24/7 Wall Street to Esquire: Drop Dead

Once upon a time -- well, four years ago, to be exact -- I worked with a woman who had previously worked at Esquire magazine. She noted proudly how that title had come back from a near-death experience the previous decade, when it had gotten dangerously thin and was largely ignored. But she pointed to its resurgence in ad pages (and for all I know in readers, too) in recent years.

It's always nice to see a magazine return to the front lines after being written off by all and sundry. And, though I have my qualms about the current Esquire's direction, it remains a powerful and historic magazine brand, and I wish it many decades of continued life.

But I don't think Douglas A. McIntyre agrees. McIntyre writes on 24/7 Wall Street that Esquire is one of 12 major brands that will disappear. He even calls his article "Twelve Major Brands that Will Disappear."

Many of the other brands are not in publishing: Chrysler, Palm, and he goes really out on a limb and lists AIG. But he does include Architectural Digest and Borders. Borders would be a shame to lose.

But Esquire? Frankly, I don't know what Hearst will use to decide its live-or-die choices, but killing a 76-year-old magazine because of a once-in-76-years economic collapse doesn't seem smart. And I don't think Hearst got stinking rich by being stupid. At the very least, wouldn't they sell the brand? Go online-only?

McIntyre notes the magazine's more than 25 percent drop in ad pages early this year, but that's actually not out of line from recent industry-wide numbers. If he's picked up a copy of Esquire's competitors such as GQ or Playboy recently, he's noticed that they're a lot thinner, too. And the "lad magazine" competitors aren't in much better shape, those that are still around. It's called the Great Recession for a reason.

Will Esquire die? Unlikely. Will Douglas McIntyre think of a meatier subject to write about for his next article? Hopefully.

Magazines Looking for a Pony

When Ronald Reagan was in the White House, he used to tell a story about a boy who was so optimistic that when confronted with a pile of manure, he began digging enthusiastically. Asked by concerned onlookers what the heck he was doing, he replied, "With all that manure, there must be a pony in there somewhere!"

Soooooooooooo, magazine publishers took whopping big hits to their advertising revenue over the last year. According to the Publishers Information Bureau on April 14, magazine advertising revenue for 2009 Q1 was down 20.2 percent compared to the 2008 Q1. And ad pages dropped 25.9 percent during the same time frame. Some magazines were down more than 50 percent, according to Min magazine.

But if it's been so bad, then things will have to get better, right?

Well, maybe not, but hope springs eternal. Folio: reports that magazine publishers are looking for an uptick in their advertising pages -- based mostly on the belief that things have been so bad, they've got to get better. A Hearst publisher is cited saying that "there have been a lot of [advertisers'] budgets that have been held back" waiting for the right time to jump back in. "We’re beginning now to see that open up for the second half."

Hey, I hope she's right. But I suspect more than a few publishers have stopped digging.

Please Excuse This Geek-Out Moment

So, not to belabor the news about Starlog's print hiatus, but news comes from Fangoria (via a posting on Sci Fi Wire) that there will be special editions of the magazine: "Don't get too sad, friends. ... [W]e will still be publishing STARLOG special issues during the year. This is really more of a retooling then an ending."

For this and other responses (the vast majority of which are very sad and supportive, as have been most of those I've seen on other sites commenting on the change; that must warm the hearts of the Starlog folks), see Sci Fi Wire.

I promise: A non-Starlog post here soon enough.

Priced Out

It may sound counterintuitive to be able to increase a magazine's circulation after it raises prices -- even in the best of times, not to mention in a deep recession. But some magazines have found that they are able to do just that, according to an article today in The New York Times.

Titles such as People and The Economist experienced increases in readers even after hiking prices. Meanwhile, I've written here before about the dirt-cheap subscription price for Esquire, which is now cheaper on a per-copy subscription rate than the original cover price of the magazine's first issue more than 75 years ago.

