Time’s “Mine” Magazine disappoints — but opens up new possibilities

I just received my “personalized magazine” from Time Inc. in my inbox. Curious and somewhat eager to take a look at what they billed as “custom publishing” — not customized, they said, for a specific company or group of users, but rather for me. On the Table of Contents page, they say it again: it’s “designed especially for you — by you.” Well, not really.

Basically, Mine is an experiment by Time that lets anyone choose five Time Warner/American Express Co. magazines — and then receive, a couple of weeks later for me, a digital edition featuring stories from each of those magazines. Magazines included among the choices included In Style, Golf, Real Simple, Time, Sports Illustrated, Food & Wine, Money, and Travel + Leisure.

A novel concept, definitely — and I think the idea of a customized, personalized magazine is actually intriguing. But I wasn’t impressed with this one. First, I really dislike digital editions. It feels embarrassing to flip pages online and to hear the little “swish” of the computer-generated page flipping sound. I also find them annoying to read and navigate: you zoom in for a closeup and then have to zoom out to see anything else. When doing so I’m already longing for touch technology.

Second to that, well, the content is just dull. It’s not personalized. There are just some stories picked out from each of the mags and plunked together. The only thing that did feel personalized was the ad on the back page, which just felt creepy: a Lexus ad that reads “The all-new 2010 RX: now with more Shannon Emmerson.” Ew. And yes. I’m sure they considered me carefully when designing a car I can not in any way dream of affording.

All in all then, I kind of hate it. But it does represent, I think, an entry point into genuinely customized products of the same variety. Fast Company wonders if Mine could lead to future mash-ups of 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?

I think there’s a good point to be made here, namely that while Mine is not mine, it could be, someday, done by somebody else and please, not in a digital edition.