Time Out Chicago has finally launched, to lukewarm response from at least one critic. It’s hard to imagine anyone in Chicago getting exercised about a new magazine or newspaper. The city has been so awash with new pubs in the past five years, readers are probably asking themselves what more there is to say about their fair city. As we’ve noted previously, a city that is this overwhelmed with paper stands a fair to middling chance of burning to the ground—don’t laugh, it’s happened before.
We don’t keep a close tab on Chicago anymore, particularly since today there are plenty of outposts here in the Twin Cities that know what Chipico relish is and where to get it and what to put it on. But we are certainly on the record as thinking that the Red editions are both insultingly bad, the venerable paid dailies are visibily confused about what happens next, and the Reader seems to be running away with it. A whole raft of second stringers could bear some scrutiny—from The Onion (can a dissipating humor sheet really be the first national freebie?) to New City to Chicago Social. We intentionally set Chicago magazine aside, because we think it’s good enough to qualify as a publication of national interest—although it is always struggling to emerge from the long shadow cast by Texas Monthly.
So do the Time Out folks have their sights set on any other Great American Cities? Unlikely they’ll look twice at the Twin Cities, for the same old reason—we fall outside the top ten advertising markets, so national advertisers are nearly impossible to reel in here (even though most of them have their advertisements created here). Then again, a chain franchise like Time Out can presumably leverage national ads across all of their titles—but today that is merely New York and Chicago, and given the typical ten-year gap between developing new titles, we so no reason to fear the glacial advance of Time Out, Inc. (Also, we note that this model has hardly been a gold mine for others who are attempting it in a sorta half-assed way. We know precisely what the blockage is, but we ain’t talkin’. That’s called consulting, and we take a fee for that, heh heh.)
More to the point, it is certainly worth pointing out that Time Out hardly has anything to add to any of its chosen American marketplaces—the scene here is lousy with paid and free publications (advantage to the latter), and even worse, the English-speaking world is utterly beset by capsule reviews, arts and entertainment recommendations, and all this interchangeable blurbism. In other wrods, there are so many mousetraps available today, it is only the arrogant and the stupid who insist on bringing new ones to market. (Yes, we know there are four fingers pointing back at us, thank you very much. But we’re not new anymore—we’re three years old!)
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