Pose

New York magazine is celebrating/lamenting/excoriating/applauding/[insert your own word here] the Best and Worst of the past month's celebrity magazine photography. There is, as you'd expect, some good stuff and some well-intentioned (but well off the mark) stuff.

Here's How You Do It

Smart: publishing Paste magazine.

Smarter: publishing Paste magazine in both print and online editions, thereby allowing cheapskates (or – and here's an audience every publisher forgets – people who live outside of the magazine's distribution area) to read the entire magazine, consuming both the edit and the ads, for free.

Sure, they've lost the $5.95 I would've spent (if, of course, my local newsstand stocked the mag) buying the product. But they've saved whatever they would've spent printing the mag, and they've just added one more person to their circulation. Like I say: smart.

September

Watched The September Issue last night... and loved every minute of it. The general consensus is that Grace Coddington steals the show. Her interview with Vogue unintentionally backs that up.

Milk?

I used to love playing Spot The Celebrity in the old Got Milk ads they used to (and possibly still do) run in American magazines. There's a huge collection of those ads (along with bajillions of others, which I'll link to later) at Vintage Ad Browser. Go snoop around the site. You'll love the retro 1960s and 1970s stuff.



(Honestly, though, this post is just an excuse to post a pic of the lovely Yasmine Bleeth...)

Vogue

I'm loving this Daily Beast gallery of Vogue magazine shots. Goes to show: you can do a fashion shoot without doing a... y'know... fashion shoot.

Out

Oops. When gay magazine Out put gay American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert on their (mostly gay) cover, they were instructed by Lambert's publicist not to make the little lamb look "too gay". The magazine's editor – in a move that even a straight like me can love – dutifully put Lambert on the cover and ran the yes-I'm-gay-but-not-too-gay interview... but then also launched a blistering attack on Lambert in the editor's letter.

My favourite part: "Much easier to stick you in Details, where your homosexuality can be neutralized by having you awkwardly grabbing a woman’s breast and saying, “Women are pretty.” So are kittens, Adam, but it doesn’t mean you have to make out with them."

Meow.

Information/Design

David McCandless over at InformationIsBeautiful just launched a book, and all the marketing around it has caused him to pause and ask: what makes good information design? He's come up with an interesting Venn diagram, which - though still a work in progress - should be mandatory viewing for every media designer.

Reading

Rediscovered this little gem in an old copy of Esquire we had floating around the office: author Dave Eggers' take on the future of reading. It's worth - you guessed it - a read.

Cover Version

I think my link button is going to explode. Slate magazine have a photo gallery up of New York magazine covers which reference old Esquire magazine covers (from the famous George Lois era). Interestingly, Esquire referenced Esquire last year during their anniversary celebrations - and they weren't the only ones!

Wearing

This month's US GQ (you know, the only one that's worth reading) has a great little fashion/style/service piece about The Seven Style Mistakes Every Man Makes. It's pretty much on the button - and what I like about it is that they don't just tell you what you're doing wrong (yes, I'm talking to you, Mister Mom Jeans)... they also tell you how to do it right.

That's proper service journalism - and that's why I read the US GQ.

Mad

As nice as they are, the classic Esquire and Rolling Stone magazine covers can't hold a candle to old-school Mad magazine.



It's as if they carefully researched every rule of magazine cover design, and then specifically (and hilariously) set out to purposefully break every rule of magazine cover design.

Illustrate

I'm a sucker for a good illustration. I've lost count of the times I've started reading a magazine article (usually in The New Yorker) purely because it had an interesting illustration. (The bonus is that – as happened a couple of months ago with their story on the Icelandic economy – I'll usually be rewarded with a great story that would otherwise not have read.)

And more often than not, that illustrator is Steve Brodner.

Spot The Difference

There was – and I'm picking my words carefully here – some unease when we discovered that both Sports Illustrated (my former employers) and Men's Health (my current employers) magazines were going to run AB de Villiers on their covers in October.



Luckily, the covers were totally different and the story angles were totally different and it all ended happily ever after.

Which is more than can be said for this month's Golf Digest and Compleat Golfer magazines. They're direct rivals, and their cover stories (Ernie Els Turns 40!) had the identical angle, and – worst case scenario – they both had the exact same image on their cover.



Ouch.

