If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, think of The Rake as a work zone. Slow down, give us a brake. We aim to fill the potholes, maybe add another lane. If it’s all going to a hot place in a hurry, we want to make the ride as smooth and enjoyable as possible.
This is a rich town. There aren’t all that many American cities that still support two daily newspapers, two city magazines, and two alternative weeklies. Media as a topic of media, of course, bores us all to tears. Bear with us a moment, though. Like pro sports teams, art museums, light rail, and an openly bald governor, a vibrant local media is one of the things that helps us believe we matter, helps us believe the Twin Cities are something more than the last stop before Seattle.
Just so, this town may not need another magazine, any more than it needs thousands of square feet of new development right outside our door in downtown Minneapolis. Indeed, recent numbers suggest that vacancy rates in the metro area are the highest they’ve been in five years. Nevertheless, the building boom continues. We guess we’ll take our cues from the developers: We aim to be the biggest and the best, and the vacancy rate will become someone else’s problem, yeah? Perhaps it’s the patriotic thing to do.
Seriously, though. Magazines like all other enterprises need an excuse for conducting business. We felt that most of the worthy publications already in print here were for somebody else. Edina housewives, in particular, seem to be a well-served readership. And a handful of Gen-Xers who somehow are still stuck in the bar scene without serious jobs or families still have their Lovelines and refugee-of-the-week stories. But the rest of us–folks who live, work, and play in the city, folks who have a passion for life that goes beyond the area’s terrific crème brulee and cosmetic surgeons, folks whose politics have never been as predictable as the newspapers–we don’t have a periodical to read and enjoy. It’s not a commonly known fact to the general public, but there’s nothing in the International Code of Print Media that says reading and entertainment have to be mutually exclusive–it just happened that way.
Our hope is to rake up some intelligent and entertaining stories for ourselves and for you. Our intentions are good, and the road is smooth, and who cares where it goes, anyway? It’s the journey that counts, not the destination, right?
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