Category: Magazines

“On each occasion, I was politely told that the typical buyer of advertising space lacked the time and intelligence to grasp complicated ideas such as I had just presented. Nor in six years was any notable investment made in a dedicated sales staff, reader research or web development for I.D.”

“Imagine going to a hospital and learning from the person holding the scalpel that he really doesn’t see a difference between your hand and your foot; after all, an appendage is an appendage, and a sock can be pulled over any of them.”

Read more (here) via, Magtastic Blogsplosion

Mediaite picked up a story that Perez Hilton ran about Men’s Health using the same coverlines from 3 years ago (here) on their December issue and they have a quote from Zinczenko defending the practice.

Most magazines recycle coverlines. Maybe there’s a little rewording or maybe they just lift one off an old cover, but it’s not unusual to refer to a cover book for inspiration when writing lines. I’ve heard that Time Inc. has a book where words, colors and cover subjects have sales numbers attached to them (that’s why you see so many Jesus covers on Time) for further insight into how things will perform on the newsstand.

The problem is not the recycled coverlines, it’s the recycled content. There are only a limited number of ways you can say the same thing over and over again and magazines keep reaching for the same high performing content to keep the ship afloat a little bit longer. For a magazine like Men’s Health they actually create content specifically for the newsstand and in many cases it’s fluff so they can write a line that contains the magic words “sex, abs, best body, ultimate….” Rodale is notorious for fluffy coverlines that have very little payoff inside (not to mention fake numbers). I think we’re all very aware by now that magazines are digging their own grave.

Story here: http://www.theadventurelife.org/

It’s not huge news that a magazine just folded but a big deal in my universe since I worked for Outside and Men’s Journal.

All magazine categories are simply too crowded for the number of readers and advertisers available. Men’s Journal was started when Jann couldn’t buy Outside back from Larry Burke. Jann sold it to him when he moved Rolling Stone to New York because he couldn’t afford to keep both magazines afloat in the change of venues. After selling it, the outdoor category started to heat up. Mostly with companies that wanted to be associated with the rugged lifestyle. The advertising they bought was mostly as positioning. When National Geographic launched Adventure in 1999 the outdoor lifestyle category has peaked and was on its way down. I suspect Adventure was more of a reaction to National Geographic shedding millions of readers during the rise of the MTV generation than anything else. That and the average age of their readers made them think they needed to develop another product to attract new, young readers. So, this is all just the natural progression of it all as the category has 1 and a half magazines in it now because Men’s Journal has gone on to position itself as more of a mainstream men’s magazine with outdoor influences.

Financial times is reporting that Rupert Murdoch’s eldest son Lachlan is closing in on a joint offer for a group of trade magazines owned by Nielsen Business Media (here). There’s no telling if PDN will be a part of the sale but the story goes on to say that Nielson would like to shed the print publications because “investor focus on its exposure to declining print advertising revenues could impede a successful IPO.”

I don’t know how far from the tree this apple fell, but if Lachlan is anything like his father he will be happy to find out PDN still has pay walls in place and still charges a premium for subscriptions. If anyone is poised to weather the storm it’s niche publications like this. Everyone seems to be talking now about jacking up subscription prices and installing pay walls as a way to remain insolvent and magazines like PDN suddenly seem ahead of the curve since they never bothered to chase numbers by dropping those revenue streams and relying purely on advertising. Much to the chagrin of photographers who dislike all the contests aimed at them I do think the business model for magazines includes a healthy revenue stream off your readers. In the last 10 years most magazines have taken a loss in that department in favor of inflated numbers to present to advertisers. Those days are over. My only advice for publications looking to embrace/monetize their readers is to drop the smugness.

Kevin DeMaria, former Art Director at Gourmet Magazine took photographs of his final days at the magazine (here).

I almost wrote a piece not too long ago about food magazines because I’d unsubscribed to Gourmet but then discovered that having access to millions of recipes online is really a pain in the ass and what you need is an editor and some beautiful photographs to get your mouth watering so I resubscribed. Too bad Si killed it off. I hope they bring it back someday.

via, Will Steacy Blog

“The Economist has launched a single copy subscription service in the U.K. that allows readers to order just one copy of the magazine for home delivery the next day. Readers can place an order online or via text message for a copy of the latest issue of the weekly publication. The cost of the delivered magazine is the same as the newsstand price.”

via MediaPost.

Seriously, American magazines (Anne Moore!?), wake the-f up. If that’s not enough, subscribers can listen to the latest issue on their ipod (the Economist read out aloud word for word by four or five posh sounding British newscasters). What the hell? I just subscribed to a magazine and was told it would take 4 – 6 weeks for the first issue to arrive.

Ah bummer the perks at Condé are over. I used to love a good client lunch or wrap dinner. I suppose the thousand dollar sushi wrap dinner is out the window now.

