Mr. Magazine

It is not an oxymoron. A new PRINT magazine aimed at college kids by college kids. Yes, yes I know, but please keep on reading… University Link magazine describes itself as “an edgy, fun and socially conscious magazine written exclusively for college students by college students that informs and entertains.” When I heard of the newly launched monthly last April, I had to take a double take. A print magazine for college kids! Didn’t all the “media pundits” tell us that college kids are no longer interested in print, and if they are interested, than it is only in free print. So why on earth will someone, anyone, launch a new monthly magazine aimed at college kids and written by college kids and, to top it all, has the guts to charge for it $20.00 for 10 issues.

Well I took my questions to Ali Salomi the managing director and co-publisher of the Southern California based magazine and here’s what he had to say:

Samir Husni: A print magazine for college students? Isn’t this concept outdated? Some say college kids don’t use print anymore? Care to comment…

Ali Salomi: We don’t believe this concept is outdated. We have three years of research that we completed prior to launching this magazine that gave us enough confidence in welcoming the phrase “Print is Dead.” We found that other than local school papers, there really isn’t any print media aimed only at college students. We felt that by publishing a magazine that was edgy and entertaining and at the same time informative we would capture our readers’ attention.

We have street teams that are on college campuses everyday to sell subscriptions and to take surveys from students to find out what they want to read about. We wanted to design a magazine with the reader in mind and because we’re generating income with our subscriptions we’re not beholden to our advertisers for content. We keep the students and their interests first.

We charge the students $20 per year (10 issues) for our subscriptions and DO NOT publish any of our stories FREE on the web. We are the ONLY subscriber-based, college-magazine in Southern California.

With our first issue we had 12,000 subscribers, and our second 15,000. We are forecasting 20,000 subscribers by our September issue and 30,000 by year’s end. For a magazine that just launched (and the first we’ve published), these numbers are incredible. Our reader responses have been amazing and the flood of email from students asking to write for us is always nice as well. Students regularly report to our street team how nice it is to take a “break” from school and read the magazine between and sometimes even in class.

SH: Why is the magazine limited to Southern California and what are the expansion plans?

AS: The magazine is currently limited to Southern California. We did this for two reasons; one was to make sure that the voice of the magazine remains the voice of Southern California college students. It speaks to them in their own lingo and covers subjects within their own communities. We also wanted to assist student writers within the Southern California region. All our stories are written by college students. We are trying to give students a leg to stand on when they enter the world of journalism. By writing for our magazine they will gain hands-on experience while still in school.

The second reason we are only in Southern California is for our advertisers. There are many companies that are located in Southern California who don’t need a nationwide advertising campaign. By advertising in our magazine, they are able to hit a niche 18-24 year old demographic within their own region.

Our expansion plan is to cap off at 50,000 subscribers in Southern California then open up to another major market. Once in another major market, we will publish a magazine only for that area, i.e. University Link Magazine: Miami Edition, it will be a different magazine with different writers and different content. We will use student writers from that area. Our long-term goal is to target 10 major U.S. markets.

SH: What innovative things you consider yourself doing launching ULM?

AS: We consider ourselves the first paid, subscriber-based magazine targeting college students; that is also written by college students. We will strive to keep our advertising costs low, so that local businesses can advertise in a high quality publication.

Best of all, starting in September, we will be launching our “Editor Internship Program.” This will be a 5-month internship program where we will select five students to work with University Link Magazine. During these five months, each student will be able to edit one of our next five issues with the other four interns learning and assisting. The five interns will be working directly with our Managing Editor, Taylor Van Arsdale, who has more than 15 years of editorial experience.

The covers above are those of the first and second issues of the magazine.

Innovation in print is well, alive and kicking. Abe’s Penny: A micro magazine created by Anna and Tess Knoebel, is the latest of such innovation. Each volume of Abe’s Penny “contains four postcards that subscribers receive one by one, once per week, for one month. Each postcard features an image and a few lines of text. The full set of four postcards is a full story.”

