I glared at the seat-back pocket. “It’s just me and you.” I opened up the January 2008 issue of Southwest Airlines Spirit magazine with low expectations. It was that or Sky Mall.

Seat-back airline magazines are generally on the crap end of the magazine spectrum, somewhere below ancient doctor’s office magazines (“What to Eat in 2004!”), but above the local Pennysaver.

And, at first, Spirit matched my expectations. The usual suspects were all there. My horoscope advised me to get moving “at NASCAR speed.” The crossword puzzle was done already, mostly correctly, thanks to a previous reader. And the front of the book was flush with cutesy fare (“No more than 22% of your office knick-knacks should be personal.” Noted.)

And the ads. Oy, the ads. Look, I know that seat-back mags are for local advertisers and smalltime marketers, but the overwhelming amount of ads, coupled with their lack of production values, can make even the most professional magazine look like a bathroom stall billboard.

But once you get past all that, Spirit is actually a pretty good read. The features are not just the usual “what to see where” fare. This issue was an eclectic mix of fun stories. Some standouts:

• “High Rollers” by Tom Wilmes on the resurgence of roller derby and the little shop, Sin City Skates, that helped kick it off. One thing I learned: Skaters all have unique names, registered with The International Skatergirls’ Master Roster. Favorites from the article: Robin Drugstores, Ivanna S. Pankin, Darth Hater.
• Shiela Lowe’s story on graphology. Bonus points to Southwest’s president Colleen Barrett for volunteering a writing sample for analysis. The verdict: She plans ahead, values her privacy, and is conventional but straightforward.
• This issue saw Spirit’s first “Your Adventure In” feature, a combination of personality test and travel info. Start by answering a few personal preference questions (“What’s your favorite Tom Cruise movie?” Unfortunately, none of the above that guy’s a whackjob wasn’t one of the options), then, depending on your answers, you’re directed to one of four stories about you’d like in Dallas Fort Worth. Cute.
• The inevitable story about hot new gadgets was made entertainingly surreal by photos of a little puppet dude using them without explanation. (This made me miss Greg The Bunny intensely.)
• My favorite story in the issue was “Sure Played a Mean Pinball” by Spirit editor Jay Heinrichs. It was part personal confessional, part history of the game, part review of the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, and part interview with the iconoclastic proprietor of the museum. Very entertaining with an elegant NY Times Magazine-style design.

Before I knew it, we were touching down and I’d never opened my laptop. In the end, isn’t that what a seat-back magazine is for?

Oh, and, Grandma Powazek is doing okay.

In October 1995, Suck.com published a story by editor Joey Anuff (aka The Duke of URL) on How To Read Wired. In short, his advice was to take a hearty dollop of irony and then rip out all the back-to-back ads.

Twelve years ago, according to Suck, Wired 3.09 contained 206 pages, of which 90 were full-page ads. If you included the partial-page ads, the ad/content split was an even 50/50.

I decided to revisit Suck’s how-to with Wired’s December 2007 issue (15.12). It had 290 pages, of which 151 were full-page ads. Today, if you include the partial-page ads, the ad/content split is about 53/47.

If anything has changed, it’s the amount of product-driven content. This issue contained 18 pages in the front of the book that were devoted entirely to products (What’s Inside Lotrimin Ultra? Play Super Mario! Wow, Expensive Motorcycle!). Then there’s the Wish List, “a survey of the stuff we’re dying to get (and give) this holiday season,” which includes a Top Ten that lasts for 12 pages, plus 24 pages of some of the most blatant product placement I’ve ever seen in a magazine. Check out this spread and tell me if it’s an ad or not.

If you include all this product placement with the ads (where it belongs), it totals 198.5 pages, which is 68% of the magazine, leaving 91.5 pages of actual content. Sad.

Suck’s instructions still work like a charm. Wired is printed with perfect binding, and pages come out like butter. I removed any page that had ads on both sides. If Wired has changed at all, it’s that they’ve gotten better at avoiding this situation. Of the 151 full-page ads, only 88 were doubled-up, allowing me to tear out 44 pages. Still, what a difference.

Inset photo courtesy of Suck.com.

I’ll say this for Wired: As much as they’ve let rampant consumerism take over the book, they still treat their Features section as sacrosanct. There’s nary an ad to be seen from Noah Sachtman’s “What Went Wrong” on how techo-optimism led us astray in Iraq (an amazing story, a shame it had such an ugly corner-to-corner design) to the end of Carlyle Adler’s “The Secrets of Silicon Valley” on thefunded.com’s pole vault over the walls of Sand Hill Road (with a beautiful angular text design and b&w photos by Rainer Hosch).

