It's axiomatic that any publication that gets compared to "the old Spy" is guaranteed to fail. "The old Spy" implies a vague mission statement; "the old Spy" thinks "smart, irreverent writing about media and culture" is a mission statement. "The old Spy" posits an imaginary readership that isn't worshipful of its icons, but is still curious about their mechanics. (Add gender politics to your list of priorities, and "the old Sassy" becomes a favorite substitute.) Might magazine, which just published what promises to be its last issue, was the closest approximation of this delusion you could find on the average newsstand. Unless you happen to have a spare US$1.4 mil in your cultural charity account, that promise will likely be kept.
When will the lesson sink in that hip, deconstruction-happy twenty-somethings (not "hipsters") don't need a trade publication? With any luck, never. Publishing is not significantly different from the business world at large in that most of its products fail, and when they don't, it's less a function of manifest destiny than the smartest sort of dumb luck. As in politics, you can vote for what you like, and prod your pals into doing the same, but in the end, your purchase is small and should be appreciated as an end unto itself. When you dash to pick up Might's last, it's ultimately like voting for Ralph Nader, in that it may be good for the soul, and anything beyond that is gravy.
Unlike Nader or Spy, though, Might will probably not run again. But like "the old Spy," the founders' footprints aren't hard to find, and will continue to be found both online and offline. Editor Dave Moodie's artfully offensive rants persist in the Suck archive, and will soon waft malodorous off the pages of a rehauled incarnation of Spin, where he's been hired as features editor. His partner Dave Eggers, just named Esquire's editor at large, will almost certainly find it difficult to continue with his sporadic entries on Salon. As for senior editors Paul Tullis and Zev Borow, and the rest of Might's itinerant staff? Ubiquitous already, we only hope their relationship with MSN's Mint, the digital pretender to Might's porcelain throne, remains strictly platonic. With Microsoft adopting a television-network-like do-or-die 12-week proving period for its online properties, Mint's future could be grim, and it would just be too devastating to deal with two deaths in the family in a single year.
This article also appears in HotWired's Net Surf, which takes the pulse of the Web.
