Remember the Gay '90s?

[Screwed-down Hairdo]

ßUQ MY M00THA F00KING DIQUE, Y00 FAUCILLE...

Oh, the hate...My PC has started wearing a conical white hat with eyes cut out for holes.

[yanpa]

That's not very PC of it.

[Screwed-down Hairdo]

That's not very PC of it.

I loved that!

[GomiGirl]

Get a room you two..

[Coligny]

And a camera...

[Taro Toporific]

Get a room you two..

And a camera...

And the POPCORN!

popcorn-eater.gif

[legion]

There you go, turning us again int00 an interwab hate masheen...

Go fuck yourself, you dumb French cunt....I haven't got a fucken clue about hate, you motherfucking, garlic-shitting, Plastic Betrand loving piece of merde....







Just kidding

Plastic Bertrand is Belgian

unlike Johnny Hallyday, though not for want of trying

[wagyl]

I get the feeling that "Plastic Bertrand is Belgian" in answer to each time SDH misspells his name will become an inside joke meme here, just like the kiwi yanpa and Greji and his goats....

[Screwed-down Hairdo]

I get the feeling that "Plastic Bertrand is Belgian" in answer to each time SDH misspells his name will become an inside joke meme here, just like the kiwi yanpa and Greji and his goats....

Wow! What a surprise! Yanpa is not a Kiwi? And Plastic Bertrand is Belgian? I hope that doesn't mean he lures children into basements and debases them...

[wagyl]

And Plastic Bertrand is Belgian? I hope that doesn't mean he lures children into basements and debases them...

Only when it is a conspiracy involving the Police and high ranking members of the Royal family.

And I prefer to call it "showing them a little lurve" rather than "debasing."

[Screwed-down Hairdo]

I hear you...if there's a silver lining in the Belgian proclivity for stuffing children in basements and raping them it may lie in the cuntry having developed to produce the world's finest chocolates.

[wagyl]

This is a chicken and egg issue. I mean, how do you think you attract the kiddies into the basement in the first place if not with a box of Godivas?

[Screwed-down Hairdo]

This is a chicken and egg issue. I mean, how do you think you attract the kiddies into the basement in the first place if not with a box of Godivas?

True, true...And I heard they only made Godivas because it gave them a chance to look at a nude lady with a horse...

[wagyl]

It is almost time that this thread was merged with the "Child Abduction Issue Explodes" one.

[yanpa]

Given the title and the contents of the thread's second page, you'd be hard-pressed to know what it's about...

[B-Attitude]

Zombie magazine death match!
I'm outing myself as one of the six or seven people on the planet thrilled to watch this unfold.
But let's get one thing straight, even back when their were three to five fairly high-quality English-language city magazines alive and (sorta) well in Tokyo (late 80s-mid-90s), there was never a legitimate readership-driven proposition for advertisers. They all survived by selling ads to people who bought out of a sense of community goodwill, or a whim and a prayer. No amount of great journalism, design and photography can turn 60,000 readers (very generously) into 300,000, which would be a kind of minimal number for serious, mainstream advertisers expecting to make more back in sales than they spent on the ad. More realistically, even the best-ever English-language mags in Tokyo in their heyday were printing maybe 35,000 copies -- even if they claimed double that readership or more.
This tiny number rules out brand advertising and pretty much all categories other than very small businesses depending on a very well-defined niche.
That is, except for CLASSIFIED advertising. This is how Dark Melvin made money where every single other person who tried lost big. Classified advertising is profitable mainly because it sells itself. A decent database takes it from email straight into the mag with nary a human hand involved. Better yet, classified advertising is compelling as free, unique content -- or at least it was in a pre-craigslist/gpot/etc world. Dark Melvin hit stride with Classified to the extent that he established it as the biggest, easiest to use classified ad market in English.
Of course, Dark made a lot more money than that by selling the hell out of display ads as well. That's no mean feat and his success at that (even though it was in pre-Lehman Tokyo) should have Terrible Lloyd up late these days. I made the distinction with classified advertising because with classifieds, advertisers actually have a prospect of success, even with the tiny numbers you get in a publication like Metropolis. And that matters because having quality content doesn't mean shit in this game.
I would refer you, for example, to the recently (well, a year and a half ago) slickened Tokyo Weekender. The thing floats a good number of full-page display ads on a sea of content that falls well below the typical blog-post at any of three dozen Japan blogs. It's success has nothing to do with improving the journalism, nor with improving the design. Rather, they've just got better, harder-working ad sales people.
Same will go for Dark Melvin. There's no way he can regenerate the classified profit base, now that the free online alternatives are so numerous and convenient. He'll have to sell the hell out of "goodwill" advertising. I'm inclined to think that's impossible at this time, in this place. But back when he started Tokyo Classified, I was inclined to think the same thing, only to be proven dramatically wrong.
If nothing else, this gives Lloyd a second thought about the possible outcomes of another round of pay cuts for the people he has left.
Or maybe not. If the slapdash first issue of M2 is any indication, the operation is only semi-professional. That could, in the end, just make Metropolis look better by comparison and thereby help Lloyd sell more ads as the class act in a living, breathing niche.

