I got my first issue of
Mine magazine recently. This is an experiment in user-customizable content, an attempt to bring something the web offers to the print magazine format.
There are a lot of web portals along with some news sites that allow you to do a fair bit of customizing of the information you get. Sites like
My Yahoo let you put what's important to you – email, scores, weather, stock updates, selected news topics and even your favorite RSS feeds – on one page, and you (more or less) pick the layout, within certain parameters.
On the news site, outlets like
the BBC let you pick what you want to see on the home page, and move boxes around to order them however you want. If you visit a site like
MLive.com, which has several newspaper affiliates, lets you pick what region of the state you want to see news from, or if you just want the general state-wide version.

Mine is an attempt to give readers the same sort of information customization, – along with some personalized advertising. They're starting small with this (31,000 people get a free, 5-issue print subscription; 200,000 more will get an online-only publication), and I don't see this going large-scale.
For the trial period, you go to
the Mine web site, enter your contact information, and select five of eight magazines published by Time Inc or American Express. You get to choose from Real Simple, Food & Wine, InStyle, Time, Money, Sports Illustrated, Golf Magazine and Travel+Leisure (F&W and T+L are American Express-owned publiscations). You answer a couple of lifestyle questions that may or may not apply to you, hit send, and wait for your first issue to arrive.
The magazine options didn't impress me, but I understand that they're starting small with an experiment. Still, Time and Sports Illustrated were no-brainers for me, Food & Wine holds mild interest for me, and then I added Money and Travel+Leisure because I had to pick five. The thing is, Time Inc. owns some much more interesting to me stuff (
all their brands), and their subsidiaries own even more.
The magazine is complimentary thanks to an advertising partnership with Lexus. And by "advertising partnership" I mean there is a one-page ad from Lexus, along with the inside covers and the back cover advertising from Lexus (read: no other advertising), all customized to me – two ads mention the town I live in and another mentions my name.
The magazine weighs in at 36 pages (really light) and has one to three articles from each publication. Each article previously appeared in one of the magazines between 2007 and 2009, but it doesn't tell me which appeared when, so I couldn't even order the proper back issue if I wanted to see what each was coupled with.
Here is what was in my magazine.
From Travel+Leisure: Two stories, one about making flying more interesting and one about luxury camping. The first was fantastic, suggesting you get a window seat, offered tips for mapping your flight path and understanding what you might be flying over. The second was a waste of print for me – if they had bothered to read the lifestyle questionnaire they asked, they would have known that.
From Food&Wine: One story, and it wasn't actually
about food or wine. It was about how to take a winery tour on your next vacation to South Africa. As someone who likes to eat food and drink wine, I would have wanted less of a
travel story.
From Time: A story about how to keep my kids active (another sign they hadn't read my lifestyle questionnaire), a profile on the Tibetan monk who might just be the next Dalai Lama, and a trend piece on people bringing solar power into their homes via financing.
From Sports Illustrated: A piece by a guy in his 20s who goes on a five-day soccer binge to purge his hatred of the sport, which might be interesting if you (a) hate soccer or (b) are a crazed soccer fan. I fall into neither category. I kinda like soccer, but would much rather watch a baseball game. There was also a profile on a women's basketball player at a community college in Washington state who suffered a concussion and wound up with a fair bit of amnesia.
From Money: Two stories, one on what to do with your basement if you have a lot of cash laying around, the other about keeping the tax obligations on your retirement savings low. I would have rather learned how to have $195,000 laying around for a basement make-over as opposed to what I could do with the money, and the second was actually mildly useful for a mass audience.
Here's the deal: This magazine wasn't at all customized to me (outside of the ads, which really are more creepy than anything – see the two I included pictures of). If I had these choices on a web portal, I wouldn't use the portal. If it's a sales vehicle for the included titles, it fails miserably. I am already an occasional subscriber to Time and Sports Illustrated, but while I might have at one time decided to try a F&W subscription, if this was a representative sample of what's usually in it, well, keep your magazine, thanks.
For a publication that's being billed as a
printed RSS feed, this failed in both customizability and recency.
And it's a good thing they started with such a small initial run: even though they only offered 31,000 print subscriptions, they
bungled a block of them.
I'm not the only one who
thought this was a lousy debut. I have four more issues coming; I wonder if they'll listen to feedback and improve them, or if they'll just struggle through and say, "well, we tried" after the run.
At this point, I can't imagine paying for a subscription to this. I also worry that if they messed up a large chunk of 31,000 subscriptions, there's no way they'd be able to handle 2 million. The kind of data they can get for advertisers might be invaluable, but you still have to make consumers happy before advertisers will start paying for it.
Labels: magazines, media, mine magazine, time magazine