"print’s fucked, yo."

October 5, 2016 7:04 AM

The highly acclaimed magazine mental_floss will publish its last edition this month. Executive Editor Foster Kamer shares his thoughts on its demise and the mountain of spam that he had to wade through to assemble the letters section each month.

The website will soldier on.

posted by Etrigan (32 comments total)

Shit.

.
posted by dfm500 at 7:15 AM on October 5, 2016

I love the Mental Floss website. I'm not surprised about the print side closing down though, given the issues involved.

The Floss is dead. Long live the Floss.
posted by Splunge at 7:16 AM on October 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

.

However...
Absolutely, print publications are a dying species, to be sure. But to say print, in general, is dead/dying defies reality. Look around your home/cubicle/street/refrigerator/wherever. Every. Single. Thing. you see utilizes print of some form. I make my own living pretty exclusively in the CMYK colorspace.

Students coming out of college having no clue beyond RGB are in for a shock, unless they intend to stay totally web-based for their entire careers.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:16 AM on October 5, 2016 [11 favorites]

I had no idea mental_floss was a magazine.
posted by humanfont at 7:22 AM on October 5, 2016 [31 favorites]

CMYK 4 LYFE?
posted by blue_beetle at 7:22 AM on October 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

This is like one of those obit threads where you were surprised that the person who died had still been alive recently since you assumed that they'd gone away ages ago.
posted by octothorpe at 7:24 AM on October 5, 2016 [10 favorites]

We've finally managed to get rid of the last magazine delivered to the house after years of trying. Maybe we can get rid of the damn catalogs next.
posted by octothorpe at 7:27 AM on October 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yeah, my reaction to this was "What?! No!!! I can't live without reading mental_floss on my phone every morning!!! ... Oh. Got it. Thanks."
posted by Melismata at 7:33 AM on October 5, 2016 [7 favorites]

Ah, the Serenity phenomena; you don't know it even existed until it gets canceled; then all of a sudden it becomes news. :/
posted by buzzman at 7:34 AM on October 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

And yet somehow Paper still exists. Life isn't fair.
posted by 1adam12 at 7:36 AM on October 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

.

I remember grabbing the first edition off a news stand on a whim in their founding spot of Durham, NC. Subscribed for almost a decade before life made it harder to finish a magazine each month. I hope they all find success.
posted by matrixclown at 7:38 AM on October 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

I have a website that I have had for a number of years, and I post items from that place nearly every day. I had also bought my daughter a print subscription when she was younger. Now, though, it seems somewhat a relic of the past.
posted by Postroad at 7:40 AM on October 5, 2016

Egon Spengler's claim was only 32 years early.
posted by SansPoint at 7:45 AM on October 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

This sucks. I actually bought the print magazine once in a while and it's great.
posted by GuyZero at 8:14 AM on October 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

The problem with print magazines for me is I can't surreptitiously read it at my desk and have people think I'm working like I can with their website.
posted by Carillon at 8:35 AM on October 5, 2016

Egon Spengler's claim was only 32 years early.

More like 49 years early.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:39 AM on October 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

I have a Mental Floss t-shirt with a picture of Francis Bacon above the caption "Mmmm ... Bacon." It never fit quite right but I like it too much to throw it away.
posted by octobersurprise at 8:42 AM on October 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Firefly.

Serenity was the movie that stood in for the 3rd season.

When our three-month-old daughter is crying for no apparent reason we just assume she's still upset about the cancellation of Firefly.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 9:10 AM on October 5, 2016 [19 favorites]

20 years ago I subscribed to magazines. Atlantic, Harpers, the New Yorker (though I can't read fast enough to keep up with it). Mental Floss, Utne Reader. The local news rag. I subscribed to Salon.com for a few years before it went to hell. Now it's just the NY Times online. The biggest news sources in the world are state sponsored things like RT or BBC or al Jazeera, or propagandists like the Daily Mail or Fox news.
posted by Bee'sWing at 9:21 AM on October 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

I did not know this was actually a paper magazine. I saw one in an airport and I assumed it was some sort of marketing tie-in to the website.
posted by blnkfrnk at 9:40 AM on October 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Executive Editor Foster Kamer shares his thoughts:

Shit happens. Doesn’t mean print’s dead, or mental_floss is, either. Magazines come and go. Christ, they re-launched Radar like fifteen times...