This new magazine caught my attention and provided a nice answer to my friend Bob Sacks who spoke earlier in the week in Colorado and defined the word magazine as anything but ink on paper. So, Bob, read my interview with Anna Knoebel and, please, come down from you high horse and discover the beauties (and money making) advantages of ink on paper. (By the way Bob, can you name ten magazines with no ink on paper editions that are making any considerable amount of money? I can name hundreds if not thousands of ink on paper magazines that are making a lot of money, even in this depressed economy).

Well, enough of Bob and plenty of Anna and her Abe’s Penny. I asked Anna:

SH: What was the idea behind Abe’s Penny?

AK: Why does anyone start a magazine? The idea definitely didn’t start with, “Let’s figure out a way to sell advertising.” We were looking for a way to communicate. Abe’s Penny starts a conversation. First, between the artist and the writer, then between the result of their work and the person who reads it.

SH: In this age of digital and digital social networks, what do you
expect to achieve with Abe’s Penny and how do you propose to do that?

AK: Our current aim is simple: to pursue the dialogue. Of course, any print publication competes with online, but we’ve received such positive feedback. People still want tangible things. Another really positive result of starting Abe’s Penny has been discovering communities of people working to preserve letter writing / mail art: Postcrossing, The Letter Writers Alliance, PodPost, etc.

SH: Is there future for print or you are just “yet another crazy print lover”?

AK: We don’t consider ourselves fanatical about print. It’s more about recognizing a common desire to share experiences, and then providing space — in our case a postcard — where those experiences can be shared. It’s nothing new. It doesn’t matter whether you find it online, in something you hold, in people you meet, but it matters that you find it. Is there a future for print? Books have been around since something like 2400 BC. Seems like print will last.

Is there such a thing as a recession-resilient market in our magazine business? Well, for one publisher, Seth Semilof of Haute Living series of magazines, recession-resilient is the key word he built his entire publishing model on. Semilof, together with his partner Kamal Hotchandani, launched earlier this year their fourth edition of the upscale magazine Haute Living. The magazine is now published in four U.S. cities: Miami, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. (Photo: Semilof with Gordon Getty practicing what he preaches)

SH: You hear some people saying that the affluent market is becoming a nightmare instead of a dream, and here you are launching a fourth edition of Haute Living magazine in a fourth major city, acting as if there is nothing wrong with the industry. Why is that?

SS: We consider ourselves recession-resilient. That’s the word we classify it as – recession-resilient. We believe that there is something going on that is wrong with the economy, but, at the end of the day, it impacts someone like Tiger Woods, Kobe Bryant, or Madonna differently. Yesterday Madonna closed on a $40 million home. The very, very affluent, upper one percent of people we’ve always wanted to reach, still have money. They’re still going to buy nice cars. They’re still going to buy nice watches. They’re still going to buy these types of things. I personally believe that, because of this crazy economy, luxury is going to actually become more of what real luxury is. I was with one of the owners of Mercedes, and he was explaining that 40 percent of leases for the C-Series ended in repossession while the more-expensive S-Series only had eight percent repossessed. We’ve always hit our niche and that’s all. We’ve continued to hit our niche. Our niche is simple. In each market, we mail to homes with incomes in excess of $5 million. We hit the private fliers on over 10,000 private jet flights per month. We are in high-end hotels, high-end boutiques, and retail traffic stores. We feel that if we hit those three areas, then we’ve hit what we [call the] money in motion. Our strategy is not trying to hit someone who lived in a $6 million home three years ago, lost his business, and now he’s out—our advertisers don’t want to hit that guy. Our advertisers want to hit the guy that is living in a $6 million home now. We were able to hit him. Launching in San Francisco wasn’t easy at all. It was very hard and very costly, but, in a short period of time, we’ve built a brand with recognition.

SH: A lot of people told us that print is dead, and everything is now going digital. At the same time, you are continuing to launch print magazines. You have “H-Interactive.” You have extended your presence on the Web and are continuing to add things. What are you doing to innovate in print and the Web, and how do you differentiate the two entities?