[GomiGirl]

Zombie magazine death match!
I'm outing myself as one of the six or seven people on the planet thrilled to watch this unfold.

I think you would be surprised - there are plenty of people sitting behind their monitors with a bucket of pop-corn and enjoying the show. I was at a function last night and it was a hot topic of conversation.

[B-Attitude]

Anyone take wagers on the outcome?
I'd put money on Terrible Lloyd, but not much.

[GomiGirl]

My money is on the INTERNET winning out over parochial street mags WORLDWIDE.

Neither will win as it is a lose lose scenario except if you are a lawyer on retainer on either side.

[B-Attitude]

Print makes money as a showcase for writing and design talent available for fee publishing. Terrible Lloyd seems to understand this and has the ACCJ Journal contract to show for it. Though Paradigm is probably making more money with Eurobiz as they've more time and experience investing in talent. True enough, though, the test of Dark Melvin's mojo will be M2's online effort, not print, which would be there more just to remind Lloyd his employees do have some options, however meagre.

[Screwed-down Hairdo]

The only relevant issue is that two men who've been running around Tokyo for the better part of the past two decades while screaming about what great entrepreneurs they are have both conceded to not paying hefty bills.
Even I -- a moral and financial bankrupt -- could be a biz whiz in a cuntry where the civil litigation process is so skewed that pursuit of justice becomes meaningless and thus allows me to do pretty much whatever I want provided I act like a good guy when others are around, and then don't get caught being bad or resorting to physical violence (and sometimes you can even get away with that if you target people with names like, say, just to pluck one out of the air, Lamont).

[Screwed-down Hairdo]

My money is on the INTERNET winning out over parochial street mags WORLDWIDE.

Neither will win as it is a lose lose scenario except if you are a lawyer on retainer on either side.

Agree....but I hope the lawyers are all being paid in advance. (Then again, they are lawyers....)

[B-Attitude]

Karma's a bitch. Schadenfreude is MY bitch...

[Dreamy_Peach]

At least, that loser mustachioed whitey who touted for that titty bar upstairs from Propaganda seems to have fucked off forever.
Or, maybe he got promoted and is working the streets of Kabukicho...

At least before 3.11 he'd moved to Kabukicho. I bumped into him there but I haven't crawled around there in a while now.

He used to work for Secret Garden, which was alright, but I always preferred the Office. That place was great.

[Taro Toporific]

Zombie magazine death match!...
...But let's get one thing straight, even back when their were three to five fairly high-quality English-language city magazines alive and (sorta) well in Tokyo (late 80s-mid-90s), there was never a legitimate readership-driven proposition for advertisers...