Wired, like the internet itself, has grown up a lot over the last 12 years, sometimes with the grace of the adolescent it was. But in web years, it’s about 150-years-old now, and far be it from us not to show our elders the respect they’ve earned.

Here’s to ya’, old man.

Vice is getting a lot of attention lately for VBS.tv, its new video site, and of course its requisite blog. But this is The Magazineer, and we like magazines, so when I saw a new stack appear outside of Villains on Haight Street, I grabbed a copy.

Their latest issue (volume 14, number 12) was their Second Annual Fiction Issue, and it’s a doozy. Almost 200 pages printed on heavy matte stock. The stories are wild, as always, and some seem more like true personal narrative than straight-up fiction. (Tao Lin’s “Shoplifting from American Aparel” would have fit in quite nicely in Fray’s upcoming Busted issue, but I digress.)

I loved how many of the stories had a personal preface by the author. They ranged from self-depreciating (“‘Does this story make you hate and want to kill me?’”) to serious (“I have been working on this novel for more than ten years.”) but they all set a personal tone to even the weirdest fiction.

Of interest to my fellow Magazineers would be the interview with Gary Fisketjon on editing famous writers like Raymond Carver and Bret Easton Ellis, and the interview with Dennis Cooper on Little Caesar, a groundbreaking literary journal that started in ‘76. I also loved the interviews with the Asssscat improv group (many of whom you’d recognize from 30 Rock and SNL).

If I had to scrape up something negative to say, it’d be that the cover feels phoned-in. It’s just black type on white, a simple listing of all the contributor names in the issue. It’s nice to give cred to the people in the issue, but combined with the width of the issue, it just makes it look like a large-type phone book with the cover missing.

The issue is packed with ads, as usual, but it seems like a fair trade, given the cover price (free). The advertisers are all targeted, too, which helps. There are also some goodies (a poster from Rock Band and some weird faux hair from Scion) which are novel but impede the page-flipping.

Those are small quibbles with a book that I can tell already will live on my coffee table for a good long time.

Further Reading: You can see more photos or read some of the stories from this issue, or download PDFs of previous issues. Wikipedia has a brief summation of the history of Vice Magazine, natch. You can also subscribe here.

April:

GQ’s alcohol advertisers pull out of the magazine’s Lindsay Lohan issue. Why? With the exception of the French Quarter, she’s not legal.

May:

Time’s 100 Most Influential People list includes Borat, Bin Laden, Obama – and, thankfully, not “You.”

Men’s Fitness puts tennis player Andy Roddick on its cover, and promptly gives him Rafael Nadal’s biceps. Roddick writes on his blog: “Little did I know I have 22 inch guns and a disappearing birth mark on my right arm…. I can barely figure out how to work the red-eye tool on my digital camera. Whoever did this has mad skills.” Furious, design consultant Mary Anne Bulter resigns.

June:

Slate’s Timothy Noah calls the Tom Junod-penned Angelina Jolie profile in Esquire the “worst celebrity profile ever written.” Junod calls Noah a disgruntled Yalie.

September:

Vogue wins FOLIO:’s first-ever fall fashion issue weigh-in, lumbering into the Red 7 mailroom at 4.88 pounds.

November:

The Atlantic Monthly celebrates its 150th anniversary with a star-studded party in New York. The party planners, though, decide to hold the event in a theater, reserving the “stage” for VIPs and the rest of the venue for NIPs. Awkward.

The writing is on the wall for print advertising. Print media buys go down every year, while online ad buys double. That’s why it’s surprising that “don’t call it a phone” handset manufacturer and phone network Helio has decided to launch its own magazine. Even more surprising is that it’s pretty good.

Helio Magazine is 6×9, about 56 pages, and beautifully printed on matte paper. It focuses on entertainment, art, music, and movies, with a decidedly hipster vibe. Many projects like this would feel inauthentic – middle aged ad execs trying to talk like tweeners. But Helio’s triumph is that they pull it off. Credit probably goes to the magazine’s LA-based publisher, StreetVirus.

The magazine is distributed free, and you can’t subscribe, so you just have to luck into it. I recently found issue 6 (Fall 2007) in a local cafe in San Francisco. The cover by artist Mark Ryden immediately grabbed me, and the interview with him was a highlight of the issue for me.

But it’s hard to think about Helio Magazine without thinking about advertising. This issue has no advertisements (past issues have, which felt weird). Indeed, the whole magazine is an advertisement for Helio. But it’s subtle. The articles don’t ever mention Helio directly – a good thing, too, because I’d have thrown the thing away the moment they asked Ryden, “So, what do you love about your Helio?”

