Dear Magazine Telemarketer,

I have something that is criticically important to tell you. Perhaps you haven't noticed, but the medium that you are using to generate ad sales, and subsequently feed your family, is dying.

About 25 years ago, Egon Spengler made the pronouncement that "Print is Dead". Now Ol' Egon was a little bit ahead of the curve, and making calls that probably couldn't be backed up for a few more decades, but all in all he was right. And if anybody with stock in a newspaper is reading this, they would agree.

That's a big friggin' problem Magazine Telemarketer. Because your own product is nothing more than a corollary of the print industry. You're highly specialized. You address issues that effect a niche market. You seek out specific high-profile members of the caste you believe will bolster flagging sales, and have them pen trite, over-wrought garbage for you.

But we can save it Magazine Telemarketer. We can be heroes.

It's not that people don't want magazines. It's that your magazine doesn't provide for them the thrill they so wantonly crave. We need blood and guts MT, we need tits and fire. And I'm not talking about the parochial titillations of Playboy, or the buttoned down, sexually repressed, sadly gentrified offerings like Maxim. No. We need to see beyond.

We need to steal people's identities and print them on page 2. We need to blackmail important people in our magazines. We need still photos of mid-western housewives mid-coitus. When someone picks up our magazine, they need to know that their own mother could be shown somewhere in the inky-scented pages. Or that by reading the articles on page 10, they are expressly giving consent to be the prey in a Man-Hunt performed by a pack of drunk, PCP crazed House Wives with Uzis.

Our pages will be filled with the digits to CIA slush-fund Swiss Bank Accounts; our pages have Nuclear Launch Codes. And when a man or a woman walks up to their local Hotdog/News stand, and stares at the rack of flimsy gardening mags, or Men's Health, their eyes will lock onto our Gold Lamé cover, and their hands will start to shake. Without reason or understanding they will press the hot, sweaty ten dollar bill into the hands of the man behind the register, and they'll never return to their tiny, dim office. Because when they read a magazine like ours, they're making a choice.

And when you you're making those kinds of call, you're up in the High Country.

 Yours,

 Crom