Time Magazine's "10 Questions"

Time magazine recently made some changes to their print design.  Overall, I'd say the tweaks are a nice upgrade from the old look.

They also added a new feature called "10 Questions" that caught my eye.  It looks like their plan is to find a celebrity, politician or other noteworthy person, ask them 10 questions and publish their replies.  Nothing revolutionary with that, I know, but there are two subtle pieces to it that make it a bit more interesting than it might appear to be.

First, the questions aren't from Time reporters...they come from you and me, the community.  It's the same "you", of course, that Time named as Person of the Year.  I think it's great that they're using this column to gather questions like this.  The 3/26 issue featured Chris Rock.  I'm not much of a Chris Rock fan and I normally wouldn't bother reading anything about him, but I was more intrigued with what sort of questions people were asking him than the answers themselves!  I suspect this will be true for many of their future "10 Questions" personalities.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, I think Time has constructed this feature in a manner that could successfully turn print readers into online visitors.  I can't tell you the last time I bothered typing in a url for something that was listed as "for more information..." in a print article.  It rarely happens, I'm sure.  In this case, because they wound up having Chris Rock answer more than 10 questions, the rest of them are available on their site.  Again, not exactly rocket science, but I can tell you that I went to their page to see the other questions (and answers) and I'm disappointed to report that the folks at Time really blew it...

If you go to this link to see the Chris Rock questions, you'll see that it's only the ones in the magazine, nothing more.  I looked high and low and couldn't find any other links to additional questions for him.  Too bad.  They were so close to coming up with an online feature I'd like to visit again in the future, but now that they didn't deliver the goods I'm not sure I'll bother going back.

Comments

[Ellen Gerstein]

Actually, there were additional questions for Chris Rock, but strangely, no others.

You can view them here.

[Joe Wikert]

Thanks Ellen. I'm not sure where you found this link but it does indeed have the additional Q&A. I looked high and low (again!) on the main page and can't find it. Your vision must be superior to mine!