The issue is peppered with art – some really incredible, some just meh – by Otis School of Design students in what the magazine describes as an “art/ad collaboration.” It is only in these pieces that the Helio logo even appears. A pessimist would call this sneaky, but I found it playful. Most brands would not allow their logo to appear in the eye holes of a skull, or as a set of pasties on a fluorescent nude.

Low points in this issue: a story on Katamari Damacy which is about three years past its prime; a story on emoticons that reads like a high school final (the lede: “The 21st Century has been marked, perhaps most resonantly, by the incestuous intertwining of social communi….” Zzzzz.); and a photo essay that screams out “what were they thinking?” even in the bizarre world of fashion.

Even with its flaws, Helio Magazine is an interesting experiment. It shows what can happen when a company loves its audience more than its logo. If nothing else, it’s a beautiful page-flipper, and worth exactly as much as you paid for it.

Further Reading: Check out more photos of Helio Magazine Issue 6 or download PDFs of issues 4 and 5.

Me Magazine is a fantastic concept. Each issue is devoted to one individual. All the stories are interviews with friends and family of that person, about that person. By the end of the issue, you know this random stranger in an entirely new way. Or, at least, you should.

Issue 13 was about Ryan Donowho, an actor and musician that I’d never heard of. And, sadly, this issue shows the weakness of the concept. Because when the central character is weak, the whole issue is weak. Even after reading it, I still feel like I don’t know Ryan Donowho … and don’t really care.

Still, I love the concept of the magazine and the potential is great. Imagine the stories intersecting with each other, the same way our lives do. I have high hopes for the next issue.

Further Reading: Me Magazine is, naturally, on the MySpace as is Ryan DonoWho.

Here at The Magazineer, we’re all about the print. But every once in a while you’ve gotta give it up for a digital-only magazine, especially when it’s as good as Oddica Magazine.

Oddica is an indy t-shirt company out of Southern California that makes really amazing t-shirts. Every once in a while they tap their stable of artists to put together a PDF magazine full of rich, amazing work.

They just put out Issue 6, and it’s full of stunning visuals, as usual. Seeing stuff like this confined to my computer monitor makes me wish it wasn’t so difficult to put ink to paper. This stuff belongs in a book.

We’ve mentioned T-Post before – it’s the magazine that comes in the form of a t-shirt. The September Issue was interesting, but ugly.

I just received the December 2007 issue, and I like it a lot more. This issue’s story is about babies getting switched in the hospital and raised by separate families for the first few months of their lives. When the families find out, they have a terrible choice to make. Rich material, to be sure.

I also noticed that they’re now packaging the shirt inside-out, so you read the story before seeing the art on the front of the shirt. I think this is a great idea, as it sets the context for the shirt.

I love the art on the shirt this issue. I’m not sure what it has to do with the story, but at least this is one I’d wear.

With Might, we did it the dumb way. We thought we had to do 100,000 circulation and we had to have all this advertising, and it was never going to happen and no one got paid, we were all perpetually disappointed, and it folded. We found out that wasn’t the way to do it.

With McSweeney’s and The Believer we decided to do the math better, to depend on the readers, not on advertisers or anyone else. If the readers think it’s good, it will keep growing. That way, there’s no compromise. The Believer ahs a circulation of 17,000 to 20,000 and I don’t know if it will ever surpass that. And get this: Because of reader support, McSweeney’s, the literary quarterly, is able to subsidize some of the more eccentric projects we take on. It’s bizarre but it can work if you depend on the wisdom of your readers.

I love this quote on so many levels.

One the one hand, it’s a wonderful insight on the state of print in the digital age. The magazine business was built on gatekeepers. To get a magazine into a store requires working with a chain of middlemen, each adding to the final cost. The math just didn’t work unless you have huge numbers. So to get them, you dumb down the content and pray for ads. In the end, the magazine becomes more about securing eyeballs for advertisers than serving the community that inspired it in the first place.

The internet allows consumers and creators to connect directly. So for the first time, it’s possible to skip those middlemen. Putting ink to paper is always going to be more costly than putting pixels to screen, but now that a group of talented people can collaborate, create, and sell directly to consumers, it’s actually possible to jump the middlemen – a community can support its own content creation. (This is a lesson the record labels, TV execs, and WGA members are in the process of learning right now.)

On the other hand, well, duh. Communities have always created their own content. In fact, this bizarre affliction of blockbusters and mass media is a relatively recent phenomenon. As Chris Anderson so skillfully wrote in Wired (The Rise and Fall of the Hit, July 2006), “the era of the blockbuster was an anomaly.” Mass media created the era of the megahit, and mass media has changed.

Content may want to be free, but it doesn’t always want to be big.

This post originally appeared here.