In the Times article, there are some ideas expressed about why raising prices works for some titles and not others. Personally, I suspect it has to do with two things: the readers' income levels (sort of a "duh" answer, but worth noting nonetheless); and whether the magazine in question is a must-buy/first-buy or a secondary title for the reader. Magazines that I read faithfully and that have wormed their way into my heart are largely price-immune to me. But other magazines, the ones I pick up at Borders when I'm just looking for another magazine to purchase, are very price-dependent.

That second point will, I think, also determine which magazines survive this hellish recession.

Reaction to Living in a Starlog-less World (print at least)

The recent news that Starlog was going online-only, at least for the moment, has naturally been commented upon pretty widely. After all, more than three decades worth of issues (and the spawning of a mini-magazine empire that included everything from baseball magazines to African-American women's magazines to car magazines and beyond) means a lot of people had contact with the title over the years.

NewsFromMe.com (which, if I'm reading that site correctly, is written by Mark Evanier) has what I think is a pretty solid insight into Starlog's longevity: "I was struck by generally smart, well-researched reporting that didn't pander. ... [T]here's a temptation to cater to the geeky element that such enterprises usually attract...to focus, as one of my friends once put it, on the Spock ears and not on the actor wearing them. Starlog sold to that crowd without, I'd like to think, insulting or losing those who like their journalism with a few more ounces of dignity. I always especially liked their habit of focusing on the so-called "little people" on a film or program..."

Starlog.com itself includes links to a number of folks commenting on the change. And though this is kind of the epitome of an internet feedback loop (because the Starlog.com article links to my previous post on this topic), I include it here because it also has a number of other folks, such as:

Lee Goldberg's A Writer's Life blog; and

Robert Greenberger's blog. Greenberger is a former editorial staffer of Starlog and its sister publications in the early 1980s, and he was founding editor of one of my favorites, Comics Scene (which was also the magazine that first snagged the talents of longtime Starlog editor David McDonnell, if I'm not losing my memory). Anyway, read his blog post to see his views of why Starlog is going print-less while British SF magazines colonize our newsstands. (You already know my views on the subject.)

Michael Alan Dorman chimes in.

Some comments on the bulletin board of the Boston Science Fiction Film Festival and Marathon. You might have to scroll down to find where the Starlog part of the thread picks up or do a search.

The incredibly named Tombs of Kobol forum has a long line of reactions from former Starloggers.

And, finally, Starlog.com has this great video of a 1984 commercial for Starlog magazine. I've never seen the commercial, so it was a treat:


April 11, 2009, update: Tom Mason has written a very nice post about Starlog that's worth reading.

The Last Print Starlog?

Starlog.com reports today that the April 2009 issue of Starlog magazine (#374, pictured) will be the last, at least for now. The magazine announced "the temporary cessation of the current run of Starlog as a print magazine. After 33 years, and considering the present state of the economy, we feel its time for a major revamp and will be temporarily discontinuing publication while the model and redesign of the magazine are contemplated and executed."

I know it's probably too early to get answers, and in this economic climate, answers might not mean much because conditions change constantly in the marketplace. But since they're floating around in my head, I'll just write out my questions here: My assumption is that when a magazine "temporarily" ceases publication, it's usually permanent. So is this planned as a permanent print shutdown, or is it really a re-tooling? Also, I'm naturally excited about a revamping of the venerable magazine -- I've written here before what I thought needed doing, though I'm not so delusional that I think that's coming to fruition -- but what type of revamping is contemplated is something to wonder about. And will there be a staff changeover? Are longtime editor David McDonnell, managing editor Alan Dart, and art director Heiner Feil out of the picture?

For those of you not in publishing, you might feel tempted to be skeptical about the allusion to the state of the economy and think it's only an excuse, but the economy is very bad for publishing, and the printing and distribution infrastructure in this country for periodicals has -- in my humble opinion -- basically broken down. Even my own magazine has combined issues for this next year to bring our frequency down from 12 to 10 times, saving a lot of money in the process.

