Toronto news: While I rarely report the demise of a magazine, I am pointing to this story because I’ve been told the rexblog is really big in Toronto: At least one of our three daily visitors is from there.

Why Q & As don’t work: Last week, I heard a legendary magazine editor say he was not a big fan of the Q&A format. After reading this Q&A on mediabistro.com with Allison Arieff, editor-in-chief of Dwell Magazine, I concur with the opinion of the legendary editor: the Q&A is rarely executed with skill. As this example displays, the Qs need to be intelligent and insightful, rather than (as in this case) bland and predictable. Worse, yet, is when the Qs display display little preparation or research. For example, the interviewer here displays little awareness that San Franscisco has a rich magazine history and once even served as home of a Time Inc. new title skunk works. Also, the whole line of questioning about how a shelter/design title can be edited outside of New York fails to take into consideration that Des Moines, Iowa, and Birmingham, Ala., are the homes of shelter books with larger circulations and revenue streams than any such book published in New York. Bottom line: It’s better to keep your questions to yourself than to reprint them and, well, what Mark Twain said. By the way, what Allison says in her As is worth reading.

Great promotional idea: Since I just complained about an over-reported magazine promotion, let me praise a creative, under-reported one: Smithsonian Magazine’s Culturefest, as reported by Media News.

Non-story of the year: You know you’ve got the ultimate weapon of mass promotion when pundits are handicapping what will appear on your magazine cover six months in advance. I feel about Time’s Man of the Year like others do about the over-commercializtion of Christmas. Here’s my suggestion for magazine-beat writers: Don’t start running stories about Time’s Person of the Year until after Thanksgiving. To do so before makes you look desperate and lazy. (Note: I linked to Goggle’s cache of the Min story because Mins kills links daily.)

Proof: Rexblog regulars know I believe the best writing in newspapers is found in the sports section. Today, yet again, I point you to another example that leads me to this conclusion. Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post is one of the greatest sports writers to ever practice the craft. And when she’s writing about (or with) Lance Armstrong, it doesn’t get any better.

Quote:

But the thing I’ve always liked best about him is that he doesn’t mind showing weaknesses or imperfections. To this day, the picture on his driver’s license is the one he had taken during chemo, in which he is bald and has no eyebrows. He has a fundamental lack of vanity that I suppose is a result of having been so exposed during his illness, of having his organs, his chest, abdomen, brain and his very bones X-rayed and held up on light tables. Those scans were the pictures of a weak and ailing man: He was scarred up in places and missing a thing or two. When he recovered from the illness, some essential reserve was gone as well.

(via WSJ Daily Fix)

Etc. Yet another profile of Bonnie Fuller, this time from Ad Age. Enough. Stop. There’s nothing more to say.

Book it: Can’t get much better than this for the rexblog. NY Times magazine-beat reporter David Carr reviews a magazine book, Wired: A Romance.

Quote:

Gary Wolf…has written a deceptively deadpan recollection that reads more like a libretto than a straightforward work of journalism.

Speaking of magazine books, Fortune.com reports there are four books out (or soon-to-be) about its parent, Time Inc.’s mis-timed and mis-guided merger with AOL: Stealing Time, There Must be a Pony in Here Somewhere, Fools Rush In (available next year); and Brilliant Mistake, antoher 2004 title.

Radar bites the buzz bait: One day, when someone is doing a google search on the phrase “magazine launch,” I hope they will turn up my repeated warnings to would-be magazine publishers not to confuse publicity with success.

Here’s just one more rexblog post to add to the growing list.

As noted earlier this week, it is doubtful Radar will be able to print its third issue. Still, in the same misguided belief all of us (me included) fall into when we fall in love with a new idea or concept, or, god please help us, a magazine we’d like to launch, we’re sucked into that clippings vs. reality confusion vortex.

Today, I provide yet the latest example of this phenomenon via a quote from a story by Larry Dobrow, contribiuting writer at Media Daily News. In covering the Radar’s money woes story, Dobrow attributes Maer Rosha, Radar’s editor and publisher with the following quote-of-death:

We were the first independent magazine launch that The New York Times wrote about in its history,” Roshan chirps.

Apparently buying into Rosha’s misguided (and riduculously wrong) statement that such a NY Times piece has anything to do with, well, anything, writer Dobrow observes, “…one would think that Radar is well on its way to becoming the next publishing sensation. In reality, the magazine is experiencing its share of growing pains.”

Ironically (prophetically), I first blogged the NY Times story Roshan claims is “the first” indy magazine launch story in the history of its history, included this insightful observation by writer David Carr:

But as an independently owned publication in a media segment dominated by giants like Time Inc. and Condé Nast, Radar is on a lonely road, one that is littered with the corpses of many well-turned magazines that withered for lack of funding, like Smart and Dads. Radar’s general-interest approach also challenges the conventional wisdom that questions the relevance of such magazines. In a culture that has atomized into consumer niches, the publications that serve specific passions have been prospering.

In that same rexblog post, I included the punch line, “Warning to Radar: Don’t confuse a David Carr profile with success.”

And so, let this be a lesson for future magazine launchers. Even when the NY Times writes about you, it does not insure success. And when they write about you in the context of littered corpses of ideas just like yours, don’t take it as a thumbs-up endorsement.