Magazine News: The Inaugural Issues

With the recent news that the election of Barack Obama helped Time magazine set a newsstand sales record, it should surprise no one that the inauguration of Obama would make even more publishers slap his face on their covers and hope for newsstand magic in these tough economic times. And so it is.

You expect Time and Newsweek to put the president's swearing in ceremony on their covers. But I was surprised to see Giant Robot (a magazine covering Japanese pop culture) do so, less surprised to see lifestyle mags like Life & Style (talk about a perfect monicker) and People (with what I think is the most beautiful cover of the bunch).

Feeling somewhat left out, my own magazine, the serious Commonwealth, also slapped Obama on the cover. But then we don't include stories about celebrity bed-hopping or giant robots (though, I'd love to have the latter). Instead, our cover story is about experts such as scientist Richard Muller, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, diplomat George Mitchell, and many others offering advice to the new president, who has so many items of business to balance (hence the cover image, right?). I hope this makes our newsstand sales go through the roof. :)

Queerantine Short Film

The above short video was made by Kerry O'Quinn and others in response to the hysterical pro-Proposition 8 advertisements that tormented Californians last autumn.

Robert Reich on the "Failed" Bailout

Economist (and former U.S. Sec. of Labor) Robert Reich says the federal bailout of Wall street so far has been a failure, with the money wasted and spent in unaccounted ways. He spoke at The Commonwealth Club's annual economic forecast on January 14, 2009, in San Francisco.
Above is a short (and, I know, not high quality) video excerpt from the event.

Esquire Splits: New Cover Trick

The February 2009 issue of Esquire magazine features yet another version of that Obama campaign poster we've seen sooo many times already, but they've got a twist: instead of a regular cover, instead of a cover with a fold-out ad on the other side, instead of the (thankfully short-lived trend of) covers that split in the middle, Esquire gives us a cover with a center window that opens to reveal a Discovery Channel ad.
Okay, to be fair, it also opens to reveal some quotes from the articles in this issue, but we all know the reason for it is to give an advertiser a new way to get their ad in front of readers' faces. No crime in that. That's why Hearst and most other periodicals publishers put out magazines.

It will likely only annoy those readers who like to save their magazines; the ad flap on the cover does have a bit of glue to sort of keep it closed again after it's been opened, but the flap will sooner or later fray on edges, become caught on the edges of other objects when the magazine is shelved, or tear off altogether.
For me, it fuels my notion that Esquire is a magazine whose editors are simply sick of putting out a magazine (and it's not a notion without real-world support).
By the way, Esquire is now offering one-year subscriptions for the price of six whole dollars. That's $6 dollars. That's less than the cover cost of two copies of the magazine (cover price $3.99 each). At that subscription rate, the magazine's publishing staff will have to get even more innovative selling ad space to make up the revenue.

After Magazines Die: What Would the Next Issue Have Looked Like?

When a magazine goes to periodicals heaven, the news often strikes readers and staff alike with a sudden blow. They may have seen the writing on the wall -- falling sales, skyrocketing costs, the loss of irreplaceable editors or a publisher -- but the final decision itself is often a sudden one. I've been through the process myself, as a reader (anyone remember Epic Illustrated? my all-time favorite, Future Life? Comics Scene? Car Design?) and as an editor (Internet World, which was dearly missed, and another smaller publication that wasn't). Assuming it's a magazine I enjoyed reading, I'm often left wondering just what the next, never-to-be-published issue of the magazine would have been like had it been published -- had the publisher's axe been stayed at the last minute. Often, that issue is all prepared, ready to ship to the printer, when the bad news arrives.

So I've got a suggestion. With the recent popularity of digital versions of magazines, either current ones or resurrected ones, comes the possibility of publishers dusting off those old pasteboards or CDs or whatever media they have the unpublished "post-final" issue in, and making it available. Intellectual property rights seem to be working out much more easily these days than they were in the early days of the internet, when it was still unclear how to treat reproduction rights to articles and artwork created years before the Web browser caught on.
And surely those publishers can make a small buck off a property they never thought they'd see again produce a penny.

So let's see issue #32 of Future Life, and issue #146 of Creepy, or #140 of Eerie, or issue #4 of Comics Scene 2000 (or issue #57 of the second series of Comics Scene or issue #12 of the first series of Comics Scene -- it gets complicated; don't ask)! Because in the digital age, old magazines never die; they can always find new life and old audiences.
What do you think?

Magazine News: Forbes Goes to Sofia

Boasting a launch circulation (estimate) of 30,000, the venerable American business magazine Forbes will begin publication of a Bulgarian edition in October of this year.

