Media Roundup: Enquirer Goes for the Gold, Comic Heroes Update, Profits at Playboy Mag, & More

The latest from the media whirl -- I mean, media world:

I noted here recently the intriguing news that UK-based SFX publisher Future was launching a comics magazine next month called Comic Heroes. One question I posed was whether the magazine would cover more than just the superhero-based comics that were being touted in the press I'd seen so far on the new magazine. Our friendly editors at SFX replied (via Twitter) that "yep, out 16 March - it will cover all kinds of comics." Good news.

More good news from the battered magazine publishing world: Playboy magazine, which has been a punching bag for the digital-only crowd for years, actually made a profit in fourth quarter of 2009, reports Folio:. The magazine's profit was powered by cost-cutting -- including the combined January-February issue (which went on sale in December) -- and by additional newsstand sales of its November issue, which featured Marge Simpson on the cover and which generated some of the greatest media buzz in the mag's history. The entire company had greatly reduced losses for that time period, too, so new CEO Scott Flanders at least has a promising story to tell investors. But Folio: quotes him as saying, "Although each of our businesses has promising opportunities, our operations are subscale in industries dominated by large players. In our business, size matters. Our mission is to create a stronger and significantly more profitable company."

A while ago I also asked in this blog whether Huffington Post magazine blogger James Warren -- a favorite of mine since my Chicago newspaper-devouring days -- was gone for good. I asked him directly (I know, a novel idea), and he responded that he does intend to return to his HuffPo perch; he's currently just too busy with his duties running the Chicago Reader. See, this blog is just full of good news today!

Let's keep the happy feelings wagon rolling, then. Mr. Magazine (aka Samir Husni) reports that January 2009 saw the largest number of new magazine launches in three years.

Let me dissent from the general shock-and-arrgh over the National Enquirer's bid for a Pulitzer in recognition of its uncovering the whole John Edwards affair/love-child scandal. The Pulitzer committee has accepted the tabloid's submission for consideration, so it's in the running. I'm no fan of the Enquirer -- never bought a copy, hope I neve do, and I don't like yellow journalism -- but I have absolutely no problem if it is deemed worthy of the award. Daily Finance blogger Jeff Bercovici agrees. Should it win? I don't know what else it'll be up against in the two categories for which it's being considered. But with the traditional media largely giving up on the expensive (and controversial, so it makes advertisers upset and it scares the MBAs who run the media) investigative reporting that is needed to keep the rich and powerful discomfited. Judge the individual work by its merit, not by the media outlet's whole.

Read my previous media roundup.

Media Roundup: Spencer Pratt, James Warren, Realms of Fantasy, Tiger Woods & More

The latest dispatches from the fun, weird world of media:

• My problem with Men's Health magazine has always been that I'd be reading some item in it that says "People worry that XYZ causes ABC, but new research proves there's no correlation, so eat (or do) more XYZ." And if you're reading fast and lazy like most readers do (myself usually included), you might think XYZ is something you should start doing, and thank you very much Men's Health for the tip. But far too many times I'd be reading the item and I'd stop and think, "Who the heck has ever said XYZ causes ABC? They usually say it causes DEF [for lack of easily available letters]." So I don't read Men's Health. It's a magazine for lazy readers put together by lazy editors. Now, we have proof of it -- and proof that the editors are rather contemptuous of their lazy readers, too: the much-ballyhooed news that Men's Health had repeated -- word for freaking word -- almost every cover blurb on the current issue from previous issues. As Jeff Bercovici reports: "A source who used to work at Men's Health recalls sitting with [Editor in Chief David] Zinczenko and his top editors in cover meetings. 'They had a file of used cover lines and would just pick them somewhat randomly, with no regard for what was in the issue,' says the source. 'Occasionally they'd have to call some poor editor and ask something like, "Hey, is there anything in the issue that involves 792 sexy women confessing what turns them on?"'"
  
• It may have been a bad month for magazine launches in November, but there's at least one new one in December: Publication. Yes, that's the publication's name. Publication. This magazine, focused on street photography, includes a set of prints with the first issue.
  
• On second thought, maybe it's not so noble: Playgirl magazine, which is relaunching its print edition this month featuring those infamous Levi Johnston nude photos, has refused to run alleged nude pix of shamed golfer Tiger Woods. Was it an attack of ethics? No. The magazine's rep reportedly said they couldn't be 100-percent certain the photos were of Woods, so they passed them up. Which means, I guess, that they would have published them if they knew they depicted Mr. Woods. Well, you picks your battles.
• Is Huffington Post's James Warren no longer writing a magazine column on that site? I've read Warren's magazine columns for years, long before I ever even moved to Chicago, where he worked for the dailies. (No, loyal readers -- er, reader -- this is not the same James Warren of Warren Publications fame.) I always found his columns readable, intelligent, humorous, and interesting. Here's to hoping he's just on a long vacation.
  
