UK Phone Hacking Scandal in Taiwan Video News Treatment

Naturally, I join the entire civilized world in reveling in anything that causes Rupert Murdoch headaches.

But I think there's an even more important thing at stake. Britain's "lively" tabloid newspaper culture is sometimes defended as the cost of a free and vigorous press. But clearly there's a lot that's just criminal going on, and it's hardly a matter of hard news and civic duty to report on a celebrity's shenanigans.

Meanwhile, over in Taiwan, they're showing us what a lively news culture is really about: taking the stuffing out of people in a manner that is fearless, borderline bad taste, and sometimes downright brilliant. NMA rules.

Discovered at Last! UK Editions of Fantastic Films Magazine

Okay, this isn't like finding the Titanic or a first edition of Action Comics. But while doing my usual online surfing, I (to quote Weird Al Yankovic) "learned a few things I never knew before." Specifically, I learned that the late Chicago-based science-fiction film magazine Fantastic Films published a foreign edition in the very early 1980s in the United Kingdom.

I have no idea if the content inside the magazine is different from the American edition, but the covers appear to be distinguishable from each other only by the numbering. (The confusion over some numbering made me suddenly realize, Hey, the Star Wars droids weren't on the cover of Fantastic Films #8 ....) Check out what I'm talking about; notice USA FF #21 and UK FF#12 below.

Longtime readers of this blog know that I'm more a Starlog fan than a Fantastic Films fan. But I do have  a warm spot in my heart for FF, which I first purchased at a Red Owl grocery store in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. It was issue #19, or at least that's what the American edition was numbered. The UK edition of Fantastic Films for that exact same issue was #10.

Anyway, I'm trying to track down some copies of the UK edition of this magazine. I'm sure you share my anticipation.

In the meantime, below is a gallery of all of the covers I was able to find of the UK edition. Does anyone know if Fantastic Films published editions in any other countries? Was there a German or French edition? A Hong Kong edition? Do let me know.

 

 

 

The Art of Good and Bad Magazine Cover Lines

My mother, the editor (and art director and general manager) of a regional Wisconsin magazine in the 1970s and 1980s, came back from a magazine design seminar one day and was pleased to report that her magazine (NEWmonth) had been praised by the seminar leader for its design. One thing in particular earned praise: The magazine had only limited cover blurbs promoting articles within, and it met the seminar leader's dictum that a magazine should have no more than three such blurbs on its cover.

Having three or fewer cover blurbs does make for a less-cluttered cover, but I have to side with the thousands of magazine editors who decide they need more text on their covers to catch the reader's eye, whether the publication is sitting on a newsstand or pulled out of a subscriber's mailbox or picked up in a waiting room or accessed digitally.

Magazine cover lines have been attracting my attention again lately, thanks to the recent controversy of Men's Health magazine re-using entire cover lines in multiple issues. The editor reportedly claimed that the re-used cover lines were only on the newsstand copies; subscribers received different cover text. (In essence: We only despise our newsstand buyers, not our subscribers.) The nature of that editorial insult aside, it is a nice reminder about what cover blurbs are really about. They're there to sell the issue -- again, whether it's literally to help the customer make the decision to buy it, or more figuratively to help the reader make the decision to spend some time flipping through or reading the issue.

I am probably an odd magazine reader and magazine editor in that I don't mind cover blurbage. You can certainly have too many -- and too stupid -- cover blurbs. But when done well, the cover blurbs are just as much a part of the cover design as the image(s) and the logo. What's the point of showing Ellen Degeneres smiling from the cover of Time magazine without the now-famous, "Yep, I'm Gay" text?

I recently subscribed to British science fiction media magazine SFX. I received my first issue, which sports no cover blurbs. The magazine promotes this as a benefit of subscribing: "As a subscriber to SFX you get more than the standard high street copy, you will get the benefit of recieving your favourite magazine with uninterrupted cover images, free from any additional text. Perfect for any collection!" Ignoring the punctuation and spelling problems with that statement, I'm sure that's an attractive benefit for many subscribers, and therefore it's probably a smart thing to do.

But I think I'd prefer to get the copies with the blurbs. SFX has very good and strong covers, nicely designed with well-chosen images. They don't look bad without the blurbs; they just don't look like a magazine, so they're not as inviting, at least to this reader. Again: I know I'm in the minority, but that's my two cents.

SFX isn't the only one to do this. The British edition of Esquire does the same (see photo, left). Perhaps the practice will spread, as magazines seek ever more creative ways to cater to their subscribers (who are, after all, small and short-time investors in the publication).

Still, the only magazine I would actually encourage to adopt the practice is Men's Health.

London Sentences Bomb Suspects ... for Now

A London court has sentenced three terrorist suspects who had been convicted of planning to destroy transatlantic airliners using liquid explosives. They've been sentenced to between 32 and 40 years in prison -- or until Britain needs to negotiate another trade deal with a Middle Eastern country.

Magazine History: A Penthouse Editor in the 1960s

[Note: Bob Guccione obituary is here.]

