Response - Week 11

I think at this point, we're all sort of pushing with brute force to the press date of our individual magazine prototypes. So, at this point, I'm not sure there's much I can change about Cupboard. My publishing group is intelligent — I know this from working with a few of them on other projects — and my co-designers are all very skilled in important ways. The original concept was to provide a magazine that helped readers save money and prepare meals for fewer people, which I thought at the time was smart because a) people always want to save money and b) recipes are frequently not cost- or quantity-efficient. The concept for the magazine started going down the wrong path once it was decided (note the passive — no one's to blame, obviously) that Cupboard should not appeal to a niche audience. The publishers refused to buy in to the concept fully and instead most of the stories are a collection of ideas that fit into the magazine rather than stories written specifically for the magazine, if that makes sense. That is to say, I feel the stories are curated from stories that have run in other magazines that fit into the mission of the magazine. It would be better if the magazine had a clear mission and bought into it wholly. For example, we have a story called Can it! that suggests people in our target audience would be interested in home-canning (despite the name of the magazine, the target audience is younger people around 20-35). A better idea would be to give recipes you can make only with canned food, but that would not appeal to everyone in the country, just most of the people in our target audience. There is an aversion to feeling cheap, which I understand, but I think an acceptance that people in this audience are overworked and underpaid and don't have time to create immaculate meals doesn't equate to cheapness. What could have been a useful and exciting magazine prototype has ended up pretty uninteresting.

That's just how I feel.