Mr. Magazine Busts the Numbers of the Latest Magazines-Are-Dying Report

Samir Husni, aka Mr. Magazine (aka Professor Husni at the University of Mississippi School of Journalism) takes apart some lazy reporting about declines in magazine circulation. As usual, Dr. Husni makes good points and demonstrates his knowledge of the breadth of newsstand magazines today.

It's just the latest in the seemingly never-ending debate over the heath of the print magazine industry, in which I work and about which I care a great deal.

On another front in that same war, I have an ongoing debate with a friend over the whole print-vs-digital magazines matter. As I've stated here (and here, extensively) before, magazines that try to do what digital does better are cutting their own throats. Print magazines should offer the in-depth, designed presentation that they do better than online. They should not try to be print versions of web sites with short articles and brain-dead writing that caters to ADD readers.

But beyond that, I do find myself wondering about the need that anti-print people have to kill magazines. Frankly, I don't understand it. I happen to love print and digital, and I have worked in both media. Print mags are hardly standing in the way of digital publications of all kinds, so it's not as if these digital-or-nothing people are in a kill-or-be-killed conflict. Why do they glory over every print magazine that dies, and why do they flame every print magazine that refuses to die?

If they don't like print magazines, then they should just ignore them. After all, I couldn't care less about jai alai, but I don't spend time criticizing it and arguing that everyone who plays it is doomed to irrelevance. Why don't I? Because I genuinely don't care about jai alai. If you love jai alai, don't write me a list of reasons I should love it, too. I just picked that game as one example of the millions of things about which I care not one bit. In short, I think the anti-print people's obsession with the health or ill health of print magazines shows they care about it a great deal. One just can't figure out why.

Have the anti-print people been abused by print magazines in their lifetime, and are they bearing a grudge against this horrible industry? Did they fear that magazines were lurking underneath their childhood beds, waiting to pop out and force them to read long articles on monetary policy or Ray Harryhausen retrospectives? Did they walk down dark alleys on their way to school, fearful of stacks of unread magazines waiting to beat them up and take their lunch money?

I suspect the real reason is related to the fact that magazines remain a challenge to the kool-aid that some of these people have gulped down. They believe that speed and ephemeral trends are the keys to success in the future, and they can't book any contradiction. If print magazines remain a viable source of entertainment and education and information-exchange, then were they really wise to spend hundreds of dollars on that new digital reader? (which they'll replace with a new model in 12-18 months?)

I probably confront more of this kind of anti-print thought than many of you, because I live and work in San Francisco, the heart of the new economy (the good and the bad, the grounded and the fake). But short-sighted, emotion-driven thinking birthed here often drives investment decisions across this country, and it's certainly doing so in the magazine industry. It's also driving publishing decisions. How many magazines do you know that used to run full-page subscription ads for themselves every issue now don't run any? (I can name two off the top of my head.) If the publishers themselves have decided to downgrade their print medium or have given up on it, then why should they expect readers to make a commitment to their print product?

And giving readers a reason to make a commitment to print magazines is what periodicals publishing is about, when it's done successfully. They make a commitment to subscribe to a magazine (which plays into the wacky newsstand numbers Dr. Husni dissects in his commentary cited above), or they make a commitment to look at a magazine each issue on the magazine rack and decide whether they want to purchase it.

It's a greater commitment than deciding to bookmark a web site.

Esquire's #%^*ing "Augmented Reality" issue

Hmmmmm, ... so one of my loves about a good print magazine is that it is a self-contained universe, a worldview designed and written and presented between two covers (well, between four covers, if you're a magazine person). And yet ... alongcomes Esquire, with its December "augmented reality" issue, featuring a vaguely lewd pose of actor Robert Downey Jr. on the cover above a box that reveals who-knows-what under the right conditions.

Samir Husni, aka "Mr. Magazine," found the Esquire experience interesting and useless. I found it, well, completely unfulfilling, because when I finally received my copy of Esquire in the mail, I was first put off by the fact that a mailing label was covering up part of the special box that was supposed to be part of the "augmented reality" gimmick of the issue. I'd heard that you hold up the image to a web camera and something is revealed.

Not quite. Luckily, the idiotic mailing label (which can be placed elsewhere on the cover, you know; it doesn't have to be over the one vision-critical portion of the entire magazine cover) came off without ripping or disfiguring the paper beneath it. But then I was instructed to turn to page 21 of the magazine, where I learned I had to go to a web page and download a zipped file, and then view the cover of the magazine in front of the webcam.

No. I refuse. That's stupid. I mean, bravo, hooray, all that nonsense for a magazine that
is trying new (albeit useless) gimmicks to get attention. But I have to go download some software that I will never use again just to watch what apparently is an ad for the magazine I already hold in my hands?

I give up. How is this better than a normal magazine?

