Publishing Western Fashion Magazines in Conservative Middle Eastern States

Interesting story from AFP about the tribulations of publishing foreign editions of Western fashion magazines in ultra-conservative Middle Eastern countries. France-based Elle and Marie Claire both publish foreign editions in the Middle East, but the biggest challenge seems to be their Saudi Arabian editions. Short of coming out with editions aimed at the autonomous mountain regions of the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, I can't imagine a tougher sell.

"We are very careful not to provoke uselessly, we don't want to be banned. It would neither help social progress nor the status of women," said Jean de Boisdeffre, who heads the international media arm of Elle owner company, Lagardere Active.

Good luck.

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.

Tribune Reorg to Include Widescale Selloffs?

The Chicago Sun-Times reports on possible outcomes of the Tribune Company bankruptcy reorganization drama in Chicago. Real Estate investor Sam Zell bought Tribune and took it private two years ago in a heavily leveraged deal. Though the core properties in the group -- including the Trib and the LA Times -- were profitable, there was billions of dollars in debt, and the company was then double-whacked by the current economic crisis.

Creditors are losing patience with Zell, according to the Sun-Times, and Zell could be forced out if they come up with their own reorganization plan. If that happens, the creditors would take control and could do a widescale sell-off of Tribune Company papers and other properties. (The Chicago Cubs are already for sale.) Besides the Tribune, Cubs, and Los Angeles Times, the company owns Chicago magazine, WGN tv and radio ("WGN," by the way, stands for "world's greatest newspaper," which actually once was the boast of the Tribune), Tribune Entertainment, and more -- oh, just let Wikipedia tell you.

Very sad to see a once-great media firm go through such tribulations. I frankly don't know if they're better off with Zell or the creditors in charge; it looks like either way, the company will be chopped up.

Magazines: New Scandinavian Architecture & Urbanism Magazine Launched: Conditions

It's cold over there in Scandinavia. While they're sitting around in their quaint cabins dressed vaguely like elves, the Scandinavians spend their time designing and creating things. Usually good things. Modernist furniture, Saabs, mobile phones.

Now they've put all of their IKEA stock dividends to good use and launched Conditions, a "magazine for architecture and urbanism." Visit the web site; if you click on the link for "current issue" and scroll down, you can see some (small) sample spreads from the magazine's first issue.

Another magazine to watch for, assuming it gets much distribution here.

You can check out the mag's blog here.

It's funny; I've never thought of Scandinavia as a magazine powerhouse -- and it isn't. Nonetheless, there's also a men's fashion magazine from that region called DVMan, which also publishes an English-language edition I've seen at Borders and other U.S. booksellers. Also, not a bad magazine.

Magazine News: Because We Need More of Us

Spinoffs have given the world some good things: Heavy Metal spun off from National Lampoon; Fangoria spun off from Starlog; Sports Illustrated spun off from Time; Lou Grant spun off from The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

On the other hand, spinoffs have also given the world some bad things: Happy Days begat Joanie Loves Chachi.

So it's probably a toss-up whether one should be worried about the end of civilization because Us Weekly is putting out a spinoff called Us Hair, which will focus on ... * can't type ... this ... sentence * ack * ... focus on -- celebrity hair styles. It is going to be something called a "bookazine," reports WWD. That means it's a one-shot, no-ads publication sold on magazine stands, destroying America's moral fiber copy by copy.

Us Weekly King Jann Wenner apparently also wants to spin off a magazine called Us Style, adds WWD, but that has been delayed by either the current bad economy or an attack of common sense.

Afar Launches with a Party -- a far, far away

The New York Times is all agog that there is actually a launch party for a magazine in these bad economic times. In this case, the new periodical is a pretty cool-looking "experiential" travel magazine called Afar. The Times spends way too much time telling us what food was at the party, and not nearly enough about the magazine, its prospects, or its team.

Anywho. The magazine does sound very interesting. I just wish I could find it at a local bookstore or magazine shop. So far, nada.

Newsweek: The Good News about Magazines Isn't That Good

Big whoopidy do. Newsweek reports that, despite an industry-wide drop in ad pages of 28 percent for the first half of 2009 (compared to the first half of 2008), some magazines have actually increased their ad pages.

Well, one would assume some magazines would. It's pretty unlikely that, of the thousands and thousands of magazines published regularly in the United States, absolutely none of them would have experienced an increase even in these dire times.

The article looks at a handful of these lucky publications and explains how they did it -- such as luck, or increased visibility from a redesign, or being in a hot niche market (such as organic gardening), or some such. In other words, not much there that can be applied widely ("Rule number one: Be lucky. Okay, now, get out there and be lucky!").

