By now you've probably flipped through the fall fashion books, and made your way to a bikram yoga class to work out all the kinks in your back and shoulders that tend to afflict persons carrying an extra 21 pounds — because that's how much weight you were lugging around if you picked up the September issues of Allure thru W. (For what it's worth, it's lighter than last year's load.) The crowning jewel of the heavy mags was, of course, Vogue, whose 798 pages weighed in at a whopping 3.74 pounds. [Folio] It's just Anna Wintour's way of telling this year's runway models how much weight they have to lose if they plan on walking in this season's shows.
You already knew that Barack Obama was outpacing John McCain's magazine covers 20:1. What you didn't know, however, is that Barack Obama's tie is outpacing John McCain 20,000:1. (Scroll to the 1:00 mark.) This, from a guy who was on the cover of Men's Vogue — where at least he was wearing a slightly different tie.
Pastor Rick Warren was the guy who moderated the debates where McCain's cone of silence fell off. Now the popular evangelical with odd taste in facial hair is getting his own magazine with the Reader's Digest people. Maybe!
Everyone is keeping pretty mum about the possible project, which will center around the ideas he promotes in his book, A Purpose Driven Life, which you needn't read or even scan on Amazon to figure out its premise.
But with the magazine industry enjoying a massage from a cheese grater, will religious articles from the guy who thinks churches will solve AIDS be the injection that the flailing biz needs? Actually, yes:
CONTINUED »
Aw, cute! Hallmark Magazine is currently thriving in a veritable print depression, while every other magazine has cut corners. Rolling Stone is left scratching it's head and shrinking its size while circulation for Hallmark is expected to rise by another 100,000 units this year to bring in a total of 800,000 readers (double of what the mag started with in 2006). So why is a magazine that doesn't even put human beings on the cover all the time bitchslapping the competition? Several theories from the people that work there: CONTINUED »
Soon, you'll be Wiring Tomorrow's Jaw. Oh, the childhood fun that can be had when a photo editor let's the cover model block out the name of the magazine. With a properly placed head, Redbook could become Reebok; More could become Mo'; and V could become, well, a sexual innuendo. [via PS]
(Click to enlarge)
Sourpuss Jeff Bercovici takes a crap all over the magazine industry's single bit of good news: web traffic is up. Except he's totally right! Magazines' 8.5 percent lift on the Information Superhighway is nothing compared to, say, WSJ.com's 94 percent increase in HTTP:// activity. [Portfolio]
The nation's two leading gay print magazines, Out and The Advocate, were, until this month, owned by PlanetOut Partners. In a deal that's just closed, they are now the property of Regent Entertainment, the gay-focused entertainment company behind pay-channel Here! TV, which picked up the magazines for a song: $6 million, paid in a complex (read: we still don't understand it) advertising deal that didn't involve cash. That's because PlanetOut is basically a junk bond, carrying so much debt even Bill Gates' attempt to save it with a cash infusion didn't work. How come? Because somehow, even with all those ad dollars leaving television and fueling the Internet and niche markets like GLBT, the magazines are suffering. But also because it's generally accepted knowledge that the gays don't need a gay magazine anymore; Details and GQ are filling the void for fashion and lifestyle, while blogs like our own Queerty is where they're going for the news. Which explains why The Advocate, once the place for gay news, is admitting it's losing the battle to survive: CONTINUED »
Vice Magazine is throwing a little bit of a hissy over in their mail section, over the fact that no one sends them nice letters (and gifts) anymore:
We mainly get emails now, and people don’t think when they write emails…..And we used to get great letters. They would arrive in decorated envelopes along with goofy little tokens, tchotchkes, gizmos, and gifts inside — even cheap stuff like newspaper clippings or a photo or a drawing was nice.
So now readers are being "punished" by the suspension of the letters column for one month. Let's see if you can't shape up and behave yourselves when dealing you're dealing with a recently-grown-up magazine like Vice.
Not to harp on the "art vs. commerce" idea any more than is absolutely necessary, but here's some more quaint proof that the editorial pages are currently being dictated by the advertising dollars: The annual, and completely baffling, Quest 400 list of the best and brightest (and wealthiest and most influential) contains over 1,300 names this year — because the society magazine managed to include all of its advertisers. If you really desire to find out who's upgrading to a 300-foot yacht this year, see the complete list.
With print revenues in steep decline, Time Inc. should be commended for trying anything to buoy the industry. Its latest stab at keeping Fortune subscriptions up is Maghound, the Netflix-esque service that lets users subscribe to a fixed number of magazine each month, but swap out those subscriptions for other titles at their convenience. The service has its critics, who say the model for this sort of thing — media on demand, like iTunes, TiVo, and even Netflix — are banking on digital products, not print, which is how they're succeeding. But publishers are likely to still sign on, since it's one more chance to generate subscriptions, or, at the very least, paid circulation, since each copy they move through Maghound will count as a single-copy sale, or the equivalent of of a newsstand sale. (Even though the prices will be deeply discounted.) So we should all be singing the praises, then, of Time Inc. for so selflessly coming to the rescue? Ehhh, not equite. CONTINUED »
Newspapers are choking out their final goodbye, while the magazine world, by all accounts, is not fairing much better. Overall, the industry is slimming down after a rough first quarter, and many publications are trying to combat the effects with the largest cover price jump in history. But those numbers are skewed toward bigger competitors who average the most readers yearly, while all but ignoring the smaller trades whose hurt has not been as wide. And not all the mags have been having a hard-go of it: Trash bags People and OK! both saw revenue and units increased, despite an increased sales price. Why? Duh, quality, or inferred quality, of the product: CONTINUED »
The magazine industry can no longer float Playgirl, and half of print's readership suddenly vaporized, with titles like Vogue and W even seeing declines. So this must be a great time to start a new magazine, yes? Enter Boho, which looks to be a catalogue for the store Anthropologie but is actually a women's fashion and service book for those who agree with Graydon Carter that the West Village is still the den of bohemia.
Fine.
But then they started throwing around words like "inner hippy" and "thrift-shop," which are usually followed by "hair lice" and "not shaving," and this we want no part of. Below, see what else is in this 1960s guidebook. CONTINUED »
Samantha, Mark and Charlotte Ronson grace the pages of the latest issue of Harper’s Bazaar in a fairly boring article that only gets exciting when — who else? — Lindsay Lohan becomes the topic of conversation.
The Knox and Vivienne Jolie-Pitt issue of People supposedly moved "only" 2.5 million newsstand copies, considered a disappointment for its share of a $14 million investment. The September issues of fashion glossies like Vogue and W have been dieting; they're hitting newsstands with fewer ad pages, when this month's editions are supposed to communicate heft.
Need more evidence the magazine industry should just throw in the towel?
Jann Wenner is taking Rolling Stone for a dip in the pool, and letting shrinkage kick in — he's cutting the book's signature size by 25.5 square inches. When the new Village Voice hit, we mistook it for an insert. What to think of the new Rolling Stone when its itsy-bitsy form hits newsstands in October? CONTINUED »
Americans are picking up magazines half as often as they once did, sez the latest ABC circulation data. This might be because magazines are a luxury, and in an economy where everyone is tightening budgets, they're expendable. Or maybe because the $3,500 dresses, $85,000 watches and $210,000 sports cars magazines regularly feature are, for readers, no longer aspirational reminders of what's possible, but nightmarish Post-It notes about what will never be. CONTINUED »
Editorial Director