SS: I do not believe print is dead. I believe print has changed. Things change, and you have to change with them. I think some print publications are in trouble, [particularly] the ones that give you daily information. But for us, it helps us, because we have built the brand for the magazine, because we go to people’s mailboxes and private jets, [and we] use the Internet to our advantage. We’ve built a section called Haute Interactive Media where we’ve built many websites: HauteJets.com, HauteYachts.com, HauteResidence.com, Haute100.com, HauteMD.com and HauteGifts.com. Each website is niche related and updated daily, but also promotes our advertisers, promotes our editorial stories and educates our readers. It also provides the best news on yachts, jets, etc. We use the Internet to complement the magazine and to go to our advertisers with a larger package.

SH: What is your biggest challenge now in the marketplace?

SS: To be honest with you, this economy was great in building our character. The last six or seven months it’s been hard. A lot of our competitors that were 800-pound gorillas and had a lot of money are now struggling or out of business. That is interesting, because six months ago, when I was speaking to advertisers, 100 magazines had classified themselves as luxury brands. Everyone was pitching to advertisers a lot of stuff that I felt was not possible. I used to tell that to advertisers. Now, those companies that claimed they were doing all these great things are out of business, because they weren’t doing those things. And I think given our brand more credibility. In this tough time, we can make it. Today my partner in the magazine secured a very large deal, a monumental deal for my magazine. We signed up to be guaranteed on 10,000 private jet flights a month in 13 major cities around the world. Whether you like it or not, someone that has the money to spend $75,000 to fly one way from L.A. to New York has to have money to buy watches, cars and so forth. And some of our advertisers, Rolls Royce, Cartier and East Coast Jewelers, are still getting amazing results. We just had a client who had an $8.5 million piece of property in Miami put an ad in my magazine. A gentleman on a Net Jet flight saw the magazine, loved the property, bought it sight unseen and paid 8.5 million dollars cash for the property, just through an advertisement in my magazine. This was all because the guy picked our magazine. He was from London. He had just been in Palm Beach on a business trip and wanted to buy that island because it was about 45 minutes away from Miami. I believe print works. I believe now, just like in all businesses, the best are going to survive and a lot will not, but print is by no means dead.

SH: What is your philosophy in picking up the cities. You started in Florida, then New York, then L.A and now in San Francisco. Is there a method to the madness?

SS: To be honest, there is no method to our madness. I looked where my competition wasn’t. At the end of the day, I liked Chicago, but I saw two of my competitors were in Chicago and I didn’t want to be the third. So, the reason why I picked San Francisco was because I didn’t see much competition. There is a lot of wealth in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Marin, and Napa, as I felt this market was lacking a magazine like Haute Living, that would connect each city, and give content that would appeal to most of our readers. Plus, that is where I am from, and it was exciting to go back and build something in a market I live for over 8 years. We only saw one major player in San Francisco, and we felt the market was big enough to have a second player. The same thing happened with New York and so forth. We just studied where our competition was and we stayed away from areas that were heavily polluted.

SH: I know there is a lot of local content in each of the magazines, but at the same time, there is a cross breeding of editorial content among the magazines. There are some articles that transcend the city. How is that decision being made? Is there a formula?

SS: We have built an interesting formula. We share content that write about private jets, private yachts, exclusive jewelry stories, and so forth. Most people in all our markets are interested in reading this type of editorial, from the latest Rolls Royce 200EX, to Cartier’s new watch, to the new trends in men suits. If you live in L.A., Miami, San Francisco or New York, it doesn’t matter to you. This content appeals to everyone, in most major cities. We kept the same name to build the brand, but changed content on a regional level. A lot of our clients drive Rolls Royce’s, so it’s all the same to them. If you live in Miami Beach or Newport Beach, you still are interested in the same type of boats, as they are international brands. We just did an amazing story on a writer visiting the corporate headquarter of Patek in Switzerland. Most of our readers are Patek customers, and found this story very interesting and appealing. What we deliver is what our reader wants.