I think what bothered me about the article, which really is rather harmless, is the headline deck: "Magazines aren't dead ... at least not all of them. A look at publishing's page turners." It just oversells -- pardon the wording -- what is really an unspectacular article. Reading the article will tell you nothing about what's really going on in the magazine world, whether magazines are really dead, how much of the industry's problems is cyclical and how much of it's long-term, who screwed up, how to get things going, or whether basing your magazine's income mostly on ad sales instead of cover price and subscriptions is really the only or best way to go for every publisher.

Maybe You'll Get that Next Issue, Maybe You Won't

The ever-snarky Magazine Death Pool reports today that Seed magazine has informed subscribers that the August issue hadn't mailed yet and they didn't know when it would be mailed. I'm not a subscriber, so I can't confirm that, but it doesn't sound good.

Seed always struck me as a magazine with good content that was totally undercut by an inexplicably bad design. Nonetheless, if the MDP report is true, I'd be sorry to see the death of a science magazine. Let's face it: Our world is not suffering from a surfeit of rational thought and actions.

But it does remind me of my brief sojourn at a small tech magazine half a dozen years ago. I basically relaunched the magazine under a new title and only stayed for a few issues before moving to a better job, but I never saw any of the issues on which I worked. That's right: We never got them back from the printer, because the publishing company was so far behind in its bills.

Presumably they eventually paid some of their bills, because the magazine limped along for another year or two before going to that great magazine rack in the sky. But I've never found a copy of any of those issues that I put together (and for which I wrote a lot of articles, pleaded with a lot of writers to write articles -- because we were so far behind in paying writers -- and edited a lot of articles).

Has any publisher ever missed mailing two or three issues of a magazine and then had a recovery that led to them publishing the title for another decade or so? I doubt it, and I really doubt it today, when advertising is scarce and investor or bank credit is difficult to get.

James Warren Loses Famous Monsters Court Case

Abandoned. That's the ruling of a recent Philadelphia court hearing the case from legendary publisher James Warren, seeking to assert copyright over images of his former monster movie magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland.

Famous Monsters ceased publication in 1983 when Warren's publishing mini-empire went out of business. Later, the title was revived by publisher Ray Ferry, who published it for a number of years before ending in a legal free-for-all. At issue in the court case was whether a book, Famous Monster Movie Art of Basil Gogos, had violated Warren's copyrights on the cover paintings by the famed Gogos by reprinting images of the covers in the book.

The court said no. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports:

[The federal judge ruled] that James Warren - the publisher who created Famous Monsters of Filmland - had effectively abandoned any claim to the title of the magazine that began the horror-fan magazine genre 51 years ago.

Warren's association with the magazine ended in 1983, wrote U.S. District Judge Michael M. Baylson, and since then, "Warren has taken virtually no action to retain his common-law ownership of the mark. Indeed, for almost 25 years, he has not published another issue of the magazine, and has not engaged in a substantial attempt to sell memorabilia or anything else with the Famous Monsters name."

The Legal Intelligencer notes:

Baylson also rejected Warren's contention that publication of the book interfered with Warren's plans for a coffee-table book on his magazines, noting that Warren had taken no significant steps to produce a book until after Spurlock's book was published, and that witnesses had testified that Spurlock's book would not adversely affect the market for Warren's book if it were published.

Frankly, I hope Warren does plan such a book, especially if it only focuses on Famous Monsters. That could be quite a book. On a different track, other Warren titles -- the comics magazines Creepy and Eerie -- are being collected and republished by Dark Horse in a series of deluxe coffee table editions. Could Warren also (or instead) publish a collection of reprints of Famous Monsters? I think they'd have a good chance at finding an appreciative audience.

All of which does suggest I just might have been correct when I wondered on this blog many moons ago whether Starlog was keeping its claim alive to discontinued print titles (Comics Scene, Future Life, Cinemagic, Fantasy Worlds) by using them as headers for special sections of that magazine. Just wanted you to know how darned perceptive this blog is ...

Dollar Store Magazines

With the purchase of TV Guide for $1 by OpenGate and the talk about McGraw Hill selling BusinessWeek for $1, one naturally asks: What other media company would I pay $1 to buy?

Chicago Tribune: It shrinks and shrinks, and the city of Chicago's once-great panoply of news options shrinks, too.

Starlog: It shrunk and shrunk, and now is no more, at least in print. I might even double the price for this one.

Playboy: Domestically in print, it's severely challenged; online and internationally, it's doing great. Too bad what I care about most is the print.

Esquire: Its leaders seem bored by the very idea of putting out a magazine, but it remains one of the great brands in men's publishing.

Boston Globe: Well, it is for sale. But then, I'd probably have to pretend to be a Red Sox fan, so $1 is way too much.

Discover: We have got to change the design of this magazine. Generally good content is lost in a world of san-serif madness.

InStyle: Okay, I admit, I'd only buy this one so I could close it down. Pure snobbery on my part, but I apologize not.