Mr. Magazine

Jeremy Leslie, editorial director and founder, magCulture.com in the United Kingdom, spoke at the ACT2 Experience last week. His remarks about the Experience are on his blog here and below is the section regarding the ACT2 Experiences blog here

The final leg of the trip was south to Oxford, Mississippi and Samir ‘Mr Magazine’ Husni’s ACT2 Experience. I first met Samir when we invited him to deliver a keynote at Colophon2007, so it was a pleasure to return the favour. He’s director of the Magazine Innovation Center at Mississippi University, and this was the second ACT2 event he’s organised. I enjoyed meeting fellow speakers including editors Will Pearson of Mental Floss and Franska Stuy from Dutch title Libelle, but the main point was for Samir’s students to get rare time with professionals. Each speaker was allocated a student ‘shadow’ to look after them but also share time together – so a big hello and thank you to my shadow Ben. Hope you’ve sorted a name for your magazine!

While much of the conference was business-orientated, my role was to talk about creativity and share some magazines the audience might not know. The primary message of my talk was simple – quality counts – but I was pleased to have that echoed by a number of other speakers who were generally very positive about an industry so often described as in decline. My secondary message, however, that there have been too many magazines and fewer was better, was a harder sell and I fear I’ll be remembered as the speaker who celebrated closures!

Also on the schedule: a trip further south to the Mississippi Delta, driving through cotton fields to Clarksdale (above) and the Blues Museum and briefly meeting Morgan Freeman (God!) at his Ground Zero blues bar in the same town.

Thanks to Samir for a hugely enjoyable event, and to Lily and Shawn for the drives to and from the airport.

Thank you Jeremy and all those who attended and those who spoke at the ACT2 Experience. Stay tuned to ACT3, tentatively scheduled for Oct. 16 – 19, 2012.

The ACT2 Experience at the Magazine Innovation Center @ The University of Mississippi’s Meek School of Journalism and New Media ended last night. However, while the events came to a conclusion, the Experience continues and the lessons from the aforementioned Experience continue to be bountiful. Here is lesson one written by Tony Silber on his blog at Folio:.

Sid Evans on What Southern Magazines Can Teach the World About Media
A report from the ACT2 Conference.
By Tony Silber

To watch Sid Evans presentation at the ACT2 Experience click here.
What’s the difference between Garden & Gun and Portfolio, two award-winning magazines that were both launched in 2007?

Other than the obvious response—Portfolio is out of business while Garden & Gun thrives—for Sid Evans, the difference comes down to one word: Soul.

Evans, the group editor of Time Inc.’s Lifestyle Division and founding editor of Garden & Gun, says being “soulful” makes all the difference between magazine success and failure, and it’s something Southern magazines can teach the world.

Evans was a keynote speaker at the ACT2 Conference in Oxford, Mississippi, and in his presentation, he offered seven key ingredients for success of Southern magazines, ingredients that all magazine brands can emulate. “Our first cover had Pat Conroy standing in a fountain,” Evans said. “It was not a choice a focus group would have made. But to me it made sense!”

In music, art, literature, architecture, food and more, there is “an abundant, rich life” in the South, and that’s what people want, Evans said. “We were a general-interest magazine about Southern culture, and it struck a nerve immediately,” he said. “And somehow, that translates beyond the South.”

Here are Evans’ 7 ingredients of successful Southern magazines.

1. Make people proud of where they’re from. Think about what was going on in the South in 1966, when Southern Living was launched, he said. It wasn’t great. “But Southern Living was about a civilized, gracious place.”

2. Make food the center of everything. “Food is what binds people together,” Evans said. “It’s what they talk about. And it’s not just the recipes, it’s the stories—the barbeque joint that’s been around since the 1950s. The term ‘American food’ doesn’t really mean anything—but Southern food, that means something.”

3. Never underestimate the power of a great story. “A lot of the media world has lost sight of that fact,” Evans said, recounting a story in Southern Living of how people survived the devastating tornados in Alabama earlier this year, and how it touched people all over the world.

4. Never underestimate the power of nostalgia. “Even as you do Facebook and develop a Twitter presence, remember nostalgia,” Evans said. “At Garden & Gun, we got a letter from a reader in New Jersey who said we made her nostalgic for a place she’s never been. We did story on Facebook about Southern sodas, regional sodas that people grew up with. It was like someone dropped a bomb on our Facebook page!”

