While it is easy to point at the availability of news on the Internet and young people’s desires for instant gratification as main reasons (which they are), there is another contributing factor: decreasing advertising revenue across the board for newspapers and periodicals. Along with Anime Insider, it was announced that that same day that Blender would no longer be produced in print form but still maintain its website. Unfortunately, the complete divestment of AI’s staff combined with sluggish online updates rule out a web-only avenue for the brand.

I don’t have many personal feelings toward Anime Insider except for being something I occasionally bought when I saw it on newsstands. They did have interviews and a manga preview in each issue but not much beside that appealed to me on a consistent basis. I will admit that the Flash in Japan made me aware of Flame of Recca (or was it Animerica?) and Kaze no Stigma — FUNimation will release Part 1 of the latter on DVD June 30th. A coupon screw-up by Best Buy in issue #50 happened to provide fuel for a post back in Nov. 2007.

The magazine will be missed as part of a shrinking magazine market (only Otaku USA and Protoculture Addicts, both bi-monthly, remain) but I will not mourn its absence, partly because their final issue is very video game focused. I do wish that the writers are able to find work elsewhere, either in print or online.

So I bought the newest issue of Anime Insider (November 2007 aka #50) today and was looking through it while recording another episode of my Talkshoe show when I came upon an ad for Pumpkin Scissors that had a $5 off coupon in it. “Hmm,” I thought, “didn’t that come out this past Tuesday? Maybe I could use that…” But that plan was derailed when I started to read the fine print only to find this:

Wait, WHAT?!? “Coupon valid 6/29/07 – 8/31/07″? This is some pretty fucked up timing. The DVD the coupon is for and the magazine issue the coupon ran in both came out THIS WEEK and the coupon itself is already nearly two months expired!!! It’s almost like they challenging me to use it and see if it’ll still work!

This is adding insult to injury but I feel like I must point out the two typos that are also on the coupon. I’m placing the blame for these solely on ADV’s advertising division. I guess they can’t really go after me for scanning this because I’m technically not creating any “cpoies”…

I mean, really how rushed were they to get this particular ad out? ADV announced the license for this title in May so they must have had a good amount of time to prepare advertising for the series’ upcoming release and Best Buy is one of the few places where you can get the quarterly digest-sized issues of Animerica so the retailer is not inexperienced in dealing with anime promotions. Did the copy proofers just forget to change the dates and also miss the misspellings? I don’t have a clue…