SH: How did you come up with this idea? What made you wake up one day and say “Aha! There is a void. There is a niche. There is something in the marketplace that no one is doing.”

SS: That’s a very good question. I moved back to Miami to be with my ex-girlfriend. I wanted to get involved in real estate, but I didn’t want to actually sell real estate. I decided to launch a real estate magazine, that would promote listings over $2 million in Miami. I was a big fan of Ocean Drive magazine, the major player in Miami, but a lot of people that I knew weren’t really Ocean Drive readers. I believe that Ocean Drive and my magazine can complement each other. A lot of people when they launch magazines will fight and compete with the big guys. We always complemented them and said, “You should buy ads and read both my magazine and Ocean Drive.” We tried not to copy and do what everyone else does. We tried to build our own niche and brand. A lot of people argued with us and a lot of people thought we were crazy when we launched the magazine. We wouldn’t accept ads that we felt didn’t merit the attention of our readers. If you go look at most of the ads, they’re all name brands. We turn down at least 10 percent of the ads every month if we don’t feel they meet the criteria of our readers. It’s almost like a very high-end nightclub, where they don’t let a lot of people in, but the people they do let in are the quality names. I think that’s how we kind of built our brand. I saw a void in Miami, and I started the magazine and then I got involved with my partner, Kamal Hotchandani. He was able to take Haute Living to the next level. We then decided to build the publication in Miami for the next year, and then launch in New York. After success with New York, we launch Los Angeles, and then San Francisco this year. This has been a thought out process, for the past four years.

SH: What makes Seth get out of the bed every morning and do what you’re doing?

SS: Basically, I love what I do. My partner, Kamal and myself, we love what we do. We love building a brand from scratch. I like when we go into a market and people think we are crazy. I like the challenge. I believe in our product. I believe that the product actually works and the product benefits our advertisers. That is what is so exciting. I constantly hear success stories about advertisers. Getting a lot of new business and making money through Haute Living.

SH: What advice would you give to someone fresh, new? Prestige New York just published its first issue, Niche Media continue publishing and expandiing, and, like you said, everybody wants to be in the luxury market.

SS: Niche Media is a fine organization. I’m a huge fan of Jason Binn and Jerry Powers. I think Jason Binn and Jerry Powers are the godfathers of luxury magazines. What they accomplished is amazing. Jason built his niche, and I think his brand is going to continue to build and go into cities. If I talked to any young publisher, I would tell them, the only way you’re going to make it happen is if you’re selling, building the edit, and distributing. The only reason Kamal and I built our brand is because we were the ones that got the amazing editorial content, that gave us credibility. You can’t buy the story. What people think is that they can get a million dollars, hire a big editor, hire a big sales guy and build a brand. You can’t. If I had to give advice to anybody, the advice is look at how Jerry Powers and Jason Binn build their business. They build it from scratch. When they launched Ocean Drive, they would put blood and sweat. They built everything on their own. I think anyone who wants to make it in publishing should do it on their own. You have to put blood and sweat into it, and you can’t hire somebody to make it successful. I believe if someone has a passion, they can make it happen. I believe a magazine is like a restaurant. Nine out of ten restaurants close within the year. The owner is what makes a restaurant successful. That’s my humble opinion. We’ve done well, and we’ve never tried to buy people to build it.

SH: How far have you come from where you first launched and today

SS: I look at the magazine just for fun. We continue to get better. I think people like us because we grow with our readers. I have advertisers called the “Jills” that are the most successful realtors in Miami. They’ve been with me since day one. They buy two to four pages each issue. Good or bad they’re with me, and we’ve delivered. They can call me up and call Kamal up, and we’re around. Same with Rolls Royce, as we have developed a great partnership, along with friendship. I also take a lot in pride in the team we have built. I have a great Art Department, Editorial Department, and back end that makes our company special. Most of our people have been with us for the past couple of years, as they have been a huge part of our success.

SH: One final question Seth. How many people have you let go since the downturn of the economy?

