The Colonization of the American Newsstand by Foreign Magazines

During one of my regular visits to my local magazine shop (Fog City News, if you're curious), I was doing my usual review of the various international titles they carry. I was reminded of just how easy it is to buy magazines from around the world today. Whether it's foreign editions of U.S.-based publications or it's publications only produced in some other country, they are now available to us as never before. Not only does this make magazine buying and reading more enjoyable, but it raises the bar for American publishers, because their readers can see the many different (and often better) ways that magazines are produced in other countries.

Fog City News is a dedicated magazine store (well, they also sell chocolate, but that's a different column), so it's not surprising that they would be a good place to find magazines from other lands. But go to any Borders and you'll find Italian and French and some German titles (oddly, no Chinese or Japanese magazines, even here in heavily Asian San Francisco). Magazines from the UK and Australia have an even broader reach, of course, because they don't have the language barrier. When I lived in Manhattan in 2000-2001, practically every street corner had a newsstand where you could buy publications from around the world. (I remember looking at a couple near the subway station in my Upper East Side neighborhood and noticing that you could buy newspapers from Serbia and other eastern European countries, but there was no Chicago Tribune to be found.)

But it wasn't always this easy to find magazines from abroad. When I was but a wee lad, the only place in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where I could find the occasional foreign magazine was at that city's legendary magazine shop (Bosse's News & Tabacco, if you're curious). And before the internet came along -- especially eBay's foreign sites -- and made it easy to buy things from anywhere, you were left with either mail-order catalogs (if you could find them) or going to a large library.

Today, practically any Borders (for example) carries the French, British, and Indian editions of GQ magazine. Without working too hard, you can also get the UK edition of Esquire, the Italian Vanity Fair, French GEO, Chinese National Geographic, and much more.

It means that magazine producers in this country have to be aware that they have new "competition," even if that competition isn't necessarily directly related to sales (and it sometimes is). It means their customers can see magazines from all around the world, and those foreign magazines are often printed on heavier paper stock, are a larger trim size, have more pages, and cover topics that haven't already been done to death by lazy American editors and writers.

For example, the Italian edition of Vanity Fair is weekly, not monthly like the U.S. edition. And it's a thick weekly; it's not as if Vanity Fair Italy produces four thin editions that equal the thick monthly American edition. The German newsweeklies Der Spiegel and Focus are regularly two or three times as thick as Time or Newsweek. And the niche market of science fiction magazines in this country has been almost completely taken over by UK publications, with U.S. titles few and far between.

The bar is raised.

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!

Previewing the Large Hadron Collider -- in Hindsight

In my never-ending efforts to make this blog the world's foremost source of Large Hadron Collider news, I present this one-year-old video of Nobel scientist Frank Wilczek discussing the LHC.

Small Business Media Comes and Goes

The heart of the American mittelstand is losing and gaining in the current media turmoil.

Bloomberg, which recently assumed ownership of the BusinessWeek brand from McGraw Hill, is closing BusinessWeek SmallBiz, which catered to ... well, the name is self-explanatory. Meanwhile, Portfolio, which was an unsuccessful big-business feature monthly from Condé Nast, stayed alive as an online-only venture. It is now being run by American City Business Journals (owned by the same parent company as Condé Nast) and is being refocused as a source of information for small- and medium-sized businesses.

A year ago, I was investigating the possibility of creating a magazine (and related media) aimed at the small and medium business. My goal was to focus on serving the businessperson who wasn't interested in going public, who wanted to build his or her business, perhaps sell it at some point or pass it along to the next generation. Within the strictures of that setup, I wanted it to be something that was as in-depth and high-quality as Fortune or Forbes.

Looking for potential market competitors, I went over the newsstand, and I found regional titles (no, had to be national) and entrepreneurial how-to-get-rich titles (no, had to be professional and about developing and growing a business) and investment titles (no, had to focus on private businesses, not public ones -- those are already covered well elsewhere). But I didn't find anything that fit what I was thinking about, so I figured I might be on to something. I started pulling together a business plan, but then a little thing called The Complete and Utter Collapse of the World Economy came along, so that idea was shelved.

We'll see what the new Portfolio does, and whether the market opening I spied still exists.

Media Roundup: Rolling Stone, Forbes, Red Eye, Starlog, & More

Oh, what a tangled world wide web we weave:

• Not all newspapers are collapsing and shrinking. Red Eye, the Chicago Tribune's free commuter tabloid, is expanding its circulation and distribution, reports the Trib's Phil Rosenthal.
• In an apparent attempt to replicate the success of tell-all books by former disgruntled employees, an unknown (but Jeff Bercovici names names) former employee of Forbes magazine is reportedly writing an insider book that allegedly lays bare things such as a feud between the Forbes brothers. Think of the book as sort of a Devil Wears Prada but boring. Will Kip Forbes get us his restaurant review before deadline? Will Steve return Bono's text message? Who gets to sleep with the Fabergé eggs under their pillow tonight? Turn the page to find out! Or don't.
  
• Speaking of laying bare secrets: It was published in The Globe, so you know it's got to be gospel. The gossip rag published an are-they-or-aren't-they-gay list of celebrities, which Matthew Rettenmund kindly shares. I think you can give little credence to much of it (the suspicions and the denials), but it is interesting to read some of the rumors. Rush Limbaugh? Oh, dear.
• As readers of this site know, I love behind-the-scenes stories of magazine companies, especially entrepreneurial ones. (No, this isn't hypocritical; I don't care about the personal relationships at Forbes. If that book were on the decision-making and history of the magazine -- now that I'd find interesting.) Starlog editor David McDonnell provides another look at his company's experience publishing -- and not publishing -- licensed movie magazines. (It's a follow-up to an earlier article by McDonnell on the same topic.)
  