5. Have a drink. Southern Living has had a “tortured relationship” with alcohol over the years, Evans said, but now, alcohol is a regular part of the magazine, as it should be. “When you do a story about a mint julep, you’re doing something about more than a drink,” he said. “When you think about most kinds of alcohol, they come from somewhere else. But bourbon is ours. It is uniquely Southern.”

6. Pick the right heroes. “One of the things that makes Southern magazines unusual is that readers treat celebrities as members of an extended family,” Evans said. “When you’re writing about celebrities, you need to be careful. If they don’t seem real, if they don’t represent the South well, then you lose credibility with readers.”

7. Make your readers the star. “Elevate them,” Evans says. “Recipe sharing is a huge part of the culture—a kind of cultural secret weapon.”

And in the end, Evans repeated, a magazine should “be soulful. It’s not a business strategy, but it is a business philosophy.”

The ACT2 conference is organized by Samir Husni, director of the Magazine Innovation Center at University of Mississippi the journalism school, and widely known as “Mr. Magazine.” The two-day event, in its second year, has doubled in size from 2010, Husni said.

To watch Sid Evans’ presentation at the ACT2 Experience click here.

Long time ago, in not a far away place, magazines used to consider their subscription cards as a legally binding contractual agreement with their subscribers. If you subscribe for a magazine for a year or a specific number of issues, the magazine used to honor your subscription to that entire period of time. You subscribe for six issues, you get six issues regardless of the frequency of publishing. You subscribe to one year, you receive a one year of magazines unless there was a specific number of issues mentioned in that one year subscription. Frequency was and should never be the basis for magazine subscriptions.

Well, yesterday I received a post card from Sporting News Magazine. It read, “We have decided to merge the bi-weekly (28 issues a year, including four double issues) print edition of Sporting News Magazine with our affiliated Sporting News Yearbooks. The resulting publication will continue to be called Sporting News Magazine, will be published monthly, and will generally focus on one seasonal sport preview.” So far, so good. You will say it is a sign of the hard economic times.

My subscription to Sporting News Magazine runs until May 21, 2012. So, I figured they will take the number of issues remaining in my subscription and extend my subscription to the new monthly until all my issues have been sent. Well, I figured wrong. Instead of receiving at least another 14 issues of the magazine, I was told that “after serving your October 10, 2011 issue, you currently have $4.60 remaining on your paid subscription to the bi-weekly Sporting News Magazine. To fulfill that, we will send you 1 issues (sic) of the monthly Sporting News Magazine.” Yes, you have read that right, 1 ONE issue left. The card went on to read, “If for any reason you choose not to continue receiving Sporting News Magazine, please contact us at 1-800-777-6785 (U.S. only) for a full refund on the remaining dollar value of your paid subscription.”

I called the number and was put on hold for ten minutes because they are “experiencing heavy calling volume and if I want to cancel I can go to sportingnews.com” I tried the number again today and received the same recorded message. I opted to wait and when the subscription agent took my call, she explained to me the change in frequency and the way they calculated my remaining “dollar value” from the magazine. She also told me that the new cover price of the magazine will be $8 and the Nov. issue will be a double issue with a $16 cover price, so the magazine is doing me a favor by rounding up by remaining $4.60 and sending me one issue with the $16 cover price.”

I am sure that the folks at Sporting News Magazine have cleared this deal with their lawyers and accountants, but even if it legally a way-out of fulfilling their subscription obligations, I do not believe it is the right way or the moral way to deal with the folks who believed in their magazine and subscribed to it for a lengthy period of time. Even if it the legal thing to do (and I am not a lawyer) I do NOT think it is the right thing to do.

Sporting News Magazine should respect the contractual agreement it had with its subscribers and should honor that either for the number of issues remaining or the time frame remaining. Asking folks to cancel their subscription if they do not like the alternative is indeed a sign of the these tough economic times. I said it once and I will say it again, magazines and newspapers are not dying, but too many are committing suicide. I wish Sporting News Magazine with its 125-year history will not join those who “are committing suicide” by the actions and marketing philosophy they are taking.

In my many years of observing and following the magazine industry, I never recall a time where a magazine encouraged its readers to cancel their subscriptions. This must be a first. Yet, I do believe that there is still time to change, survive and thrive.