Great Moments in Advice from Highly-Paid Consultants:
* Get rid of Nerve’s writers! (Site implodes)
* Get rid of the AV Club’s writers! (Site implodes)
* Get rid of the writers who created Entertainment Weekly‘s distinctive style, make every issue a collection of press releases and listicles, and shrink the print so it’s hard to read!* (Magazine goes out of print)
*NOTE: And, yeah, no…it’s not that I need glasses. I have old issues. When I was in my 20s, the font was literally larger. Y’know, the size of print designed to be read by human beings.
And, sorry, I like magazines. Yeah, yeah, I get it. I’m old. As old as the hilarious “hot take” of calling people old who like things that were better than (or at least as good as) whatever’s being foisted on young people by rich ad execs at any given moment in our history.
I liked magazines and newspapers. I liked The Boston Phoenix. I liked The Village Voice. And I loved the print edition of Entertainment Weekly, for decades (then less and less in the past several years as the powers-that-be made it more and more unreadable…to stop people from reading it so the highly-paid consultants could say, “See? Print is dead” — y’know, like The New York Times).
I loved Entertainment Weekly‘s snarky tone and inside show biz dirt. I loved the reviews by Lisa Schwarzbaum and Owen Gleiberman. I loved the double-wide Best Of issue every year. I loved how they manged to squeeze a Twin Peaks reference into every other issue for years after Lynch’s show went off the air.
So, vaya con Dios, Entertainment Weekly. I guess I might theoretically read a Survivor recap on your website every now and then going forward. But as a magazine, you were beautiful until you were devoured by the Great Suck that’s already devoured film, music, journalism, political discourse, the middle class, the ozone layer, the ice caps, etc. etc., and won’t stop sucking ’til it’s devoured us all.