BTW, I have sitting on my desk next to me the June 1940 issue of Esquire (no, I'm not that old; I bought it on eBay, thank you very much). It features absolutely no such gimmicks, but it does feature articles by F. Scott Fitzgerald, examinations of Japanese life, a look at the people around Jack London, and a ton of satire, fashion, comics, and commentary. And much, much more. I hope Esquire -- and all the other magazine editors out there who think they have to trick people into reading their publications -- can come back to earth at some point and realize that people spend time with your magazine if you give them something worthwhile to read.

And you don't have to hold it up to some stupid web camera.

100 New Magazines Launched in October? How Many Are Worth Keeping?

Mr. Magazine, aka Samir Husni, writes that he notes 100 new magazine titles were on the stands in the month of October. From the sampling posted on his blog, I'm amused by some of these magazines. Does the world really need Angels and Miracles? or Men Fetish? Couldn't those two titles have been combined into a new-age evangelical gay leather magazine? After all, it's all about niche marketing these days, isn't it?

Anyway, Herr Zeitschriften says there are two interesting things about this avalanche of launches: There are lots of one-shot magazines, and the cover prices are somewhat hefty (a rough average of $8.66). He makes a good case that one-shots are not going to save the magazine industry, but I'm not sure that's necessarily so. Some one-shots are indeed produced simply to soak up newsstand space, or to steal the thunder from a market niche rival. But other one-shots are test magazines, and if they're successful, they can go on to long, happy periodical lives. Starlog magazine started life as a one-shot dedicated to Star Trek; when the distributor wasn't interested, it was bulked up with other science fiction articles and it went on to be a science-fiction media behemoth for three decades and the flagship of an enterprising (forgive the term) magazine company. That same company relaunched Comics Scene in the mid-1980s as a one-shot; it did so well, it was launched as a quarterly (that became a bimonthly that grew to a nine-times-a-year frequency) and lasted something like eight years.

So I welcome a one-shot publication. If it's well done, and it doesn't look like a cheap knockoff (such as, oh, a hastily assembled "tribute" to a recently deceased celebrity, for example), then I think it actually boosts the claim of magazines as a viable market where ideas can be floated, launched, retooled, and enjoyed.

As far as the high cover prices, I'm actually all for that, as long as we get our money's worth. That's been a theme of this blog for some months, in fact. I've urged a number of publications to take that route, as part of a way of freeing themselves from the addiction to the fickle (and shackling) advertising dollar. If you have a weak editorial product and you're third in your market niche, then this strategy won't work. If you're already a second- or third-buy decision for your potential reader, then boosting your cover price from $6.50 to $8.99 is going to give those people several incentives not to purchase it. But if you're the market leader or a strong second in your niche, a higher price that comes with quality and quantity -- more pages, added investigative or long-form journalism, new columnists, a beautiful redesign -- then you might just save your magazine in the long run.

Think about it. Playboy is still charging just a couple dollars more an issue (by cover price) than it did a quarter century ago, and its subscription price is pretty much the same (and even less, in some of its offers). Yet it just cut its rate base by nearly 40 percent. If they know they're going to be losing readers, why not boost the cover price a couple dollars -- yes, a couple whole dollars -- and deliver more and better editorial in the process. Their readers, in particular, will reward them; Playboy has famously loyal readers.

Starlog could relaunch at $9.99 an issue and boost the page count from what it was in its late run (around 84, including covers). After all, the science fiction media magazine field is no longer dominated by American publishers selling $7.00 or $8.00 magazines. American publishers are barely visible in the SF media magazine field these days; it's dominated by UK publishers, whose magazines sell for $9.99 or even $11.99 -- and deliver a lot more pages and editorial content. Those are the new competition, and there's no need to try to undersell them. They've raised the bar, so compete with them head-on.

On Sunday, I bought two magazines, neither of which is a regular buy for me but instead an occasional buy: Empire and SFX magazines. The cover price of both of them was $9.99, and each had more than 145 pages of full-color content. Why did I buy them? Well, I wouldn't buy an American mainstream film magazine because I find them to be boring and unimaginatively written, but Empire has spirit and great reach into the industry and a vast array of content. As for SFX, I would buy an American competitor if there was one out there worth reading. But with Starlog out of print (along with fellow casualties such as Cinefantastique), I've finally given up looking for an SF magazine not published by Titan magazines or Future, both from the UK. (Hmm, maybe this is the magazine I should be trying to launch ....)

But the $9.99 cover price didn't scare me off, and neither magazine shows any sign of imminent death. So how long will it take for magazine publishers in the United States to stop trying to do cheap-and-weak magazines and start doing pricey-but-quality magazines? If Samir Husni's blog is any indication, we might be headed in that direction at long last.

Samir Husni Interviews Bob Guccione Jr. -- Why Magazines Are Great, How They Can Be Done Well

Samir Husni, aka "Mr. Magazine," posted a very interesting article on his blog, an interview with serial magazine entrepreneur Bob Guccione Jr. It's well worth reading.

