Off The Page: on magazines and beyond →
David Hepworth, someone who’s actually qualified to write about magazines, unlike me:
The thing I find interesting about The Magazine is it doesn’t try to be exciting. It doesn’t see it as part of its job. … It’s very niche at the moment, as these things tend to be. Its mix is the kind of thing that would appeal to a novel-reading nerd: a piece trying to encourage Americans to drink tea, another describing the experience of watching the Tour De France at close quarters, something about the pitfalls of self-publishing, something else about one’s elderly father telling you how he met your mother. It’s not GQ. On the other hand, it’s not Reader’s Digest either. In fact, it’s full of the kind of pieces that a commissioning editor would reject with the regretful words, “if it were up to me…”
I’ll take that as a compliment. (He gets it.)