…It used to be that on Monday mornings, the flower deliverymen would clog the elevators while they brought fresh bouquets for editors’ and publishers’ desks.

…“When a client wanted to go to get Japanese, you used to say, ‘Ooooh! We’ll go to Nobu!’ But it’s so outrageously expensive, now you have to think twice.”

…they would order takeout from Balthazar several times a week. Sandwiches, cheese plates, the works

…“I just found out today that we are on our last batch of Poland Spring,” said the source. “We won’t have any more after this. We have to start drinking tap water.”

via  The New York Observer.

A group led by the private-equity firm InterMedia Partners and InterMedia’s luxury magazine publisher, Uptown Media, has reached an agreement to acquire Vibe and its Web site. The new owners say they plan to relaunch Vibe.com in the next few weeks.

They intend to bring out the print edition only at the end of the year and then publish it quarterly rather than monthly, possibly increasing the frequency after 2010.

via– WSJ.com.

I think that magazines need to spend more time and effort on the distribution problem. The less time people spend around newsstands and the less there are of them means that they need to seek alternate ways to allow consumers to browse and buy a single copy of a magazine. Also, the inefficiency of shipping magazines all around the country in hopes that someone will pick one up seems like a place where you can save some cash as opposed to say, cutting your contributors fees. Maggwire is a new site where you can view magazine stories (from their websites) by topic and vote, comment on and share them. I like the idea of an aggregator that only deals in magazine content. Looks like a winner to me.

via, Mr. Magazine.

Fortune magazine dips into the archive to pick out 20 great images shot on Kodachrome (here) after Kodak announced it was going to discontinue producing the film.

The Atlantic has an excellent story (here) on retooling the newsweeklies to compete in the internet economy.

In the digital age, with its overabundance of information, the modern newsweekly is in a particularly poignant position. Designed nearly a century ago to be all things to all people, it Chaplin-esquely tries to straddle thousands of rapidly fragmenting micro-niches, a mainframe in an iTouch world. The audience it was created to serve—middlebrow; curious, but not too curious; engaged, but only to a point—no longer exists. Newsweeklies were intended to be counterprogramming to newspapers, back when we were drowning in newsprint and needed a digest to redact that vast inflow of dead-tree objectivity. Now, in response to accelerating news cycles, the newspapers have effectively become newsweekly-style digests themselves, resorting to muddy “news analysis” now that the actual news has hit us on multiple platforms before we even open our front door in the morning.

Bottom line here is that advertising used to be sold on a “hits” basis, but now that hits are practically worthless (blame the ease at which juvenile humor, celebrities drinking starbucks and vitriol can produce millions of hits) it’s engagement and finding or slashing circulation down to an audience that is passionate about the product you produce. This also means they can start discarding all the junk they put in the magazines that caters to a more general interest crowd. Sounds good to me.

Did you know that writer Dan Baum once turned down $90,000 to write a 30,000 word story for Rolling Stone to instead take a contract with The New Yorker where he wrote 30,000 words a year for that same $90,000. The contract was up each year and after 3 short years Editor David Remnick called to say it would not be renewed. Dan thinks this has less to do with his skills as a writer and more to do with good old fashioned office politics. Dan didn’t work in the New Yorker office, where he discovered they whisper all the time in his several times a year office visits from his home in Boulder, CO, but he failed to integrate himself into the culture that is the New Yorker and blames his demise on that sad reality of magazine life.

You can read the fascinating “inside baseball” account of writing for the New Yorker (here). It was first published as a series of tweets over a week ago and seems to break some kind of code of silence that surrounds the publication. They don’t publish a masthead after all.

Even more interesting and certainly educational for photographers will be his list of successful story pitches (here). Photographers have great stories all the time but I’ve rarely seen a passable pitch from one, so most of the time if I really wanted to get something made I would write the pitch myself. As a side note it’s even worse when photographers take their excellent ideas and give it to a writer who’s not qualified to write for the publication.

Wired, another Condé magazine was written up Sunday in the NYTimes (here), because they have the dubious of being both award winning and advertising losing. I was pointed to this discussion over on Boing Boing Gadgets (here) by Scott Bauer where a former wired.com editor uses that story to take a few digs at the print magazine and then a whole bunch of writers chime in on the comments. EIC Chris Anderson even drops a couple comments one in particular where he attributes the problems between online and print at wired to Condé HQ decisions. More “inside baseball” but interesting nonetheless.

I love seeing incredible photography in a well designed page. In the end the design can make or break the impact of the photography. There’s some great designers out there but it usually comes down to whether or not the editor will let them do their thing.

You can see some of the photography nominees for the SPD awards on their grids blog and I think they will put a few more up next week so check back:

Service Feature, Story

Section, Series of Pages

Section, Single Page or Spread

Trade/Corporate

Educational/Institutional

Service Feature, Single or Spread

Photo-Illustration

Redesign