Greg Lindsay on In-Flight Magazines and ‘Airworld’

Advertising Age editor-at-large Greg Lindsay analyzed the current state of in-flight magazine publishing earlier this week on Mediabistro. His main conclusion isn’t too surprising: The magazines are “sans edge in an era that prizes knowingness and snarkiness above all.” The path he took to arrive at that conclusion, however, kept me rapt for a good part of yesterday afternoon.

“I spent September literally living in airports,” he writes in the lead of his Mediabistro piece. “I was on assignment in ‘Airworld’—the limbo on the far side of the metal detectors—and during what was essentially a three-week layover, I toe-touched a dozen cities from Los Angeles to Singapore (the long way around), flew 26,000 miles, and once spent 18 consecutive hours in the air.”

The result was a 15-part online series and several print stories in Advertising Age that examine what Lindsay calls “the largest coherent, stand-alone branded environment on Earth.” In total, according to Lindsay’s blog, he wrote roughly 30,000 words about his journey, including installments about airport food and Sir Alfred Mehran Nasseri, the man who has been living in the basement of Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris for the last 17 years. Everything is online, though free registration is required.

I’ve only read the first few pieces, and I’ve found Lindsay’s writing and reportage quite compelling. My only quibble so far: Lindsay and/or his editors have dubbed the environment “Airworld” and I’ve yet to see a nod to Walter Kirn, who coined the phrase—or at least popularized it—in his 2001 novel Up in the Air. Kirn’s excellent book covers much of the same territory Lindsay does through the story of Ryan Bingham, whose quest to accumulate one million frequent-flyer miles leads him through the “aura-sapping artificial lighting” of Airworld.

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