Richard Stengel and Karl Vick
It's that time of the year again. The time where we add up our circulation figures and our ad dollars, and realize that there's no way we're going to be able to pay for a second Switzerland vacation this year. But that's all right, because we're not in it for the money. It's about journalism, fame and having a Constitutionally protected right to lie as much as we want.
Right now we're hanging on to the future by our fingernails. Because in the latest survey we found that the only people who read our magazine either don't know how to use a computer or are sitting in the dentist's office and trying to bury their fear in our infographic about the cast of the Jersey Shore.
We're desperate. I mean we've tried everything. And we've partnered with such leading news organizations as CNN, the Huffington Post, the Onion and AskMen.com, but nothing is working. And somewhere in between such vital stories as the "Top 10 Famous Toilets" and "5 Best Kim Jong Il Hairstyles" (Editor's Note: only one of those is a real Time Magazine story, guess which one. Nope, you guessed wrong), we have to try and find geopolitical stories that somebody actually cares about, and that we can render in a simplistic fashion for our core audience of people who are just happening to browse at a newstand while waiting for the bus.
And let's face it that subject comes down to Israel. Sure we could try to do a report on the genocide in the Sudan, or the coup in Thailand or the flood in Pakistan; but who's really going to care? Can you imagine anyone picking up a copy of Time Magazine with a cover focusing on the treatment of multiracial children in South Korea? Yeah right. As it is nobody's buying our magazine. If we did that, our sales figures would hit negative numbers.
Sultan Knish
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