One of the last places you’d expect to see the art of storytelling is where a publication sells its advertising.
Even one of the bastions of high-brow reading, The Atlantic, – home to Malcolm Gladwell and other marquee-name storytellers – offers a fairly mundane sales pitch:
The Atlantic is America’s leading destination for brave thinking and bold ideas that matter. The Atlantic engages its print, online and live audiences with breakthrough insights into the worlds of politics, business, the arts, and culture. With exceptional talent deployed against the world’s most important and intriguing topics, The Atlantic is the source of opinions, commentary, and analysis for America’s most influential individuals who wish to be challenged, informed and entertained.
Very corporate.
About what you’d expect to read in any company boilerplate after multiple revisions grind out the personality.
That’s why Blast magazine’s sales approach caught my attention starting with the kickoff:
For the love of God, SPONSOR US. We’re really freakin good, we swear.
We’ve aleady covered “freakin verus freaking,” but suffice it to say this is not a vanilla opener.
Check out the rest:
Blast is a lifestyle and tech magazine focused on us spoiled, rotten Generation Y kids born between 1978 and sometime in the early 90s. (And a few Generation X holdovers — think MTV before “The Hills,” Atari and baseball with long hair, mustaches and no steroids.) We’ve experienced Nintendo, AOL when it was dialup and all the girls in the chat rooms were models, Windows (or MAC), Doom on a 3.5″ floppy, boy bands, iPods, iPhones and college degrees that stuck us with a mortgage in student loans.
Blast’s contributors do music, movies, theater, video games, sports, fashion, sex, food and liquor for starters. We write about some of it too.
Blast is online. Don’t ask for the print edition.
And, seriously folks, we’re not a blog. We do use WordPress as our content management system, but WordPress is SO much more than a blogging platform.
Blast is a form of convergence journalism, looking to combine the quality of print journalism (and print journalists) with the convenience and unlimited space of the web. Where else can you find a 2,000-word video game review or a 3,000-word band interview? Maybe Rolling Stone. Yeah, we’re not as good as Rolling Stone.
Where else will you find coverage of both the 2008 presidential race and the latest breaking news from the porn industry? Maybe Maxim. We’re better.
We try to be equally geared toward guys and girls — forgive us if it doesn’t seem that way, but we think we balance the pregnant porn star coverage pretty well with the latest from Kaki King and Tegan and Sara.
Good stuff.
Self-deprecating with an edge.
Funny.
You come away knowing the publication’s personality and what they want to be when they grow up.
By its own admission, it might not measure up to Rolling Stone‘s editorial, but Blast definitely tops the Rolling Stone media kit.