The news just keeps getting more personal. Hyper-specialized blogs, RSS feeds, and personalized Google homepages let us focus on what we care about and tune out the rest. Thus far, personalized news has been limited to the Internet, but Time Inc. is bringing it to the printed word with mine, a five-issue, 10-week, experimental magazine that allows readers to select five Time Warner/American Express Co. magazines that Time editors will combine into a personalized magazine with 56 possible combinations. Essentially, mine is a printed, expanded RSS feed. Magazines available to the program include Time, Sports Illustrated, Food & Wine, Real Simple, Money, In Style, Golf, and Travel + Leisure.
Ads in the mine run will all be for the Lexus 2010 RX SUV--but with personalized messages for each subscriber targeting their interests.
mine's experimental run is free, with a 36-page print edition available to the first 31,000 respondents and an online version available to 200,000 others. The online edition may not be of much interest to readers skilled in the art of Internet news surfing, but mine's printed edition brings an interesting concept to the table: the minimalization of paper waste with personalized magazines and newspapers. Instead of subscribing to five magazines, why not just subscribe to one that has everything you want inside? And instead of subscribing to The New York Times, The Star Ledger, and your hometown newspaper, why not subscribe to a mash-up of all three?
The print media industry may be slowing down, but it isn't dead. Could personalized periodicals help magazines both adjust to the digital age and do right by the environment?
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