This is Frank Romano for whattheythink.com. Well, the other day I got my copy of the AARP Journal. If, like me, you are an old person you will get this. As you know you join AARP, you normally get the notice before your fifty-fifth birthday. You join up and then you start to get the magazine.

Now, I removed from the magazine all of the reply cards that were in it. This is from one issue – one issue of the AARP Journal you get all of these. Now by the way, this is wonderful – this is wonderful because this is all printing and this is great. So somebody had to print the magazine, someone had to print the cards, all the cards had to go in. They were all tipped in or inserted in, bound in and I removed them physically to show you all of the cards that come with just one issue of the AARP Journal. This is great.

In the old days most of these would have fallen out, right? You open up the magazine and the cards would fall out. I once got a card and the magazine fell out.

This is the latest issue of Business Week. Not a single one, nothing, nada. No inserts at all. No cards, no reply cards, no requirements, promotions to get a subscription, et cetera.

So why do you get this as opposed to this? It’s a form of marketing, I guess, because AARP Journal is involved in a lot of promotions. They are involved in various kinds of medical insurance, automobile insurance, home insurance, just about anything you can imagine plus a lot of other stuff that they market. So AARP is also a marketing organization so they use this as their vehicle to deliver a lot of their marketing.

This is more a business magazine, Business News. In the old days you would have only found a card in here for renewals. I would imagine today most of the way they promote for renewals tends to be online. I did not see a form in here but there probably is one to sign up for it.

So magazines have changed in the way they handle these reply cards, promotion cards, et cetera. And, of course, now I have to tell you that I read most of this online because usually when the issue comes I’m away, but I download the file because I’m a subscriber and therefore I can read it online. Now I notice and there’s a big difference between the print file – the print version and the digital file and that is that some of the charts and graphs that are so integral to the story are not integral to the story in the electronic edition. I don’t get all of the charts and graphs and I don’t get them in the same way with the text going around them formatted in a certain way. So there is a difference between the way they present.

Now if I got it as a pdf file it would be just a replica of what was on here but there the problem is it’s page-by-page and sometimes they let you have spreads, not all the time. But if you have it as spreads then you can actually see the way the designer wanted the graphics to form. In the electronic version you don’t always see that.

The other thing they’re experimenting with – and I don’t know if this is the same paper or what, but notice the margins on this thing. I don’t know if you can see it clearly but it goes with less than a quarter of an inch to the trim of the publication. Now either that’s, you know, the designer is trying for something really avant-garde or they’re just cutting back on the margins in order to save paper. So put more copy in there on fewer pages they just goes as close to the edge as they possibly can. Not all the stories were formatted that way but that particular one was.

In any case, interesting changes going on in the magazine marketplace as magazines now have both electronic and digital versions. And in some cases they have cut back on the number of print issues and made it up with more digital issues. In some cases magazines have gone completely digital as some newspapers have and eliminated the print version altogether. I still like to have a print version. Now again, I travel a lot so the electronic version is becoming more and more the one I see more often because I’m not here when this comes but I still – when I get home I always go through this.

I go through the AARP Journal because there are articles about old people and, of course, they resonate with someone like me.

In any case, that’s my opinion.

Well consider this an ode to the thumb drive.