I don’t like to say that I ‘hate’ things.  It’s too harsh, and usually not true.  I personally think it’s impossible for someone to truly believe that something can have utterly no redeeming quality or benefit at all, no matter how narrow the circumstance – or perhaps furthermore that something is so universally vile that the world would only benefit by its permanent disappearance.  If a person considers a thing from all possible angles, usually one faint vindicating characterstic can be found.  Maybe that’s why I’m a packrat. 

However, I’m going on the record to say that I hate Bayview magazine.

I hate it.

I was in the waiting room at the hospital yesterday (got a vasectomy… maybe that’s for another post), and decided to pick up Bayview to read, mostly because it had one of Izy’s photos of Mongoose on the cover, a boat that I have crewed on many times but whose owner and my friend, Tom, passed away last summer.  I miss him a lot, so I figured I’d take a look.

Krista and I have had a special kind of disgust for Bayview pretty much since it was first published.  It was an obvious ad-cash-grab very poorly disguised as a local culture magazine.  But I didn’t expect the reaction I had yesterday.  It was… violent.  I very nearly threw the magazine across the waiting room – but I suppressed that urge.  Barely.

I hate Bayview.

I’ve spent the last day thinking about why, precisely, I would like to see the magazine erased from public memory and those responsible for it banned from any similar venture for the rest of their lives.  It’s not just the design, which is amateurish, lazy, and uninspired.  Registrations are poor resulting in margin problems and clipping.  The ad spaces are indistinguishable from the article spaces.  General aesthetic balance is not even considered.  Even the titles of the articles are hard to discern.  Palates are confused and clumsy.  Oh, I could go on.

Yes, the design is bad, but there’s more.  The content, too, is vapid, obviously just filler to meagrely prop up the advertising space.  The copy is sans serif and 1.5 line spaced (double spaced paragraphs), the columns are too far apart, and the actual content in any given article (except those written by Tim Matthews) offers little or no substance.  My first association is that of lazy students who squeeze their margins, choose ‘roomy’ fonts, and play with line spacing to eat up room – thinking the marker won’t somehow notice.  The whole magazine reminds me of this.

None of these problems would be so angering if the magazine wasn’t trying to pass itself off as a local culture magazine.  But it does.  I shake my head when thinking about a tourist (or even resident) picking up such a half-assed effort and being left with the sad impression that the magazine accurately reflects Thunder Bay’s cultural heritage.  I can say – emphatically – that it doesn’t.

I hate this magazine because it is an insult to our local culture, not a celebration of it, and it’s an insult to the readership, all because it pretends to present local culture accurately both throught copy and design, and does so assuming that the reader wants Grade 2 level content while not noticing that this ‘magazine’ is nothing more than a cheap income generator for Wrightsell.

Thunder Bay is better than this.   Thunder Bay is deeper, wider, smarter, and more sophisticated than this (and I don’t mean elitist, far from it actually).  I think a proper job can be done, and I’m thinking hard about what it will look like.