Missbehave Magazine cleverly tucked into their blog on January 27th that they were no longer going to be a print magazine, and were going 100% digital as of March 1, 2009. While the shock reverberated around Label Networks, because we all love this mag -girls and guys -this actually might be a good thing. Here’s why: Missbehave has some decent bloggers, ranging from Nikita Clothing snowboarders on missions to find snow all over the world, to Hellz Bellz and Married to the Mob -both leaders in women’s street/contemporary fashion. Plus they will be killing less trees, if you think about it environmentally. Not to mention there’s way more room to write lengthy interviews like the last one they did on M.I.A. So there are ups.
Coming from a magazine background myself, as the former senior editor of Snowboarder, then editor of Women’s Sports & Fitness, then finally finally, the publisher and editor for my own mag called “W.i.g. -for Women in General,” which I must admit was the first sassy, street, skate, snow, music, lifestyle magazine for street-smart women (and men), I understand completely where Missbehave is coming from. When we went all digital, our readerships actually grew. Especially internationally. The 47 trees we killed for each print issue would no longer have to be replanted (yes, we had figured this out before it was cool to be kind to Nature and we all had read “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson). And suddenly, we no longer had to worry about the mafia-run distribution system in magazine publishing placing us next to hair magazines (thinking that we were about wigs) or in the lesbian section (cause we must be since we covered action sports).
I used to walk into Barnes Nobles and Borders when I’d see W.i.g. in the wrong section, which it invariably always was (expect for Powell’s in Portland and City Lights in San Francisco who always knew what we were all about and where to place us, so big-ups to them from way back) and would pick up our stack and carefully move them next to Rolling Stone and Vogue and Outside and Men’s Journal. This was all circa the late ’90’s mind you, but my point is that maybe online is a good decision for the Missbehave girls in terms of growth, and way less headaches when it comes to advertisers and distributors. And printers.
That being said, our best wishes to Missbehave -we’ll keep reading no matter what form you’re in.