Daddy

I learned pretty early in my spell as a writer at Sports Illustrated that the best way to make people you don't like look stupid, is not to misquote them or to quote them out of context; it's to report exactly what they say. (Clive Rice did a far better job of making Clive Rice look like a bitter racist than I ever could.) I've always though that the American liberal media should take the same approach with Sarah Palin.

Just let the woman talk. She'll hang herself.

But Vanity Fair aren't taking any chances. After August's shamelessly one-eyed character assassination, they've now hauled out the big guns. This month they've got a first-person dirt-disher in the form of Levi Johnston: the half-wit hockey player who knocked up Palin's teenage daughter.

The story is hee-larious, like a combination of Married With Children, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Juno.

It's pretty much impossible for me to pick out my favourite bits... but here's my Top Three:

It could be the part where Palin demands that Levi gets a haircut, but he refuses: "The first thing Sarah said to me at the hotel was “You gotta cut your hair.” I told her I didn’t want to—I had a mullet at the time—but she finally got me to do it."

Or maybe this part: " It was the happiest day of my life, but it was also terrible because my family couldn’t be there. I didn’t think Sarah wanted my mom around all the cameras because she had been arrested for selling prescription medication a week and a half earlier."

Or this bit: "It takes a lot to make Sarah Palin cry, but I’ve seen her cry a few times—once was when Bristol and I told her that we were pregnant."

If this little snot-nose got your daughter pregnant, you'd probably want to bury him in the snowy tundra of backwoods Alaska. If his intention with the story was to diss the mother of his pregnant ex-girlfriend, then he succeeded. But not without making himself look like a total loser at the same time.

Haters

New York magazine has a fascinating/frightening cover story on the tide/tsunami of hatred that's being directed at President Obama. It's very, very scary. Turns out the "silent" majority - which we discovered wasn't a majority - isn't quite so silent either.

I can't start my week like this. I'm heading off to a happier place.

Hammer Time

I've been trawling through the New York magazine archives, admiring their slideshows of the best and worst of fashion magazines.



Their selection from March 2009 was particularly amusing. The "Best" stuff is really good, and the "Worst" stuff is especially awful.


Seriously. What were they thinking?

Cover Up

The nominees are up for The Maggies – a smartly-named award for the best British magazine covers. Looking through the list, there are some great ones and some arb ones... and I couldn't help wondering whether any of them would have passed the mandatory Media24 requirement of slapping your entire Contents page onto the cover (because, y'know, the more coverlines the better).



I'm weird like that: I prefer the approach of The New Yorker or the old George Lois-era Esquire, where your cover is like a stand-alone work of art.



Of course, these covers are pretty and all... but I don't know if they'd make me want to buy the magazine. Which I suppose is where the unwritten coverlines rule comes in.

Copy/Paste

Guardian blogger Roy Greenslade has a post up (which, in an irony that will soon become apparent, he lifted from elsewhere) on 10 Ugly Truths About Modern Journalism. As good as it is, I'm not going to reproduce the list here (my Copy/Paste tool isn't as sharp as Roy's), but I can comment on three of the entries:

6. Some journalists use Wikipedia
That should say "all" journalists. Trust me.

8. Many journalists have side projects
That should say: "Most journalists cannot afford to not have side projects." A mid-level salary in publishing is like an entry-level salary in commerce.

2. Many stories are not copy edited
This is especially true for online news. But you want to hear the scariest part? The editors at some online news outlets (coughNews24cough) actually take great pride in the fact that their stories are not spell-checked, grammar-checked, or – get this – fact-checked before they're published. Hence all the unapologetic "President Is Shot / Wait, No He's Not / OK Maybe He Is / No, We Were Thinking About Some Other Guy / OK Nobody Got Shot / How Do You Spell President Again?" stories.

Senior Management

A while back, the Washington Post ran a wonderfully-told story on Washington City Paper, an alternative weekly newspaper which – whether you live in DC or not – has some damn fine articles on offer.

I did, however, have to chuckle when Slate's David Plotz – one of City Paper's alumni – recalled in a recent Gabfest podcast that City Paper used to have "many senior editors, who were senior to no-one and who edited nothing".

I'm going to use that line over and over.

Wiley

New York magazine have a superb gallery of portraits by Kehinde Wiley. Wiley's work is amazing: he remasters the Old Masters by replacing the old white dudes of the originals with young African-Americans and hip-hop artists.



Albrecht Dürer has never been so street.