Think I’m being overly meta with an editorial franchise about editorial franchises? You ain’t seen nothing yet. The New York Times Magazine’s weekly ‘Meh List’ is one of many editorial profiles within the umbrella editorial franchise that is the One-Page Magazine. Every week the One Page Magazine appears within the first few pages of the print version, featuring an assortment of recurring bite-sized features which are by turns interesting, poignant, informative or funny.

Examples include:

The dubious “adjudication” of reader-submitted dilemmas and disputes by humorist John Hodgman in the Judge John Hodgman Rules micro-column (a multimedia franchise – find the podcast, here).

The Big, Important Chart – a mini-infographic which visualizes “data” like mapping one-hit wonders of the ‘90’s across the X-axis of dance craze-ness and the Y-axis of lasting legacy.

and. . .

The Meh List. The Meh List is all about zeitgeist. First off, the concept of ‘meh’ belongs completely and exclusively to this generation. And the meh list is just what it sounds like: a list of things that are pervasive in our current culture, but are neither big hits nor big misses – things we could take or leave. The brilliance of this is in making us feel like the writer *gets* us, of making us think “exactly!” by identifying a list of things we all recognize, but neither rant nor rave about.

The Meh List often has a couple of food line items (e.g., “Whole Foods sushi”), something more consumeristic (“rimless eyeglasses”), something for the thinkers among us (“golden ages”) and at least one item that is absurd in its randomness, but surprisingly universal in the ‘meh’ it sparks in readers (e.g., Harrison Ford’s earring).

Inspiration for: cultural, trend or entertainment-related editorial franchises.