Ordinary Gweilo

Spike has now reached issue 4, and on the positive side they seem to have attracted advertising from Vokswagen and copies still seem to be widely available even in the “Gweilo lite” parts of Hong Kong where I spend most of my time.

The serious stuff is still first-rate, and I think it’s a very good idea to re-print stuff from Apple Daily and Next Magazine for those of us who can’t read Chinese. I am less sure about reprinting articles from The Spectator since they don’t have much relevance to Hong Kong (Taki’s article mentioning a dinner party attended by Princess Diana seemed particularly pointless). The business news is good, but I have my doubts about whether it is wise to devote so much space to the media (mainly the SCMP so far). It’s understandable that journalists should think that newspapers and magazines, and the people who work on them, are fascinating, but do the readers think the same way? Private Eye does the same thing and it has survived for 40 years and is very successful these days, so perhaps I am wrong (or perhaps readers just put up with the media stuff as its only part of the magazine).

The biggest problem is that the humour and the feature material is still a bit hit-and-miss. The satire needs to improve, but I really wonder whether they need the critics at all, especially as they seem to have little relevance to Hong Kong.

I also still think they need to tweak the design to differentiate the serious stuff, the satire and the features and to give the magazine a clearer identity. Private Eye manages this quite well even though the magazine still looks as if it was knocked up on an electric typewriter and they quite clearly don’t employ a designer. I’m afraid Spike looks a bit too much as if they purchased a generic magazine design off-the-shelf – it is “glossy” without looking really stylish, and I think that is confusing to the reader.

The biggest worry is whether they are selling enough copies to survive, which in turn depends upon how much it is costing them and when their backers expect to make a profit. I’m afraid I have no idea about that!

Update: This article from the Taipei Times seems to shed some light on who is backing Spike (it’s Jimmy Lai in case you can’t be bothered to click on it). [via NTSCMP]