I Can't Wait to Work for Candy Crush Magazine
Airbnb, the popular hotel-tax dodging application and apartment-renting service that artists use to gouge tourists and finance their careers, has launched a print magazine, the Times reports. It is called Pineapple (?) and its purpose, it explains in a note to readers, is "to explore our fundamental values: sharing, community and belonging."
Pineapple, which "includes an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator of the Serpentine Gallery in London, on 'architecture's role in bringing us closer together and what the idea of home means to him,'" does not much sound to my personal taste. (It "got mixed reviews from publishing and travel experts," the Times writes.) But make fun at your peril. Profitable print magazines are dying. Pretty soon the only publications left on the magazine rack at your local hologram bookstore will be those underwritten by businesses and unstable people with too much money, too little sense, and an obsession with branding—in other words, start-ups.
So where will magazine editors and writers be working 15 years from now? Portfolio types will head to Venmo Magazine, of course; Men's Health can head to MyFitnessPal Magazine or maybe Breeze. Less lucky will be the staff of New York and the New Yorker, who will be forced to help launch Yelp Magazine, only to be replaced at launch by...Yelpers. Wired will be forced into emphemera, and a more punishing schedule, with SnapChat Weekly. Women's magazines like Cosmopolitan and Glamour will simply become period-tracking apps. I would subscribe to Dark Sky: The Magazine, a beautifully printed art magazine with photographs of storms. None of them would be profitable, except for Yik Yak Magazine. (Yik Yak: Call me!)