Jon Friedman has a funny column watching a focus group put on for show filled with readers of Entertainment Weekly, my baby, who were forced to give up the magazine for a month.
It was endearing, even heartwarming, to observe the obsessive loyalty of these subscribers. The dinner occurred smack in the middle of a horrendous industry slump. Magazines are desperately seeking advertising dollars these days….
That said, I’d hasten to add that these 12 EW subscribers truly need to get out and smell the flowers once in a while, too. (One of them talked about renting a hotel room while in college so she could watch the Oscars ceremony without having her roommates milling around and distracting her from the broadcast. She said that, by the way, with a shrug, as if this amounted to perfectly normal behavior. I don’t know about you, but I could barely afford to buy a slice of pizza when I was in college)….
They dearly missed EW during their period of deprivation. Zoe, a charming lawyer-turned-aspiring-actress, confessed to the group: “I felt lonely,” before smiling gamely and adding reassuredly, “just to the not-pathetic-side of lonely.”
The other panelists nodded knowingly….
Juan commiserated with Kevin, saying: “It was like not having a pen-pal write to me.” He then paused and added sheepishly: “You probably think it’s kind of … freaky.”
I’d like to hear more from those fans and not about the magazine but about the movies. Did Zoe find King Kong sexy? Did Juan get into arguments about Munich?
The point of this little show Friedman attended was, of course, to show the wonders of magazines. It’s all about the magazine. But see the post below about newspapers and community.
EW, I’m glad to see, does exactly what we hoped it would do: It attracts an community of people who love entertainment. But the internet didn’t exist when the magazine was born. Now it does. So now they could bring those people together to share their reviews with fellow movie fans. The magazine has a community. The magazine is a community. So now what?
