People in the real world have no idea the sheer size and absurdity of the trade magazine universe, a kind of alternate universe that exists in some parallel dimension right next to our own. How you pass through that dimensional door is anyone’s guess, but you know you’re there when you start receiving Grounds Maintenance or Mortuary Management. Once you start a business, you will find yourself magically transported to some corner of the trade magazine world where you’ll find immensely useful information that will be all Dada to those of us who remain behind in this dimension.

I’ve written for a few of these (Groundskeeper, for instance) and, well, you wouldn’t believe the drop-jaw stories they run. So what, you may ask, has inspired this particularly useless musing? This query from an IndustryWeek reporter just arrived in my inbox:

Need to speak with manufacturers who have a good raw materials story to share
Raw materials are a big deal to manufacturers. What is a raw materials story that hasn’t been told? This article is for manufacturing execs.

I would imagine just about every raw materials story hasn’t been told. And if it has, it probably hasn’t been listened to with any great interest.

One thing I can tell you after years of sending press releases and writing articles for these magazines, the folks who edit them — mainly out of love — check their senses of humor at the door every morning. As proof of concept, I present my all-time favorite, Official Meetings Facilities Guide, with its adrenaline-laced attention-grabbing acronym splashed all over the cover (I am not making this up — just type the URL you see on the magazine).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 8:47 PM and is filed under happenings, seriously dumb. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.