Monday 23 February 2009

Magazines


I bought a magazine on Friday, for an article that caught my eye and I thought would be interesting. I understand that the magazine uses advertising revenue to fund its publishing, but the amount of "stuff" being pushed by them now is unaccpetable to me. Every magazine I see exhorts us to buy this, buy that, "must have",'"couldn't be without" - all one huge long promotion of consumerism. That's just the mainstream amgazines, but over the past couple of years, I've noticed it creeping into what were more informative, "alternative" titles too. Organic Gardening magazine, a long-time stalwart in my magazine rack is now Organic Home and Garden - buy more organic "stuff", and less of the gardening. I no longer buy that one. Even Permaculture magazine, in the last couple of issues has been, to my mind, pushing consumerism - buy green to save the planet. Er no, actually, saving the planet is best achieved by buying as little as possible, no? That's how I see it, so in my efforts to jump even further off the consumer bandwagon, I am truly going to try and go mag-free for the rest of the year.
Then I'm going to start my own. watch this space.:)
To add insult to injury, the article was dreadful after all LOL

2 comments:

Eileen said...

Oh how I agree with you on this one. I too used to buy Organic Gardening, Harrowsmith and other gardening, back to the earth type magazines but gave them up years ago because I got sick of looking at all the ads to BUY!BUY!BUY! Start your own -how awesome -perhaps an on-line zine???

lilymarlene said...

I couldn't agree more.....!

And a lot of TV programmes had gone the same way. I was heartened though by Gardeners' World choosing Toby Buckland last year as the new presenter when Monty gave up. He is so make-do-and-mend that he is just what we need.