Best Life Dies

Rodale has killed Best Life magazine, a spinoff of Men's Health. (Really.)

Personally, I never saw the point to Best Life, beyond filling a business need by the publisher. But it did fill that niche for a few years, and last year it racked up impressive advertising increases. But for me -- eh. The magazine never seemed to do much on the newsstands. What does it have that Esquire, GQ, Playboy, and others don't already do?

And the cover lines? For heaven's sake. "Be a (Much) Better Father" and "Be a (Much) Better Man" and "Elegance Made Easy" and "The Best Drink in the World" -- this looks like the most conference-roomed editorial lineup around. Prepackaged and designed to hit the right newsstand sales tropes. All of which means it might have been a well-designed and written magazine (I dunno; was never interested enough to buy what looked like a personality-less magazine), but it's a second buy, not a must-buy for readers. Who identifies with a catalog?

Magazine News: Update Roundup

A roundup of notes and some updates on previous posts here:

Old New Republic: If they can bring back George Clooney to ER, then why can't Martin Peretz buy back his magazine? Yep, Marty Peretz has bought back control of his baby, The New Republic magazine. As previously reported here (and here), Peretz used to own the li'l political magazine before selling it (in phases) to Canadian firm Canwest Global Communications.

In or out, in or out: Folio: reports that Penton is in the midst of layoffs and changing some print mags to online-only. But it is finding resources to launch one new print magazine, Chief Marketer.


Daily dilemma: The San Francisco Chronicle might not be killed off or sold after all. But I suspect I'm correct, as I wrote here earlier, that it'll be too weak to be a great newspaper, after it cuts hours, wages, and staff.

Last man standing: Magazine distributor Source Interlink continues to mop up its legal mess with competitors and competition, again according to Folio:. Background on this ridiculous battle here and here, and info on why traditional print distributors are whistling in the dark here.

We spit in the general direction of so-called bankruptcy: Mastehead Online reports that Reader's Digest Association President/CEO Mary Berner says phooey to speculation that the company was planning a bankruptcy, just because it had hired a law firm that is known for its work on bankruptcy cases. Still, it can't be good.


Logo tastes: In my notice about the new web site by science fiction media magazine Starlog, I asked whether the site's use of the magazine's old logo instead of the new one unveiled a few months ago was a mistake, just a placeholder, or a sign that they were abandoning the new logo. My source tells me it was none of the above. Just the preference of the web page creator.

And that's all the news that is, um, news of updated news. I'll have to work on a new closing line...

Deal Imminent on New Republic (re)Purchase?

The New York Observer reports that former owner and current editor Martin Peretz was very close to sealing a deal to repurchase political journal The New Republic. Peretz is reportedly teaming up with financial exec Larry Grafstein.

More news likely anyday now.

Economics of Periodicals Publishing: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

For six decades, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF) has published short fiction, and is well regarded as one of the finest of the SF publications. So, how does one react to the news that, starting with the April/May 2009 issue currently out, F&SF has reduced its frequency to bimonthly?

One reaction certainly is sadness at seeing a great old magazine come out less often. It's a treat for the reader to have a favorite magazine hit the mailbox or the newsstands every month, so any cutback leaves a feeling of emptiness.

Another reaction might well be happiness and relief that the magazine is still around; it hasn't given up the ghost; it's just reduced frequency and added pages. Yes, the digest-sized magazine now boasts 260 pages (including covers -- I always count covers; why not?). That's a lot of pages for its short stories, book reviews, contests, editorials, cartoons, and more.

A third reaction is probably a mix of the above two, and that's where I am.

In addition to its high-quality fiction, F&SF features occasional editorials by its perceptive publisher and editor, Gordon Van Gelder. In the current issue, he notes that print magazines offer something that the internet does not: the ability to present long-form articles and fiction.

...[W]hat (if anything) is lost in the switch from print to electronic media? Well, some might argue that the internet is not friendly to the long, thoughtful, carefully considered piece. In fact, I'm one who would make just such an argument. I find it hard to read anything online that's longer than 800 words or so. And when I'm communicating online, I rarely have the patience to write a long piece when I can dash off something and then get feedback for it almost immediately.

Good point. It's one I've more or less made here (and here and, with Hugh Hefner's help, here).

The technology that is moving readers and publishers to the internet and undercutting the business model of publishers is not all one-way, with only bad news for print magazine lovers. I've said before and I'll say again: The technology is already developing (and, with printer-makers' help, already in use in exciting ways) that will make it easier, not harder, for print publishers to launch new titles, revive dormant ones, and thrive in this world. It's the technology for printing and digitally distributing that are the newest game-changers, and it might just prove to be a savior for small magazines.

Whether those publishers put out their new online/print/digital hybrid magazines weekly, monthly, or bimonthly will increasingly be a matter of talent and timing, not postage and distributors costs.

The Old New Republic Redux?

The New Republic magazine, the nearly century-old liberal (and occasionally conservative) political journal from Washington, D.C., may be getting another new owner, just a few years after being acquired by its current, er, new owner. And the new owner might turn out to be an old owner, reports Folio:.

Martin Peretz was the owner when I became a disciple of the magazine in the early 1980s. A friend of the family gave me a subscription (first issue featured the Soviet downing of the Korean airliner), and I remained a loyal subscriber for most of the decade. My devotion waned when the magazine went through some journalism problems (i.e., accusations of bad reporting practices by some of its younger reporters) and the magazine seemed to shrug them off. TNR has always been a little bit too nice to the people it's pals with (friends, former students, etc.). But I still kept up with it from time to time, finally giving up when an editor was reportedly let go because he didn't support the presidential candidacy of Peretz pal Al Gore. (That was the story at the time.)

