The End Is Nigh

Yesterday I bought the October issue of Metro magazine. If Dante was right, my purchase will have condemned me to his Seventh Circle of Hell, where I shall suffer eternally with those who were violent against themselves. But I have already paid dearly for my sin in this life – Metro now costs $9.75.

The current incarnation of Metro is clearly suffering an identity crisis. The advent of the cannily conceived MiNDFOOD in 2008 must have knocked Metro’s minders silly. “It’s like six magazines in one” claims MiNDFOOD’s advertising. It’s really more like six half-arsed magazines in one (giving it three arses?),  but its owners know exactly what they are doing, unlike ACP.

In March this year it was reported that Metro’s circulation was just 9,680 and that it was likely running at a loss. Former editor Bill Ralston wondered whether ACP would soon be forced to combine it with North & South. Meanwhile MiNDFOOD was described as one of the few titles that were not haemorrhaging readers, and its website puts its current circulation at 30,758 (NZ Audit Bureau of Circulation data). Based on the same data, MiNDFOOD is the fastest-growing magazine in the country. Ralston’s speculation could well come true, sooner rather than later.

But one certainly doesn’t get the impression that Metro’s current editor, Simon Wilson, can hear the wolves baying for his publication’s blood. Reading one of his editorials is like having your brain rubbed with an oil called “Essence of Smug”. Wilson was presumably on holiday for most of September; his October editorial certainly reads like it was written while he was out to lunch.

Just how little effort Wilson puts into his editorials becomes obvious when you read Nicola Shepheard’s excellent cover story, “Shark Attacks Granny”, in which she expertly covers The New Zealand Herald’s tabloidization under the deputy editorship of Shayne Currie, NZ’s tinpot William Randolph Hearst. Wilson doesn’t feel under any pressure to lead from the front in his editorial: he simply rehashes Shepheard’s best lines and steals some of her considerable thunder. On the rare occasion that he actually tries to write something off his own bat, he falls flat, just like this sentence, which has too many rhymes for “prat”. How about this for a paragraph, which begins with a relative clause, no less:

    Which means if you want to blame anyone [for the tabloidization of the Herald], blame all of us. We’re the ones buying, or not buying, the paper.

This kind of blarney makes a Woman’s Day editorial look profound. We’re all to blame; we’ve all sinned. Thanks for that, Simon Magus. In the rest of his editorial Wilson tells us who his heroes are, like a 5 year old listing his favourite superheroes. Along the way he manages to misspell the surname of one of them twice, “as you do” (to quote him on Steve Braunias’ taking of his daughter to the races).

Mention of Braunias, who has been peddling his unique blend of Scroogery and schmaltz for so long that he has become a national institution (surely a fate worse than death for a writer with subversive pretensions), brings me to the issue’s special feature, “One Big Day in Auckland”. Braunias headlines “24 other top writers and photographers” who together attempt to chronicle the events of Saturday, September 4, 2010 in Auckland, “the city we love”. It’s hard to describe the result.

The birth of twins (who problematically didn’t arrive until the 5th) is documented in graphic detail. There are two poems, the less said about which the better. Tessa Duder goes for a sail. Emily Perkins makes lamingtons. You get the idea.

Apart from Nicola Shepheard’s cover story, which shines out like a light when all around is dark, the October Metro will do nothing to improve the mag’s ailing circulation. Utterly ignorant of Dylan Thomas’s sound advice, Metro is going gentle into that good night.