"Hey Jann!"
"Good Lord, it's that Red-State Fuck-Head!"
Compromise is the heart of valor, the soul of the media pond, and the kernel of interpersonal relations. But too much "softness", so to speak, allows us to deviate "too far from the formula" when we need "a strike of the rod" to get back in shape.
I've noticed that your magazine has lost its letter-print size, or the good ole "11 X 18" trademark which always made it so distinctive, and oddly credible as "a culture sheet" of rock n' roll fashion ads. Sacrifices must be made, in order so "the ole' bird can fly", but this is the equivalent "of giving away the crown jewels" even as the magazine is massively cut back in staff & content, essentially "losing all of its identity" except for the "Rolling Stone" letterhead which these days is pulling itself along on the thinnest puff of credibility like the putrid puff of "Tabbi-oid"-fueled mean-spiritedness and piss-poor attitudes .
I find it very strange how you can meld the old grinning 1960's grin of sheepish folk music with rude, snakry "Generation-Next" values and the watery rocket fuel of Barack "Obam-asms" to sell any kind of vision of "hope and change", if not a better world that grovels around the feet of heroin-addicted rock stars with a note of caution, yet an air of worship with your sniveling, flat-faced "rock critics", if that's what you want to call them.
Appeal more to "South Park conservatives" with an air of wizened credibility that cuts through "the rhetoric of crap", that chases these evil, bug-eyed doofuses out of the office like Jesus & the money-lenders "in days of old".
I have some specific suggestions, other than this all-sweeping arm gesture that waves the rod of damnation and "Cannanite ire from a Missourian".
-- 1) Print is heading toward "the grave", and both you and I know this. However, I find your site difficult to navigate and deal with. The text is "too small", the search engine blocky and inefficient, and graphics all but "nonexistent" as I squint at the screen. Most corporate website templates these days are the equivalent of those Haliburton crates used to warehouse terrorists, dissenters, "Discordians", and wing-nuts such as myself "festering away" in Hangar 18 until they dynamite their way out with a pent-up "life-force" that frightens.
-- 2) I believe there is a nostalgia for "old magazines". At some point, your company offered to sell reprints of covers and have them framed through a premium-priced third-party distributor. But what you forget, is that anyone can always pick up an original copy of the magazine "used" for $5 on Ebay and have it done locally for 1/3 the price.
a) You should offer PDF's with a digital "key" to open that particular copy for scholars of near-recent history, maybe for $6/piece with bonus features & extras "up on the website" for PAYING CUSTOMERS with "3 goin' for $15".
b) You should offer up some novelty, Print-on-Demand t-shirts that ties in with a prominent brewing company, perhaps-- for "an ironic feel".
Some Examples:
Where's the party?
Where's the party?
Where's the party?
Or to be obnoxious, even!
Where's the party?
-- 3) Finally, both you and I know that your magazine has reached "a conceptual deadlock" and needs to be "shaken up a bit". This is certainly not the same oyster skiff that published Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas" in its entirety over two back-to-back issues "for the fuck of it". At a certain point, once you start shifting over to that ever-shifting "teeny-bopper" youth demographic and start appealing less to "what's good" like Baby-boomer stalwarts, but "WHAT'S BIG", you become the market's "prison punk". You got to play an aggressive game "and be the ball" instead of submitting to the lower instincts of the gum-snapping mob. . . . . which is fickle as pigeons and loyal as a cafeteria in high school.
a) What if you gave these two characters their own column. . . . . ? Or you print up a translation of their words, and then readers go to the website and listen to these grizzled, zany veterans philosophize like professors of rhine-stones n' scuzz?!
b) If your articles could perhaps be "enhanced" by musical accompaniment "to drive home a point" like "a rock n' roll circus", something you could do is play a 10-second clip of a song and then offer to sell it to the viewer for a bargain rate of 63¢ through iTunes which could be "a great promotional tool". . . . . not only for new music, but for the other great material that exists in the long, long "tail" of cultural commerce and semi-distant "collective memory", getting "more energy" in the bloodstream and reinvigorating America.
So that's all I can think of now, Jann, and remember that "I'm just a poor boy from Missouri" and "a half-Jewish bullshit artist" who will talk to whomever will listen.
Take care now,
Michael "Lawless" Adams
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"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'
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(Rheeee of Crickets)
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("I heard that, Missy!")
© 2010 by Insufferable Industries
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