There has got to be some amendment to Murphy’s Law which states that the moment I get attached to a product or service, it gets improved, revamped or just plain discontinued. Pardon my cantankerous generalizations, but I don’t want it “improved”! Even design changes to the packaging make me nervous.
I suspect improved is marketing code for budget cuts, usually to insure the profit margin is what actually gets improved. In some cases I’ve gone as far as to write to the company and ask for my product back, (yeah, I’m that girl) because finding a suitable replacement requires so much trial and error it gets wasteful, not to mention expensive.
I do a lot of reading to find inspiration for the comics. News papers, magazines, whatever I can get my hands on, but I’m kind of particular when it comes to actually buying a publication. Women’s magazines can be so incredibly insulting to the intelligence, it hurts my brain. I’m not paying money to read about what celebrities are wearing or who they’re dating and I really don’t care what shade of lipstick defines me as a person.
There are a few needles in the haystack worth checking out. That is until they hire a new editor to improve it. Without naming the culprits, this happened to a magazine I’d become attached to about a year ago, (although I couldn’t give you the exact date). They hired a new editor and within a couple of months, it degraded into numbing fluff pieces. By September, I might just as well have bought Cosmo.
So I gave it up and found a new title I was pretty pleased with, and last month they introduced the new editor. I remained cautiously optimistic, but in the way that Charlie Brown must have been every time Lucy offered to hold the football. Sure enough, this month they yanked that football out from under me and not even subtly! At least the other guys had the decency to erode the quality over a couple of months to ease the inevitable, but this was like a brick in the face.
In the interest of fairness, I will give it one more issue, anyone new to a job needs time to make it their own. But a note to all you new editors out there; lots of us out here want to read about more than eye shadow, bikini wax and “What he’s really thinking”! Don’t be afraid of niche topics or digging into deeper subject matter, we might actually learn something.
