We at the Weekly have given OC Metro, the self-described “business lifestyle” magazine of Orange County, plenty of well-deserved jabs over the years. But the glossy monthly (Metro had been a biweekly for years until this past September, a downsizing we can all be happy about) has outdone itself with its December issue.
Among the numerous acts of inanity is editor Tina Borgatta's Editor's Note, a look back on 2008 that's really all about . . Tina Borgatta (pictured here). Check it:
“JANUARY: A new, exciting chapter in my career begins as the editor of OC Metro.”
“APRIL: My husband, Art, and I join the Huntington Harbour Yacht Club and meet many great new friends.”
“AUGUST: I'm thrilled to be invited back to teach journalism at Chapman in the fall.” (Confidential to Borgatta's students: if you had known she was going to write a cheesy column like this one, would you have seriously taken her class??)
“NOVEMBER: Art is elected to the yacht club's board of directors, and I am named “alternate secretary.”
But the yuk-yuks don't stop there. A much larger feature appears several pages later, a basic 2008 Best/Worst list of the sort you see in myriad mags and pubs every December. It's pretty vanilla, just the sort of innocuous puffery you'd expect from OC Metro (although they put the cancellation of KDOC's pathetic song-and-dance show DayBreak OC under “worst,” when DBOC's inevitable shotgunning was actually one of the best things to happen during '08).
And then you get to November. Listed under “best”: “Proposition 8 passes in California.” Then you see they also list 8's passage under “worst.”
As iiiiif . . . somehow Borgatta and the Metro are trying to get it both ways? In their business mindset, how could 8's passage possibly be considered best-anything? Perhaps Borgatta missed this sentence on the Prop 8 ballot a month back—the legislative analyst's estimate of what fiscal impact Prop 8's passage would have: “Over the next few years, potential revenue loss, mainly from sales taxes, totaling in the several tens of millions of dollars, to state and local governments.”
Gee—that doesn't sound like a particularly good pro-business move, coming from a “business lifestyle” magazine, does it?
But then, it's OC Metro.