The August 2009 UK edition of Esquire magazine features two noteworthy articles, each probably aimed at different audiences. The cover story is about cute Harry Potter film star Daniel Radcliffe, and later in the magazine is "A Star Is Porn," the unoriginally titled article by writer Lynn Barber recounting her years as an editor at the original Penthouse magazine in the UK in the 1960s. There's not much titillation in the article -- sorry, boys -- but for magazine geeks, it's a great behind-the-scenes look at how magazines start, growing from shoestring organizations to large staffs, big offices, expense accounts, and world fame.

People who are not in the magazine industry probably labor under the illusion that magazines are published by big companies in skyscrapers and run by normal corporate drones. Some are. But Playboy was started on Hugh Hefner's apartment table, Starlog began as a one-time publication by two publishers who paid the bills by winning at poker and holding private film screenings, and -- Barber tells us -- Penthouse began in a "a tiny terraced house on Ifield Road" in London.

The front room contained a dolly bird receptionist called Maureen and piles and piles of cardboard boxes -- these, I was to learn, were the Penteez Panties "erotic gifts" [the magazine sold to pay the bills in its early days] -- with another room housing the Penthouse Book Club at the back. Upstairs, the back bedroom was Bob [Guccione] and Kathy [Keeton]'s office, and the front was "editorial," a largish room containing the art director Joe Brooks and a very small cubbyhole containing [editor] Harry Fieldhouse.

Barber stumbled upon her job at Penthouse after interviewing the controversial Guccione, during which he off-handedly suggested she come to work for him. Soon, she did, and she became one of the first employees of that young magazine, seeing it through its early years in the UK and helping to launch its U.S. edition, which is where Guccione would really hit the jackpot (at one point amassing a fortune of about a half-billion dollars -- all of it would be frittered away and the company eventually sold in bankruptcy). Along the way, she did a little bit of everything:

I also had to attend some of the Pet shoots, not with Bob [Guccione], but with an American photographer called Philip O. Stearns. My duties at the shoots included putting music on the stereo, squirting scent round the room, and powdering the girls' bottoms. In between, I did The Times crossword.

Her Penthouse editorial duties would also include, at one time or another, begging local shops to let her borrow clothing items (or diving suits) for nude Pet photo shoots, editing sections of the magazine, and smuggling material into the United States to get it to the Milwaukee-based printers of the new American edition of Penthouse. This was definitely not a cubicle job.

Barber doesn't say it in the article, but it sounds like it was a lot of fun to be on the ground floor of a rapidly growing magazine, seeing it add staff, circulation, advertising, spinoffs, and more. She doesn't say how long she stayed at the job or why she left, but the magazine and Guccione would go on to huge success in the United States, spawning a magazine empire (including Omni, a science/science-fiction magazine that reached a circulation of more than a million in the early 1980s, before declining and being canceled in the mid-1990s), only to founder under the intense pressures of the internet and the religious right. Guccione pushed his flagship magazine into hardcore pornography for a few years, but that not only didn't save the title, it reportedly lost him a huge number of distribution outlets. The fact that he kept on with that approach, nonetheless, tells you something about his poor business sense.

When I was in high school in the 1980s, pretty much every boy read Playboy or Penthouse. Yes, even gay folkses like me read one or the other, because, I think, it was a way of getting to know what adults were talking about, what was really going on, what was really happening. (And, for the straight kids, the nekkid folks, of course.) But we Playboy readers thought the Penthouse readers were weird. That's probably because Penthouse itself was weird; almost every article was a conspiracy about some deal or another, and there was an unshakable devotion in that magazine to fetishes and oddities. Nonetheless, both magazines were a part of growing up for millions and millions of American boys, and if most of those readers read their copies because they featured scantily clad (or unclad) women and stories of (as-yet) unexperienced pleasures, they also were probably the first place most of those readers were exposed to the articles and ideas of William F. Buckley Jr., John Updike, and Ayn Rand, or where they actually read articles about politics. That's often used as sort of a punchline, but I think it's true, too.

Barber's article makes the August UK Esquire a must-read for anyone interested in the history of a once-powerful men's magazine, and it's a great look for all of us who are in the magazine industry at just how some magazines are launched and how they grow. None of it's "by the book," because there is no book.

Terry Pratchett and Assisted Suicide

In the we-don't-want-to-think-about-this-but-adults-have-to department, Terry Pratchett has added his voice to the debate in the United Kingdom over assisted suicide.

In a lengthy article in the UK's Daily Mail tabloid, Sir Pratchett ("Sir Terry"? I'm not British, so I'm not up on proper silly titling protocol) praised those who have made the trip to Switzerland to be assisted in their suicides, and he said when his time comes -- he was diagnosed in 2007 with Alzheimer's Disease -- he hopes it will be in the garden with a glass of brandy.

Now, the British press isn't something to crow about on the best of days, but did he really need to choose the Daily Mail to make this statement?

Anyway, it's a brave and sensible statement from a fantastic writer.

Twilight of the Lad Magazines, Part II

After 14 years, the UK edition of lad magazine Maxim is discontinuing its print existence and will become an online-only operation, reports The Guardian. The U.S. edition will expand its newsstand coverage to include the UK.

According to The Guardian's report, Maxim's circulation has been sliding for years, but it took a hit of more than 41 percent in the second half of 2008.

Also see "Twilight of the Lad Magazines" part I.