Separated at birth: Granted, I only watch baseball during the World Series (however, uh, I’m a big fan of MLB.com) so I had to ask the 14-year-old in the house why Billy Ray Cyrus is now playing for the Red Sox and he said, “Huh? You mean that achy breaky guy?” And he explained to me that the guy on the left, Johnny Damon is not Billy Ray Cyrus (right). I’m glad I could clear that up for any others who, like me, are just tuning in.
Carr goes down-market: NYT’s David Carr profiles Englewood Cliffs, N.J.’s Bauer Publishing USA, publisher, says Carr, of such “down-market magazines” like Woman’s World and Soap Opera Previews. They also publish the down-priced People knock-off, In Touch and First for Women.
Quote:
While many New York publishers put out costly, lavish magazines from costly, lavish headquarters, both designed in part to impress advertisers on Madison Avenue, Bauer, the American division of a large German publisher, produces mass magazines at low prices intended to entice grocery shoppers in Middle America to add them to their carts.
Carr’s story corresponds with Bauer’s launch next week of a new magazine:
To those ends, Bauer is about to begin publishing a weekly called Life & Style. The magazine, priced at $1.99, will try to bring the sheen of celebrity to a weekly about style that will put a million copies on newsstands next Monday.
October surprise: What will it be this year? Some new allegation of a Bush indiscretion at Andover? Or, my favorite: Bin Landen will be popping out of a cake in the coming ten days. But never would I have predicted that a Time Inc. magazine would discover that new high-wage jobs are filling the pipeline and that the NY Times would publish an article suggesting that Bush has a higher IQ than Kerry. Talk about your October surprises.
Lowering the lid: After watching the Titans flush their season away, I think there will be a run on these Titans toilet covers. Hey, I’ll always be a fan, win or lose, but I’m afraid this season is down the drain.
rexblog bumper music: Another One Bites the Dust (Queen)
Buried web treasure: Someone with the initials J.T. is working on cataloging transcripts of every episode of Saturday Night Live. While it’s not quite up there with searching for a cure to cancer, I think this is a commendable endeavor.
(via: ResearchBuzz)
Icerocket RSS hack: Steve Rubel has discovered a simple hack to set up an RSS feed for the results of an Icerocket search: “All you need to do…is conduct a search on any IceRocket tab and then simply add &rss=d1 at the end of the result page URL.” Thanks, Steve.
Update: The hack seems to be disabled. Hmm.
Update II: Steve now says, “The hack I blogged about is no longer required, nor does it work. Each search result page now has its own feed on the right hand side of the page.”
How magazines get started (continued): Here’s a profile of the new magazine, BP, written for “the nearly 3 million Americans who are diagnosed with bipolar disorder, characterized by mood swings from mania to deep depression.”
Quote:
The magazine owes its existence to the success of a 10-year-old sister publication, Schizophrenia Digest. “We traveled across the country with SD,” Garvey said, referring to the magazine. “People would come up to us and say, ‘We love this, but do you have anything comparable for people with bipolar disorder?’”
So as not to offend several of the seven readers of the rexblog, I will eschew my typical irreverence.
(Explanation: How magazines get started.)
