The Matter of Eclipse Magazine
Radar, the magazine for “smart people” who dabble in pop culture, has recently, in one fell swoop, both insulted and inspired starry-eyed Cornellians. A lot of people are up in arms, to say the least, about the magazine’s “unfavorable” ranking that dubs Cornell the runner-up to the “most overrated” college in America (Harvard took that honor… overachieving bastard), among other meanish things. Consider Sun columnist and possible crab person Tony Manfred, who decided the best way to rage against the rankings machine was to fight fire with fire: “Imagine dumb people trying to be smart, perverts trying to be sexually mature, bush-dwelling paparazzi giving journalism a try — this is Radar.”*
And then there’s those brave souls who have said pish posh to Radar’s snarky commentary and transcended petty adversity. Like blue-blooded** Eclipse (the supplementary section of the Sun that has been converted into a pull-out “magazine”) editor Leigha Kemmett, who embraced the magazine’s “unique and engaging content, content that [she] actually wanted to read” despite the fact that the issue she picked up was the one that slighted Cornell.
In any case, I’ll stop this crappy-trend-story-lede nonsense and cut to the chase, sort of: our feelings about Eclipse magazine. It wants to be like Radar, kind of? And the cover story, the unfortunately headlined “Rating the Rankings,” is basically a rumination upon the current status of Cornell’s rankings poo-poo (dropped from 12 to 14 in the U.S. News & World Report, the most overrated item in Radar).
The article is good (I’m quoted at the very end yay!) and most of the other writing is dece, but the layout in general kind of reminds me of a yearbook: the text-wrapped circles, slightly askew headlines, clunky inforgraphics… In fact there are yearbook-y things going on outside of the layout. There’s the cutesy cues to the reader that the people who work on the publication are friends. In real life! Like the editor, one Ms. Kemmett, totally “invited [pseudonymous advice columnist "A"] to Gramercy Tavern for a drunken lunch date” while they were both working in New York City for the summer. Fabulous?
And there’s also the problem of its being printed on stock that reminds me of advertisement booklets they sometimes slip into the fold of Sunday newspapers. But should they get some advertisers seeing as there’s none yet and move on up to glossy paper, I think overall that Eclipse could blossom into a nice outlet for feature writing at Cornell. So Kitsch (and sorta Slope Magazine and Voices) may not have to be the only venues for longform journalism at Cornell. Competition… scary!
***
*Funny thing, I worked at Radar this summer and it was EXACTLY as Mr. Manfred says. Simian editors feigned intelligence by using the cutting-edge technique of mashing the keyboard randomly to write quality copy, and our receptionist Fred was a pervert trying to pass himself off as… as… a sexually mature receptionist! (Check out this Terabitz search of sex offenders, screengrabbed at left, if you don’t believe me!) Our office was also a bush on the corner of 44th and 2nd, and my fellow interns and I were hired solely on the basis of our past experience stalking celebrities with the pappity-paps.
**Totally irrelevant, but this “New England prepster” has a fan club on Facebook that quotes her as saying, “No I’m not from Alabama, I have all of my teeth, thank you!” I know we, being sensible liberal folk, are supposed to sniff and turn our noses up at these sorts of comments, but I think they’re hilarious. Props for some (hopefully tongue-in-cheek) blue-blooded elitism.
October 3rd, 2008 at 11:58 am
[...] There are about 30 copies of Eclipse below the one jutting out.Last Friday, the Daily Sun’s dece new weekly pull-out “magazine,” Eclipse, hit the newsstands like it usually does. But for some reason, the recently conceived alternative [...]