Valhalla Island

In a place where the top selling magazines are Woman’s Day and Cosmopolitan, Monocle felt like it was made for me. Thick, durable, using beautiful page stock, typography, huge and many photographs, whitespace, long articles deeply discussing the best of economies, ideas, systems, products and living with a truly global perspective. It was perfect — Just look at that logo, just look at any issue’s cover.

I’d read two issues, at an enormous $12.50 Canadian each I still felt like they were easily worth the fee. I read about North Coast Russian cities that are plunged into constant darkness 3 months of the year, I read about Zurich’s metropolitan transit system, Scandinavian university residence communities, Dutch newspapers and Tokyo’s major. None of it is important but it was all very interesting. Then they gave a glowing review to an album by one of my very favourite bands — Okkervil River (listen — I was hooked.

Issue 9, the most recent issue, which I was excited to see on shelves just before boarding my flight from Calgary to London, disappointed me extremely. There was no substance, the lines were blurred between editorial content and advertising with those weird PANASONIC X MONOCLE and PIONEER X MONOCLE sections and the blatant consumerism, which was there was always an undertone of, took over the entire magazine.

After getting home I came across ‘…but a Monocle’s supposed to treat myopia’ an excellent review of the publication start to finish. Greenfield’s argument against Monocle boils down to this:

[...]at core all of my issues with Monocle boil down to this iron fact: at £75 annually, I simply don’t feel that my subscription delivers sufficient value for me to want to renew it.

His criticism made me realise things I hadn’t because I was so caught up in it’s panache.

As the unwonted praise heaped on world-class bad actors like Ishihara indicates, Monocle consistently lacks anything resembling a critical voice.

My eyes opened wide, he’s right. Articles are always completely neutral so far in that a write up on the work by a German company in the way of wind turbines carried almost no voice suggesting it might be a great thing. Then it always bothered me when they’d use a “Monocle’s View” section under something which seemed like it should be a review.

To quote Greenfield quoting BusinessWeek:

In this, that piece in BusinessWeek strikes me as getting it just about right: the magazine “is either prescient, or steering sharply toward an audience that doesn’t exist.”

So, while waiting in LA International, browsing the magazine stand I picked up a copy of The Economist. It was cheap and every major article in the magazine was listed on the front, they interested me, I bought it.

I was extremely surprised by the well designed interior. There’s no thick, textured, matte paper but they use type very similar to that of WIRED’s print edition, a face I’m able to read for hours on end. The articles were extremely interesting and unlike Monocle, timely and relevant. It lacked all of the brand name consumerism and replaced it with longer, more insightful articles that offer an opinion and criticism.

In a nutshell, The Economist is Monocle with that bad bits taken out.