Hey, Entertainment Weekly! Say it, don't spray it

A lengthy subscription can make one feel emotionally invested in a magazine, especially a weekly. The variables of staffing, the pop culture landscape and decision-making all lead to ebbs and flows in quality. Surviving on the racks takes some sacrifice, including alienating any of your audience that doesn't LOVE Twilight, all for a fleeting, one-time purchase from a tween who just stopped talking about Kate Gosselin's latest hairstyle .... ahem, but I digress.

Still, I want the magazine to be more than snapshots, "scoops" on TV show plotlines and 30-word reviews. I want Entertainment Weekly to be in-depth, and not just for the pop culture (Lost, Survivor, Sarah Michelle Gellar) for which its writers carry proverbial torches.

Readers must be vigilant in not letting the magazine mix "stinging" barbs at well-acknowledge dreck and quick, six-paragraph puff-piece profiles for people who play the game. The latest issue (June 19, 2009) features a fun Q-and-A with Megan Fox, who manages enough personality to make her story more than just a dumping ground for text in white spaces too small for another photograph. But the piece on Maya Rudolph by Dave Karger features two examples that even a cheerleader would deem as overly supportive.

"Some of my best '[Weekend] Update' memories are when Maya was playing Whitney Houston next to me," says her former castmate Amy Poehler. "I could watch her play Whitney every day for the rest of my life."
We all could have. But in 2007, ....

And then, the Entertainment Weekly trademark, the last-second editorial flourish!

After her sentimental Away We Go sojourn, it's a return to the nuttier stuff that made her a star. "Don't worry, I still want to do Stripes, believe me," Rudolph says. "I hope that I get the chance." Where do we enlist?

You can end it on the quote, man! I know the temptation always lurks to end a piece, especially a short one, on a quick little expression of writerly passion. I've ended things with all the sweetness and tidy appearances of a model home, and the heart to match. But Entertainment Weekly should be a pinnacle for even the quick-interview-as-preview story form, not this hackery. And "we" mean it.

P.S. - The "we" that somehow includes Project Runway fans one week and mouth-breathing Megan Fox disciples the next also appears on the Web site, this time on a Mary Jo Buttafuoco(!) item.