SS: On the sales side, the only people that I’ve laid off are under-performers. Sales is the most important part of this business, and we have been able to rebuild our team, and hire some great regional people that believe in Haute Living, and are going to help take our brand to the next level. We’ve hired seven new sales people in the last 90 days. It is very humbling, as they all give credibility to Haute Living, which speaks about the hard work Kamal and myself have invested into building Haute Living. We have kept our back office team, editorial team, and distribution team intact.

Greg Sullivan is founder and CEO of AFAR Media, a new media company that is ready to launch a new magazine AFAR this coming August. The magazine’s tag line is Where Travel Can Take You and its content will be solely devoted to international “Experiential Travel.” I asked Greg whether he is crazy to launch a new magazine, in print first and then on the web, in this day and age. Click on the video to hear his response.
By the way, Mr. Sullivan spoke earlier today to our students at Ole Miss about his new magazine venture. Stay tuned to a link soon to his speech on the Ole Miss campus.

Media reporters and pundits these days are having a field day with the quarterly statistics from different agencies reporting the decline of magazine advertising and newspaper advertising and revenues. Those reporters and pundits remind me with an old western where the villains force you to dig your own grave then they throw you in it. All the reports have one theme in common: things are so bad that you will think print is the only medium that is hurting in the midst of the worst economic crisis in our history.

There is no doubt that our established media are hurting, but do not blame the medium. As I have mentioned more than once on this blog, it is the publishing model that is to blame. The American publishing model as we know is DEAD. We need to change and change must be radical in nature.

Well, a lot of new magazines are doing things differently. They are trying to adapt to a new publishing model. We just finished the final statistics of the new launches of 2008 and the numbers are amazing. Here are some facts that you need to know about our industry and about how some “prophets of bloom” are doing to combat all the grave diggers:

Total New Launches in 2008: 697

Launches with a Quarterly frequency or more 196

Average Cover Price $8.10, yes you read that write…almost $5.00 more than the established magazines

Average Subscription Price $28.05, imagine that real price for the cost of the magazines and of course your receive fewer issues (4 or 6 issues for that price).. compare that with 52 issues for an average of $20.

Average Advertising Pages 12.34, way less than the 50/50 split…it is more like 10% of the entire magazine…we are back in the business of selling content first and charging for it the fair price without subsidies…

Average Total Pages 111.01

And which categories were the hot ones? Here are the top ten of 2008

Top Categories

1. Epicurean… 97 (we love to eat regardless of the economy)

2. Crafts… 68 (since we are cooking at home we have time to do some crafts while the food is in the oven)

3. Sports… 62 (armchair sports people are still looking for something to complement their addiction)

4. Home… 44 (see number one, we are spending more time at home, so we better take care of it)

5. Entertainment…42 (finished all the food, done the crafts, read the sports at home, now is time to catch up with our other addiction: celebrities: they are free and will cost you nothing but the price of the magazine)

6. Metropolitan… 23 (there is no better place than home…act globally but live locally)

7. Fashion… 21 (money is low, fantasy replaces reality)

8. Health… 19 (do you really want to count how many articles dealt with stress and how to cope?)

T9. Games… 17 (first it was crosswords, then word seek, now Sudoko is the king/queen of the games magazines)

T9. Sex… 17 (I guess some still feel there is not enough on TV and the web)

And for you, the doubting Thomases of this world and the grave diggers, if you really want to see the magazines behind the statistics all what you have to do is to click here and take a tour of some of the products that folks who do not believe the end is near are doing and succeeding. The first three months of 2009 are already on display.

Learning from the new launches is going to be but one important aspect of the new Magazine Innovation Center that I am launching in August. Stay tuned for more info about MIC and our entire publishing industry. There is HOPE and there is more to come. Enjoy.

167 news magazines appeared for the first time on the nation’s newsstands in the first quarter of 2009. This number represents 14 titles more than the 154 titles first published in 2007 and 13 titles more than the 153 titles first published in 2008. Call it what you want, but yet again the innovative media companies and entrepreneurs have shown a resiliency against all odds, and for that matter against the prophets of doom and gloom.