• This is the oldest bit of magazine news I can report; everyone's already published the news. National Geographic Adventure is being canceled, after a very short attempt to sell it (which went nowhere, because who's going to buy a magazine that either retains someone else's brand or has to be rebranded at cost?). The brand will continue, reports Folio:, in a "multi-platform model." So, they couldn't sell it.
• Speaking of stretching brands across platforms, Rolling Stone magazine is opening a restaurant in Los Angeles.
  

My previous media roundup.

Sandra Bullock's "The Blind Side" Victory

The success of The Blind Side is very pleasing. The movie --about a well-off conservative Christian woman who takes in and eventually adopts a homeless black teenager, who develops into an NFL player -- is what Hollywood calls a family film. But, as Kim Masters explains on The Daily Beast, the film almost didn't get made because it was something that Hollywood didn't know how to handle: A film with a strong, middle-aged female lead, a black co-star, and no explosions.

Others have noted an additional factor that made the film an unlikely success. The most important is that it's a film that is having its greatest success in the South and the Midwest, where moviegoers aren't scared off by watching a church-going family (they see them every day, they are them every day, what's the big deal?). Hollywood doesn't generally do well portraying evangelical Christians (and, let's face it, evangelical Christians have often been their own worst enemies when it comes to establishing a national image). In typical movies, these folks are either Bible-thumping crazies or they are sickly sweet sources of truth (if the movies made by or for the evangelical market, that is). This movie shows the Touhy family as it apparently is in real life, and which even honest secularists need to admit is not a complete anomaly: An honest, fun, good-hearted family.

No, I'm not a conservative evangelical. No, I'm not even an evangelical. But I hate laziness in culture and politics. I grew up in the upper midwest, going to relatively liberal Methodist churches each week (Sunday school and service on Sundays, choir practice on Wednesdays, and often visits on Saturday to prepare for a church play or repaint the youth group room), and I know there are lots of people who take their faith very seriously, who would give the shirts off their backs to someone in need, would never dream of shoving religion down someone else's throat, and who are largely invisible because Hollywood doesn't know how to tell stories involving such people.

I'll get off my soapbox. But only after I add a shout-out to Blind Side star Sandra Bullock; it's great to see her at the top this year.

Sam Zell Out as Tribune CEO

Sam Zell, the Chicago-based real estate honcho who bought Tribune Company and took it private, is no longer CEO of the company, reports Jeff Bercovici at Daily Finance. That will come as a pleasant change for those of us who have watched in horror as the Tribune has been lobotomized by incompetent slashing and burning (I know, mixed metaphors, but work with me here -- it's a real mess).

But it won't be a complete triumph. Notes Bercovici: "The bad news: As chairman, he'll 'continue to provide the management team with strategic oversight and vision' -- the same oversight and vision that guided Tribune into the ditch it currently occupies."

Tribune continues to struggle in bankruptcy. But it's staff might be a little bit happier now.

Post-Reunification Surprise: Germany Still Paying World War I Reparations

Germany is approaching an historic milestone. No, not the anniversary of its reunification. No, not the anniversary of the return of the federal government to Berlin. No, not Roland Emmerich's birthday.

Germany is nearly finished paying off its war debts -- from World War I. Yes, I, not II. The country has only 56 million Euros left from a punitive sum that was originally 226 billion Reichsmarks (later reduced to 132 billion Reichsmarks), according to Deutsche Welle, citing a Bild report. With a little bit of help from decades of inflation, a booming economy, and a cessation of payments during the long interregnum when Germany was divided by the Cold War, the amounts Germany had to pay to bondholders (apparently very patient bondholders, at that) was small enough that most people didn't even know the payments were still being made. Or that Germany still had debts from that war.

It sounds funny to most people. But then again, we'll be paying Afghanistan war debts for decades to come.

The Truth Behind the Tiger Woods Incident ... er, maybe

If you don't understand the narrator, the animated scenes do a pretty good job of explaining what they believe happened. I think. Odd that they'd spend the time creating this, no?

Media Roundup: Jimmy Jellinek Becomes God, Fangoria Previews Stephen King, & More

The latest and maybe greatest:

• Fangoria features an excerpt/preview of the exclusive article by Stephen King slated to run over its next two issues: "What's Scary." You can read the preview. Or come on, don't be a chump. Buy the mag!
  
• New York-based media dude Andrew Fox is claiming to be bidding on lad-mag Maxim, even reportedly telling the mags' owners that if they didn't sell, the magazine would close by spring 2010. The problem? Maxim says it hasn't received a bid and is not in talks for a sale. When writing about Maxim, we can include the obligatory sentence we use with every magazine these days: The magazine has seen a serious erosion in its advertising pages in the past year and it has suffered financial strains that have helped it lose much of the luster it once held in the marketplace.
• So The Advocate is no longer a stand-alone print magazine, right? Well, then why did the company just promote its EIC, Jon Barrett, to the new role of editorial director of Advocate Group, and why is he tasked with growing the brand in "print, online, and television iterations and the HIV Plus brand as well as SheWired.com and PlanetOut.com, which also now operate under The Advocate Group banner"?
• Giant magazine has ceased print publication and will now join the ethereal realm as an online-only brand, reports FishbowlNY.
• Also from Gotham's bowl-o-fish people, is this news that recently shuttered upscale foodie magazine Gourmet has extended itself inside a Condé Nast Epicurious app. Frankly, it's a widget.
• Playboy Editorial Director Jimmy Jellinek has been promoted to God Emperor of Dune -- no, wait, just to chief content officer, a newly created role in which he will oversee all content for the brand's print, online, mobile, TV, film, and radio efforts. Presumably this comes with a company car, an extra secretary, and an additional 30 hours in the day.
  

My previous media roundup.