• This week's sign of the apocalypse: Reality TV thing Spencer Pratt is, according to OK! Magazine, buying a record label.
• The new era of internet communications and British colonization of American newsstands has not been nice to most American science fiction and fantasy magazine publishers. But Realms of Fantasy is doing what it can to adapt. It's just launched a new web site and, perhaps most prominently, it features a promotion that lets you download a PDF of the current issue of the magazine.
  
• Only because Time magazine called it the Decade from Hell: Blogger Chris Roush shares the info that someone at Adweek's promoting Wired as the Magazine of the Decade.
  

My previous media roundup.

Famous Monsters Given New Publishing Lease on Life by IDW

Famous Monsters of Filmland, the pioneering horror movie magazine, is coming back to publishing life thanks to IDW Publishing. It will relaunch as a quarterly magazine in the summer of 2010. 

FM, the brainchild of Forrest J. Ackerman and publisher James Warren, began life in 1958 as a one-shot magazine that proved so popular that it became a staple of the genre publishing world -- and the foundation of Warren's stable of magazines -- for decades, until Warren's company went bankrupt in the early 1980s. The magazine was revived in the 1990s in a rather odd fashion that ended in acrimony and lawsuits.

IDW will probably fare better than the previous owner. Whether it will fare well in the competitive marketplace remains to be seen; that is an iffier guess. The horror publishing field in the United States is pretty well dominated by Fangoria these days, and Fango seems intent upon spreading its market coverage to include the family friendly Monster Times and the more-extreme Fangoria Gorezone. But anything's possible. Fan tastes and company capitalization will win out in the end!

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 ...

The [James] Warren Report

The latest Huffington Post magazine roundup column by James Warren. This week: The Economist, Sports Illustrated, The Nation, The New Yorker, Newsweek, the New York Review of Books, and more.

Which mag will you buy this week?

On Warren on Magazines

Reading Huffington Post's James Warren writing about the latest issues of magazines is almost more interesting and satisfying than reading the magazines. In his latest post, Warren includes an overview of the magazines climbing on the bandwagon of assessing President Obama's first 100 days in office, a journalistic device he correctly labels "lame."

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.

Forrest J Ackerman, RIP

Back to the topic of magazines. A real path-breaker passed away this past week, Forrest J Ackerman. The founding editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, the creator of Vampirella, the literary agent who brought us Ray Bradbury and others, the man who (with his wife Wendayne) brought us the U.S. versions of the German Perry Rhodan science fiction novels, passed away at the age of 92.

There are obviously lots of fans of his in the filmmaking world -- Steven Spielberg, Steven King, etc. But there are also lots of fans of his in the magazine world, or at least in the science fiction and horror magazine world. That's because Famous Monsters was a groundbreaking magazine devoted to horror films, their stars, and not much else. It was presented in an unabashedly enthusiastic way, and I think people of a generation or two before me loved the magazine for that.

It's not an appreciation I can claim to share. When I got into reading science fiction books and magazines, there was a magazine called Starlog that captured my attention, love, imagination, and weekly allowance. Starlog also produced a sister publication, Fangoria, to cover horror movies and related topics. Starlog and Fangoria are still being published, though Famous Monsters died along with the rest of the Warren magazine publishing empire in the early 1980s.

I didn't pay attention to Famous Monsters much at the time, because whenever I took a look, I found it to be lacking in substance, intelligence, and quality. I've occasionally bought an issue (thanks, eBay) in recent years to test my original reactions, and if anything, my views then were overly charitable.

But Ackerman himself (in an interview in Fangoria after he was ousted from his Famous Monsters position just a couple issues before the magazine's death) has lamented the chains with which his publisher, James Warren, shackled him with the magazine, and he apparently couldn't produce the magazine he would have liked. That's a shame. Warren, after all, produced some incredibly fun and exciting magazines like Creepy and Eerie during the 1960s and 1970s. If Famous Monsters had been allowed more freedom, then perhaps Ackerman would be remembered not only as a groundbreaking editor but as a great one.

But Ackerman's triumph is most likely his ability to transmit his enthusiasm to young science fiction and horror fans, through his magazines, books, and personal appearances (for many years, he allowed fans to tour his legendary collection of science fiction memorabilia in his homes, on Saturdays). I never had the opportunity to meet him, but if I had, it wouldn't have been magazines of which we would have spoken, it would have been Rhodan, movie monsters, film directors, and deep space shows. I would have liked that a great deal, and I feel bad that we've lost such a personality and talent.

RIP