"What?" you say. Why is a print publication expanding in a global financial/economic crisis? Because global licensing of American publications is a booming business, one that keeps money flowing into U.S. publishers' coffers even when domestic ad revenue is flagging. Playboy, for example, has been struggling in the United States (especially since the Reagan administration helped target its advertisers and distributors, a hit from which I think the magazine has never recovered). It now publishes dozens of foreign editions, recently adding Lithuania to the mix. And you can find horror magazine Fangoria in Hungary, Esquire in China, or Hello magazine in Thailand. If you've got a brand, make it global, and let someone else do all the work of translating and gathering capital to float the magazine. All in all, can't see a reason not to do it.

Now, no one doubts that Thai readers want juicy celebrity news or that Lithuanian readers want stories of success and beauty. But are Bulgarians really eager for American business acumen right now?

I Guess Elections Aren't Bad for Newsstand Sales After All

Time to be snarky: I recently tweaked a magazine distribution data executive who blamed a whopping 22 million copy drop in single copy magazine sales on the election (among other things). I said no, an exciting election (which this definitely was) should boost newsstand sales.
And it did. Folio: reports that Time magazine's Person of the Year issue and its commemorative special edition on the election victory (both featuring a certain White House-bound Chicago White Sox fan, broke the magazine's records for single-copy sales.

So the old line about how a magazine cover can't lose if it features a dog or children? Now add President Obama. (Who, by the way, is buying a dog for his children. Whoever puts that on their cover will be a millionaire!)

The Coffee Table Was too Crowded: Newsstand Sales Dive

MediaWeek reports that single copy newsstand sales of magazines declined from 266 million to 244 million in the third quarter (compared to the same quarter last year).

Writer Lucia Moses quotes Gil Brechtel, president and CEO of publishing data firm MagNet, suggests that the fault lies with higher gas prices, economic problems, and the election, which he thinks took people's attention away from reading magazines.

I'd have to agree with him on the first two, but big news events (especially complex, ongoing ones) don't decrease peoples' appetites for magazines; they increase them, just like the surge in print sales after 9/11. My guess – from a very non-publishing-data-firm background – would be that the election boosted some magazines, so the overall loss of 22 million in copies sold is actually better than it otherwise would have been.

Of course, I'd hate to be right.

Hugh Hefner on Print Magazines' Uniqueness

In an interview on CNN with John Roberts, Playboy founder/editor Hugh Hefner made some interesting comments (and by "interesting," I mean that I agree with him) about the role of print magazines in this supposedly post-print world. He takes the view that yes, some people don't want to read magazines and – more important – you can't force them to do so. Here's an excerpt from the interview:

Roberts: Now in 1953, when you first launched Playboy magazine, you seemed to be the right publication for the right time. I know that you were very heavily influenced by the Kinsey Report, which had come out not too long prior to that. But 55 years later, is Playboy magazine still relevant? And if it is, how do you keep it relevant?

Hefner: Well, I don't think obviously it will ever play the same kind of role that it played back in the 1950s and '60s. But I do think that a magazine of quality always has a place. Increasingly, obviously fewer people are reading magazines and fewer people are reading newspapers and books, but I think that part of that is a change that Playboy is always, is also embracing. We're very much involved with the Internet. We were the first magazine to use [the] Internet and have our own Web site. So I think that we'll continue to ... publish both the magazine and then publish through electronics.

Roberts: The new Steven Watts biography [of Hefner] is a fascinating, very fascinating look at your entire career, from your roots all the way up until the present. And he says, looking back over it, that "the key to his approach was that he edited Playboy for himself. Aiming it at his own tastes and values." Was that also a key to your success as well that you approached this with such a personal passion?

Hefner: I think so, but I think that is one of the things that makes magazines unique. They do speak with a personal voice. And I think it is one of the things that makes magazines special.

You can read the transcript of the entire interview here, where you'll also find a link to the video.

I made some similar comments in response to some recent statements by Esquire's editor, David Granger. The pool of total print readership may drop (might not, though; might shift to different people, though; for example, recent reports about thriving newspapers in Germany and India), but there's a role for quality magazines that it would be foolish to ignore.

Mr. Hefner has always had a clear-eyed view of magazines, unlike many of his competitors and unlike many of his critics. When Playboy was coming down from the highs of its 1970s circulation spike, he did not panic or overreact; his reaction was reportedly (I believe this was in a tale told by his daughter, Christie Hefner; if I've got that attribution wrong, my apologies) that Playboy's circulation will be whatever it naturally is; if one million people want to buy the magazine, it'll be one million; but there's no reason to pretend that it was supposed to be what the circulation was in the 1970s when it was arguably the most important cultural publication in the country.

Ziff Davis Now Paper-free!

Publisher Ziff Davis Media has effectively exited the print publishing world with its closure of the print edition of Electronic Gaming Monthly, according to a Folio: news alert. In November 2008, the company announced that it would stop publishing its once-hefty PC Magazine and made it web-only.
Ziff has a history of being a leading tech and consumer publisher, but it also has a history this decade of being almost constantly on-the-brink financially, so I don't think this is a case of my warnings yesterday coming true. But noteworthy.