Gr-r-reat analysis B-Attitude-san.
Back in 2011 on CNN Travel, Rutledge wrote a good overview about the background of the current zombie magazine death match ...

The death of publishing: Where are Tokyo's English magazines now?
---As many move online and others just disappear, is there a future for expat magazines?---
travel.CNN.com/tokyo | 22 July, 2011 | by Bruce Rutledge
You should excuse Greg Starr for waxing nostalgic. After all, as editor in chief of “Tokyo Journal” during the first half of the 1990s, he presided over an age of hard-hitting, irreverent and money-losing local journalism that would be forever upended by the Internet...
{big snip}...
Vanity publishing
..."Tokyo Journal" was popular, but it didn’t make money. "What a lot of people forget is that none of the sales-based English-language magazines ever made money," Starr says.
"They existed solely because there was a wealthy publisher with an ego who was talked into it by some eager young foreigner or a foreign-owned company who used it to promote other parts of their business, such as creative and editorial production, or there was some other person unconcerned about losses in that business."
More...

zombiejerky.jpg

[Screwed-down Hairdo]

Even online I don't see a great future for text-based journalism (which will lead to more blow-outs by washed-up, irrelevant, bombastic, ego-inflated types like myself and other more vociferous hangers-on from the old media). It will, of course, linger, but the prevalence will be for more visual presentation of news. It's just like telly taking over again, except the massive infusion of available choices means that it will be harder for anyone to make a profit...and that's where things will get difficult. I'd predict the vast majority of us are going to be sucked into mega-SNS sites and opiated with its addictive drivel while the checking and balancing role the media played to a certain extent will become even less pronounced.

[Yokohammer]

... I'd predict the vast majority of us are going to be sucked into mega-SNS sites and opiated with its addictive drivel while the checking and balancing role the media played to a certain extent will become even less pronounced.

This! This right here! Yup yup!

The line between fact and bullshit is already getting hard to to spot, and the blur is only going to spread.

Some sort of accreditation is going to become necessary ... which, if not done carefully, could lead back to government censorship and control. A sticky issue indeed.

[Coligny]

Even online I don't see a great future for text-based journalism (which will lead to more blow-outs by washed-up, irrelevant, bombastic, ego-inflated types like myself and other more vociferous hangers-on from the old media). It will, of course, linger, but the prevalence will be for more visual presentation of news. It's just like telly taking over again, except the massive infusion of available choices means that it will be harder for anyone to make a profit...and that's where things will get difficult. I'd predict the vast majority of us are going to be sucked into mega-SNS sites and opiated with its addictive drivel while the checking and balancing role the media played to a certain extent will become even less pronounced.

Dood... it's been years that one of the least unreliable news source has been the Daily Show...

And you are talking like if there was a golden age of near perfect news reporting...

Remember the cold war and all those murderous baybees eating commies wanting to take our freedom and twinkies ?
or the "affaire Dreyfus" ?

or the gulf of Tonkin clusterfark, i think no newspapers have retracted their articles yet...

[Screwed-down Hairdo]

Some sort of accreditation is going to become necessary ... which, if not done carefully, could lead back to government censorship and control. A sticky issue indeed.

Unfortunately, I see exactly the same thing happening. The outlook is not entirely promising.

[Taro Toporific]

Remember the actual topic of this thread, Metropolis vs M2?
I just saw this pop up in my RSS feed.

...Metropolis management will now say that they are producing an average of 26,154 copies, but it’s clear that since November 2012 they have been producing only 20,000 copies/issue. All while claiming in the magazine they have, "up to 30,000 copies guaranteed" ...
...only 15,922 copies are going to Tokyo. So compared with the 30,000 copies that were printed before, clients are effectively getting half the circulation...

----m2tokyo.com/blog/2013/04/17:
Metropolis Circulation: “Up to…” no good

Metropolis-30000-copies.png