Somewhere in my stacks of magazines I've collected over the years, I have the inaugural issue of Spin magazine from the mid-1980s (not the issue pictured here). Spin was a magazine that really had a large impact on the music and magazine industries. But that wasn't the last we heard of Guccione. He also founded Gear magazine and, for a while, was involved with the science magazine Discover. (I had heard rumors a few years ago that he wanted to revive his father's legendary science/science-fiction/futurist magazine Omni, publishing it as a quarterly and bringing his father on board as consultant or in some such role. I haven't found anything more on that, so my assumption is that it is a dead project, at least for now. But as longtime readers of this blog know, I like revivals of dead SF/science/futurist magazines.)

Guccione is a true magazine person, which is clear from Husni's interview. But I'm even more impressed because he seems to think along the same lines I do when it comes to what's hurting many magazines today and how quality, in-depth material is what will keep the survivors alive or birth new ones.

My father, it was his mission in life to create Penthouse Magazine and it was his mission to adhere to principles and freedom of speech, which he manifested far more in attacking the Nixon administration and going after Jimmy Carter, Reagan, the FBI, the CIA and the NSA, much more so than breaking any nudity barrier. That was a pretty simple barrier to break. It was broken, end of game, move on. For years he did fantastic investigative reporting, which is really why he had so many enemies. Those enemies chose to chase him and [Playboy founder Hugh] Hefner on the obscenity issue, but what they were really trying to do was silence the voice that was irritating to them. To take this a little further, how much money is spent on investigative journalism? People think, what the hell, why spend it? They think readers want sex, gossip, cooking, and tips to flatten their stomachs. That’s when publishing is sort of descended into this blandness of just being ink and paper. The thing that was never boring was that it told you stories you didn’t know. It surprised you. I’m sorry, I love food magazines, but I want to startle. A recipe for risotto isn’t going to surprise anybody, yet an article exposing what this or that administration is doing to deprive us of our rights and our lifestyles, that’s something that’s worth reading.

Check out the entire interview. It's worth your time.

Is Maggwire the Google News for Magazines?

No, to answer the question in the title of this post. But Maggwire's similar, a web site offering links to online free articles from magazine web sites. They are also categorized by a wide range of subject matter sections (Food & Wine, Tech, Sports, etc.).

I naturally checked the Comics and Sci Fi category, which was completely comprised of articles from the British SF magazine Sci Fi Now. To be more accurate, they mostly looked like links to the short daily updates and tweets put out by the magazine's staff, not to complete articles from the print edition (though this was admittedly my first time visiting the site, so one day's exposure shouldn't be taken to be representative). Though Sci Fi Now made up all of the links, there was a list of links to publishers off to the right on the page, and that included a whopping three: Sci Fi Now, SFX (another British SF magazine), and Wizard Universe. So far, at least, no Starlog, Fangoria, The Comics Journal, Cinefantastique, etc.

Though the site lacks comprehensiveness right now, it probably bears watching. For an interview with the site's founders, see Mr. Magazine.

Mr. Magazine Does It Again

On his excellent blog, Samir Husni (a.k.a., Mr. Magazine) busts some myths about young people being dumber than posts and not reading. Fears that young people can only view digitized content have terrified publishers of every sort, especially since the UK decided to turn over all research in the country to a 15-year-old intern. But then, when I was a teenager in the 1980s, people thought we didn't read, either, and we did.

Anyway, Husni's blog is a regular must-read. He is one of the seemingly rare people today who hasn't drunk the kool-aid that the Anything But Print crowd is peddling. He knows that print is a different medium from digital; therefore it has a different role, different strengths, and different weaknesses. Trying to do the same thing online and in print is ridiculous. It's time for smart publishers and editors to recognize that and do in print what print does well, and do online what digital does well.

Mr. Magazine on Skin Covers

Samir Husni, aka "Mr. Magazine," writes that the magazines you'd expect to have naked ladies on their covers have become tame, while everyone else apparently has decided nekkid women will help pay the bills. See his always-interesting blog.

Samir Husni on Old and New Newsweek

Husni, aka "Mr. Magazine," gives some interesting perspective to the newly redesigned Newsweek magazine. In his blog, he compares the redesigned magazine with the original magazine back in 1933, noting similarities in sections, treatment of news, and other things.

BTW, his blog is a great source of expert opinions on the periodicals business. He's the very respected chair of the University of Mississippi's Journalism Department.

Mr. Magazine to Launch Magazine Think Tank

Samir Husni, the outgoing chair of the journalism school at the University of Mississippi, is demonstrating his continued interest in and support for the magazine medium by launching what he's calling the Magazine Innovation Center. He's looking for money for the project and gathering support from industry professionals.

To learn more about the center, read his description on his Mr. Magazine blog.