itself, A Magazine will only feature pictures of B, C or D-list celebrities, or forgotten ones. For example, if People throws a Vin Diesel cover at you, A Magazine counters with Scott Baio (the accompanying article will be culled from old Tiger Beat stories ca 1988 to 1992 in other magazines, so it sounds like he's still great).
There will also be light technical section that subtly insults the reader's intelligence. A "How Does It Work" segment on a CD-ROM would show a cutaway of the computer case and thousands of tiny slaves relaying the information to other tiny slaves who turn it into pictures or sounds. There would also be "technology" articles stolen from 10 year old newspapers, about things like "the Information Superhighway" and "DVDs".
A Magazine will have a content generating staff of approximately 3 people - myself and the only 2 friends I have in the entire world. We will work full time for approximately 4 days each month to put the magazine together. If, in that time, we cannot scrape together enough content, we will plagiarize wire service feature stories about miracles, sports figures, and travel destinations. Spelling mistakes will be tolerated, since the magazine is not intended to be read.
We anticipate leveraging the success of A Magazine into a sister publications for a more literate and discerning readership - The Magazine, which will compete with the New Yorker, Atlantic and other similar type things. The Magazine would utilize the efforts of an editor for grammar and punctuation, but not content. The primary difference between the 2 magazines will be that The Magazine will have a lot more words than A Magazine.
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him: googled a girl i liked my sophomore year of high school and i found her crappy website. but she's actually done something with her life, though. she has a dog.
me: they should have a nostalgia filter that prevents you from googling people from your past.
him: restraining orders?
me: nostalgia filter is a better name.