Yeah, but the Radar he was talking about is Choire Sicha's version, which did indeed launch (and collapse) a couple of times but has since morphed into The Awl (online only!), while the name got sold off and the current incarnation of Radar is trash that is literally still milking JonBenet stories for content. If that's an example of vitality: print may not be dead, but it's not breathing well.
posted by psoas at 9:56 AM on October 5, 2016

Well, for some reason just about every non-serious outlet (and a few serious ones) are currently milking JonBenet for content. I think it's the anniversary or something.

As for hopeful digital reincarnations, all I gotta say is: Cracked.
posted by Melismata at 9:59 AM on October 5, 2016

Cracked

Only if they bring back the "Monster Party" specials. Those were the best when I was a kid.
posted by Strange Interlude at 10:07 AM on October 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Huh. I didn't know they had a paper magazine either. I used to subscribe to all sorts of magazines. I'm down to just the Fortean Times now.
posted by fimbulvetr at 10:24 AM on October 5, 2016

Bah -- they say my kid will get The Week instead of his subscription to Mental Floss. This is going to be like how my other kid got New Moon when Kiki folded, so now we get two copies of New Moon (and yes, I've tried to fix that). Not once has a dying magazine given us a replacement we actually want.
posted by The corpse in the library at 10:31 AM on October 5, 2016

I'm upset that I didn't even give the print version of the magazine a chance. I read the website and watch the videos.
posted by 81818181818181818181 at 10:55 AM on October 5, 2016

I had a few pieces published in the print edition (I write regularly for the site) and it was GREAT. They paid way better, gave my stuff gorgeous layouts and illustrations, and it was thrilling to see the finished product. Whenever a pub like this folds, it reminds me of all of the writers and editors whose prospects are folding, too.
posted by mynameisluka at 12:14 PM on October 5, 2016 [13 favorites]

.
posted by BlahLaLa at 4:40 PM on October 5, 2016

Granted, I'm one of the eldsters, but for the first 20 years of my career, it was possible to make a decent living writing for magazines. The market is so much smaller now, and pays so much less. And portfolio of doom, or no portfolio of doom, the web market doesn't pay living wage rates unless you're a staff writer. The days of regularly getting $1.00 per word are long gone, except at the very top publications. Scott Carney wrote a quick thing about it last year, and the situation isn't getting any better. I've stopped pitching to a couple of places because I got tired of hearing "Oh, that's a great story, we'll give you $50! And we get to keep all rights, in all media types, for all eternity. OK?"

That said; mental_floss was a good rag, with good people, and I'm sad to see the dead tree version go away.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 5:48 PM on October 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

mental_floss is one of only two magazines I currently subscribe to (MAD is the other, to give you some insight into my mind). I also 'subscribe' to the floss website's "blog" which gives me around 30 text pieces a day (none of their videos, though, it's John Green-free), including a daily "Five Questions" quiz, an almost daily more complex quiz-game (I got 100% on this one, 30 seconds under the time limit), a daily "Morning Cup of Links", curated by blogger and recent Mefi recruit Miss Cellania, several 'listicles' half of which are worth reading (better than average), several newsy items that are MetaFilter-level intelligent and a few that aren't, and contributions from several good writers, the best of whom is language maven Arika Okrent.

As for the paper magazine, I keep it in the bathroom, because I still prefer not to use my phone on the potty, but its contents never last more than a week or ten days, so I have to take MAD in there, or whatever my latest graphic-novel-from-a-webcomic-financed-through-kickstarter is. Well, if I HAVE to refer to my phone, I have the Comic Chameleon app.
posted by oneswellfoop at 7:35 PM on October 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

.
posted by Anhedonic Donkey at 8:15 PM on October 5, 2016

I subscribe to seventeen different print magazines. I had JUST subscribed and received my first issue to mental_floss when I went to my magazine subscription dashboard to check on the expiration date of a gift for my mom, and noticed the notation next to mental_floss that it was no longer being published. I'm bummed, as I was in April when More Magazine ceased publication, and a few years back, when Budget Traveler died.

But if Entertainment Weekly (which I've been reading since the first issue, 26 years ago) ever ceases print publication, I will be bereft, as I have an entire ritual around reading it.
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 10:23 PM on October 5, 2016 [1 favorite]