The Starlog.com report does state that the final issue in this run of Starlog will be available on its web site in digital format, which is a good move. It is a "modern" thing to do for a magazine that once called itself "the magazine of the future." But on a selfish angle, it's also what I've always wanted from magazines I've liked that have closed up shop (er, temporarily). In addition, the entire run of the magazine will be digitally available on the site at some point in the future, and that's also exciting news.

With the recent relaunch of Starlog.com, there's reason to hope that the outcome for the magazine/brand will be positive and bright, and I'm looking forward to it. There are many ways to launch/relaunch/continue a print magazine today, including one of my personal favorites, the HP-run MagCloud (basically a print-on-demand magazine that's no cost to the publisher). There are also magazines that are distributing only digitally (or digitally in addition to print). Publishers will have to decide whether the persistence of a print magazine on a person's coffee table or bedside can be replicated by an online-only product (and hence I think MagCloud may offer a good future, especially if they can bring down their high per-page costs). But that's their calculation to make.

As for me, I'll just keep anticipating the future.

April 10, 2009: Update.

The Reason

James Warren writes a regular roundup of magazines for Huffington Post. I've read his magazine roundups for years (for many years), going back to my time in Chicago in the 1990s. So I'm glad to see him marry the new media of HuffPo with old media: print magazines!

Anyway, Warren writes that the current issue of The New Republic includes an article about "Why Did New York Stop Growing Basketball Stars?"

And that's pretty much all you need to read to remember why you no longer read The New Republic. Even if I followed basketball, which I don't, I can't imagine why I'd care what the answer is to that question.

Magazine news: Help! I'm Shrinking!

Like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz, the magazine industry is getting smaller and smaller.

Okay, that's an exaggeration, but it is shrinking, and I really wanted to get the Wicked Witch thing in there. (Go ahead, click on the link above; it's worth it.)

Anyway, the New York Post's Keith J. Kelly says the magazine industry is becoming like Germany or other advanced Euro economies, whose populations are declining because births and immigration are outnumbered by deaths. (Okay, he didn't use the Europe-as-magazine-industry analogy, I did. But I'm trying to offer something for the people who didn't climb aboard for the Wicked Witch thing.)

The point is, as Kelly writes, "For the first time in memory, the magazine death rate has surpassed the magazine birth rate." He's referring to the vicious slaughterhouse that was the publishing economy of the first quarter of this year, in which the number of magazines that died just slightly outnumbered the new-birth rate.

It's sort of like ...

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.

Famous Monsters' Famous Mashup

Publisher Ray Ferry, who licensed the rights to produce new issues of famed horror film magazine Famous Monsters from original publisher Jim Warren (following the bankruptcy of Warren's firm in 1982), has lost rights to the title.

Robert Greenberger, writing in ComicMix, reports that the District Court judge issued a pretty clear-cut ruling enjoining Ferry from doing any business with the Famous Monsters moniker, and even issued some pretty tart language ordering Ferry not to, well, bother the court with ridiculous claims.

You can six-degrees-of-separation all you want, but with genre magazines, pretty much everything ends up back at FM: For example, Greenberger was the founding editor of one of my favorite -- albeit long defunct -- magazines, Comics Scene. CS was published by Starlog -- several times; it's a long story -- and Starlog and its sister mag Fangoria have long openly named Famous Monsters as the magazine that created the market niche they later took over and improved.

Is that complicated enough? Well, wait until you get into the mind of Ferry, who, according to Wikipedia (and, well, it is, after all, the changed-by-the-whim-of-the-day Wikipedia) has made odd claims about being persecuted by the legendary FM editor Forry Ackerman and al Qaida.

Ferry lost the case to Phil Kim, who created a new Famous Monsters web site last year and who sounds refreshingly, um, not loopy. I don't know if he plans on ever relaunching the brand as a print publication, but the web site offers nice daily reports on the horror news of the day. (As a more family-friendly horror news outlet than the harder-core –– and more popular –– Fangoria, FM might have created a void that I wonder if Fango itself is planning on filling with its new Monster Times franchise.)

Nothing, it seems, is clear-cut and simple about Famous Monsters these days. Rather odd, for a magazine that was always rather simple in its presentation.