It is amazing, to see of late, how some media companies are quick to announce numbers of launches and death of magazines and how they are quickly joining the mourners of print in general and magazines in particular. Try to tell that to the folks at Reader’s Digest who just launched three new magazines, or the folks at Stampington Publishing company who just launched four new magazines, or the folks at Taunton Press who launched four new titles including two with DVDs included with the magazines.
The new magazines of 2009 included 61 titles with a stated regular frequency and 106 with no frequency stated. Compare that with 48 new magazines with a stated frequency in 2008 and 106 with no frequency stated. Amazing to say the least, is that in the worst of times American magazines will know that the best of magazines were launched in the worst of times. To paraphrase Charles Dickens, these are the worst of times. Let the new magazines roll off the presses and enjoy the images of the some of the new magazines launched in the month of March.

What do Disney Twenty-Three, Dirt Rag Bicycle Times, and Big Man have in common? They are but three new magazines published in the midst of the worst economic times we’ve seen in our lifetime. However, when in comes to new magazine launches last month, the numbers beg the question What Recession? 81 new titles appeared for the first time on the nation’s newsstands in February (the best February yet) despite all the problems with the wholesalers and distribution channels. In one way or another those magazines found their way to the retailers and offered readers options to buy one out of 30 magazines published at least four times a year, one with a twice a year frequency, four annuals and 46 specials or book-a-zines.
When I announced earlier this month my intentions to create the Magazine Innovation Center this coming August, I knew that, despite the prophets of doom and gloom, that there is still a long long life for print both in the magazine and newspaper business and that the end is not near. The host of new magazines being published now are not but a case-in-point that we are not dead, but rather our publishing model is. Take Disney Twenty-Three magazine (named after the founding of Disney in 1923). The over-sized 64-pages quarterly aimed at the D23: The Official Community for Disney Fans sells for $15.95 and quotes Walt Disney on its back cover saying, “It seems to me that we have a lot of story yet to tell.” Yes indeed.
Another case-in-point is the Purpose Driven Connection magazine published by the Reader’s Digest Association. The quarterly sells for $9.99 and offers readers a 144-page magazine, a DVD and a Six-Session Video-Based Study Guide for Small Groups taught by the Rev. Rick Warren.
The aforementioned magazines are produced with an “outside the box” run-of-the-mill publishing model. Both have “membership” as a base for that publishing model. Remember the “good ol’ days” when National Geographic will not give you a subscription to its flag ship magazine unless someone nominated you for membership in the Society? Innovation does not mean that we have to come up with ideas that have never been tried before. Innovation means to stop, think and find ways to enhance and add to the power of print and its abilities. Innovation means to stop acting in a state of panic. We have to take time off, to think and to do “publishing” in a different way that we’ve done for years.
Take a look at some of the new launches and spread the word: Print is NOT dead, it is the publishing model that died last September. Let us work on finding a new model. Let us INNOVATE.

To borrow a phrase from our friends in the United Kingdom this is the age of the Super Glossy Magazines. POP magazine may have started this trend eight years ago, and now comes the ultimate super glossy: Mirage. Conceived in South Africa and printed in Germany with a worldwide network of offices and ad reps, Mirage offers a 360-page picture book utilizing the best printing techniques and opting for the best paper combination to create “an international fashion and swimwear magazine inspired by the worlds of jetset hedonism, old school attitude and a certain adolescent nervousness.”

The first issue of Mirage is anything but a mirage. It is as real as it can be. You can hold it, feel the paper, engage and interact with the images, display on your coffee table and in fact start a conversation with anyone who visits you and see the Mirage displayed on your coffee table.

The magazine is published in limited editions of 25,000 and sells for $16.95. Mirage promises “a provocative and universal subject: a new generation of hot boys and girls taking a stand against mediocricy.”

Mirage combines “jetset hedonism with 21st century voyeurism” and provides solid proof for the Thomases of this world, that print even makes a Mirage something that you see, touch and enjoy. Check the magazine on the newsstands and its media kit here.