Alkaiser's Full Review: ESPN Magazine Subscription
I usually save products I'm really interested in, or that have had a significant impact on my life for landmark epinions. So, for epinion #350, it's ESPN the Magazine. The first sports magazine I've ever ordered a subscription to since vowing I would after I saw all the Sports Illustrated ads when I was younger. (Random bit of trivia, did you know that the SI Swimsuit issue is the most stolen item from public libraries?)
Anyway, I probably wouldn't have bought this magazine if it weren't for all the flights I had to take this past year. Before I got to college the only time I'd ever been on a plane was when I was 6 months and we had to go to Recife, Brazil so my mother could get all her paperwork processed. But in the last year, I've been to Vancouver twice, Las Vegas, and had to make a ton of stopover flights. As a result, I've needed a bunch of reading material.
ESPN the Magazine was readily accessible anywhere I went, and it has more frequent distribution than Sports Illustrated, which, despite having the swimsuit issue, only comes out once a month. Meaning that nearly everything I'll read in Sports Illustrated is way old news to me. ESPN is bi-monthy, a magazine every 2 weeks. So I'd pick it up and look it over. In addition it was pretty cheap, comparatively. Some gaming magazines would run me $6, but ESPN was around $4, which is really useful because you need all the spare cash you have on hand in those damn price-gouging, money-grubbing airport stores. (Hi, I'd like a McValue meal, only, make it cost twice as much, and make it take a lot longer to get to me...thanks.)
ESPN is an oversized mag, choc-full of photos, and little sidebar articles. The biggest complaint about it I have is that the ink is cheap and the slightest bit of moisture on your fingers will take the ink with it. The "Generation NEXT" issue with Vince Carter on the cover (some woman in Canada asked me who he was, and if he was a wrestler.) has big old thumbprints missing from his face and biceps because of this.
Some readers don't like ESPN the Mag's style of writing. There's a lot of less serious "fun" stuff in this mag. If I want a serious sports magazine, I'll look elsewhere, or more than likely, not at all. S.I. makes up for it's lack of timeliness by giving you super in-depth 3-6 page articles about guys I really don't want to know all that much about.
ESPN has a lot of shorter articles written in a bit more "in your face" style. It's got a lot of "schwerve", if you know what I mean. This may grate against some of the older readers, or people who just don't really like that sort of thing, but you'd think they'd know what they were getting from watching SportsCenter.
In conclusion, I'm glad I subscribed, and finally got my issues. (It took more than a month.) The ESPN windbreaker is kind of cool, especially since I'm pretty low on warm/long sleeved clothing. I'd recommend this magazine to anyone in the 18-25 age group who still enjoys sports, and isn't patient enough to see everything months later in SI.
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