Wrote Robin Pogrebin in The New York Times in Sept. 6, 1997, when editor Michael Kelly was fired (the "TRB" to which Kelly refers is the magazine's Washington political column):

Mr. Peretz has a well-known friendship with Vice President Gore, who was a student of his at Harvard University. In light of that, Mr. Kelly said, Mr. Peretz was concerned that the magazine's continued negative coverage would hurt Mr. Gore's Presidential prospects.

''I think that he probably saw that I was going to continue writing TRB's on the soft-money scandals, since I had made something of a cause out of it,'' Mr. Kelly said. ''And he made it clear to me that he didn't like that, and that is a subject area that is obviously increasingly involving Al Gore.''

Mr. Peretz, however, said Mr. Gore was not his primary concern. ''I anticipated having differences with Kelly about Gore,'' he said. ''But that wasn't the reason I asked him to leave.''

Kelly, of course, went on to revitalize The Atlantic Monthly before he was killed while covering the Iraq War.

So if the story about Peretz's intentions to repurchase his old magazine come true, what can we expect? Probably not much. He has remained editor-in-chief of the publication under its current owners. But we'll probably continue to get some juicy journalistic melodrama from the magazine, if the past is any indication.

Reader's Digest Brouhaha

While the Reader's Digest Association considers bankruptcy, it's also getting flack from some disgruntled emotional freelancers over two of its magazines that use "repurposed" content. Folio: reports here on the freelancin' controversy. (Seems to me that reuse of the material would or would not be clearly covered in any freelance contract they signed, no? If it wasn't in the contract, then the freelancers have a beef. If it was in the contract, then they have nothing to complain about.)

For more on the possible bankruptcy filing (and its tiny $2.1 billion in debt!), see this New York Post report.

My Favorite Magazines: Fliegende Blätter

Produced for a century stretching from 1844 to 1944, Fliegende Blätter was a weekly satirical magazine published in Munich. If you don't read German, you can nonetheless get a sense of the magazine's style, attitude and quality by looking at these images (click on the image to see it enlarged). What Punch was to Britain, Fliegende Blätter was to Germany.

"Fliegende Blätter" is German for "flying sheets" or "flying papers." The initial thing that I noticed when I saw my first Fliegende Blätter was the gorgeous logo across the top of the first page. Ornate, over-the-top, fanciful, that logo adorned every cover until almost the end of its run, when it was replaced by a boring, non-fanciful, standard typeset logo (just one of the millions of things that the Nazis ruined).

The second thing to attract the reader's attention is the artwork. There is a lot of it, on every page of the publication, and the cartoons and other illustrations were drawn by some of the leading artists of the day.

The third thing is the typeface of the copy. Unusually fancy and overdone for modern tastes, it was once common for entire magazines and books to be published with that typeface. It may look like it'd be too difficult to read, but after a couple sentences, the modern reader (assuming he or she reads German) gets the hang of the two or three confusing letters and can read it as well as boring old Helvetica or Times New Roman. Personally, I love it. I think the more we strip down text and design, the more our magazines and books look like there was no attention paid to them and they were just done as economically as possible. That's obviously my own odd personal bias, but I do think the typeface used in Fliegende Blätter, along with the fantastic artwork, makes it look like every page had a great deal of care and talent poured into it. (Though, for all I know, they were slapped together on deadline by a small staff half-drunk on local Munich beer. If so, they worked well drunk.)

These days when venerable (and not-so-much) magazines are closing up shop left and right, it's nice to discover a great magazine that lasted a century, and even then only died because of a world war and a totalitarian dictator. And that's the way a proud satirical publication should die.

The pages illustrating this blog posting are from copies of the magazine that I own. But a great many complete copies of Fliegende Blätter are digitized and available for free online viewing from the University of Heidelberg.

As I said: What Distributors Should Fear

The shift is already happening. I've written here and elsewhere before that I believe the biggest losers in the technological tsunami washing over the periodicals business will be distributors, not publishers. The publishers will still be able to make their magazines and distribute them digitally; the distributors are having their expensive business model fall apart around them. And now I've found a company that's making this shift happen.



It's called MagCloud, and it's a great first step. It's a service used by publishers (many of them small publishers who couldn't even dream of having the capital to publish a print magazine and get it distributed the traditional way) who upload their magazines in PDF format. MagCloud then does a print-on-demand service, printing the magazines and mailing them to readers as requested.

The per-issue cost is high (20 cents per page plus postage, plus whatever income the publisher would like to earn), but other than that, this is exactly what I have been talking about. It actually increases the ability of people to publish, to publish what they want in their own voice and design, and it drastically cuts production costs (which makes me wonder if some small publications that actually do have budgets might be able to take a portion of the money they're saving by not printing and mailing and/or going through the newsstand and use that savings to subsidize the mag's purchase price on MagCloud; they might still come out ahead of where they are now, financially).

Any of you using MagCloud? What are your experiences and feedback?

Magazine Death Pool

For lively coverage of the steady drumbeat of little magazine hearts being crushed by economics (and sometimes stupid business plans), check out this blog: Magazine Death Pool. It includes pretty much every magazine you can think of that has kicked the bucket, including those (such as Radar) which have done so multiple times.

Magazines that Go Bump in the Night

Here's a funny song about the death match known as the magazine publishing industry. Love it.