My mother likes The New Yorker magazine, and she’s mentioned that if she had just signed up back in the early 1960s, they were offering lifetime subscriptions for $65. So if she had just paid $65, she could have saved so much money over the years subscribing. But given the state of the magazine industry, and print media in general, I’d think they might not be able to afford to keep providing lifetime subscriptions to people who lived a really long time: that’s just got to hurt their bottom line too much at this point. But if they just canceled the subscriptions on people, it would make them look bad. So, what to do?
So that got me thinking, if too many people had a lifetime subscription to a magazine that’s trying to cut costs, might they consider sending around a “lifetime subscription assassin” to help rid them of pesky lifetime subscribers who have overstayed their welcome? It might pay for magazines to implement this tactic! And seeing as how everyone wants to be involved in the media somehow, and everyone dreams of being famous these days, perhaps they wouldn’t even have to pay the assassin(s), so long as they promised to run some of their writing in the magazine from time to time.
(But they really ought to read some of the assassin’s writing before they “hire” them, because if they read it later, and they thought it was awful, they might get whacked for reneging on the deal! Or maybe they could use the same deal to get a new assassin to get rid of the current assassin? And then they could just keep doing that until they find one who actually has some quality prose and fascinating stories. I mean, how long could it take to find a hit-man with world-class unpublished writing?)
