Mr. Magazine

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.

For starters I agree with the saying, “if it does not move, or if it does not sound, it has no place on the web.” The beauty of the internet is it provides us with moving objects, beautiful sounds and animated illustrations. Unlike magazines, which by nature, are meant to provide us with still objects (frozen great images) and a combination of the 26 lead soldiers (the ABCs for those who want to know) in a way that will and should (if done well) captivate all our senses. To each medium its own.

So, it is beyond me to understand why people, very creative people, spend so much time to create what they call “e-zines” that do nothing but imitate ink on paper. If I want a magazine page to flip open, I will reach to a printed magazine. Why should I imitate that flipping feel of a real magazine on the web? If I wanted to read something for the pleasure of reading why do I have to use a magnifier to do so on the screen? I do not do that with my printed magazine.

The web and the internet are completely different beasts from the printed publications. Until we use them as such, we will continue to do our industry and our magazines a disservice to both our readers and customers. New media deserve to be treated with new ideas and not a mere rehash of old stuff that we’ve being used too. What are the benefits of recreating “traditional media” on the screens of the “new media?” It is, for sure, beyond my scope of understanding. Successful ventures are going to be those which utilize all the relevant channels to serve the relevant audiences with the relevant messages.

It is a shame to put good ideas to waste, just because we are trying to imitate something else.

By the way, the reason for this blog is an e mail I received this morning from the United Kingdom. David Leydon, the creator of a new e-zine Good Bad Ugly sent me an e-mail introducing his new e-zine. He wrote:

Good Bad Ugly is another one of those e-zines that keep cropping up, but Good Bad Ugly is hopefully a little different in approach and style and hopefully we manage to deliver a half decent magazine for free.

If you think about it how often do you spend £4 on a magazine and feel robbed? Belittled? Disappointed? Saddened? Angry? Or Frustrated? Well it happened to us at Good Bad Ugly a lot. In fact almost every time we bought a magazine at least one of those things buzzed through our head. So we set about building our very own magazine. Take a look and decide what you think, hopefully you’ll avoid some of those emotions as you wander through Good Bad Ugly’s very first issue, the TV Issue. Or we just be a rubbish free mag – who knows???

The idea behind it all is that if you contribute you take ownership of what you do and have complete artistic freedom with it – well as long as it’s not going to get sued!

Check it out and find I6 pages of irreverent, hopefully entertaining, possibly artistic, different, inventive (well it could be?),free and completely independent goodness.

Click here to read the first issue of Good Bad Ugly. To me, Good Bad Ugly deserves an A for effort, as for the execution, that is a different story for a different blog.

Alyce Alston is on a purpose driven mission: meeting customers’ demands and acknowledging that content is king. She is not afraid of what is going on in the media business nor she is afraid of starting new magazines in this climate. “This is the real world,” she told me in a phone interview, “and we have no other choice but to find unique ways to publish and to leverage the Reader’s Digest global brand.” The President of the Home & Garden and Health & Wellness at The Reader’s Digest Association is living the real world both in her professional and personal life. She launches three new magazines this week and enjoys driving a mini-van while living in a country house watching birds with her son. The former publisher of W and O, The Oprah magazine said that her current job is the “most entrepreneurial job she’s ever held.” She referred to her job at RD both as a “producer and a development officer.”
Being true to her title at RD, she is in the business of “planting seeds.” And this week Alston isplanting three new seeds, Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Connection, Best You and Fresh Home. Three new magazines but the “greatest of them all” is the Purpose Driven Connection. “These are exciting times, planting new seeds, finding new ways to do things and being involved in the biggest effort and investment of a new launch.” The Purpose Driven Connection is “The Bomb, The Big Thing” Alston said. “It requires a different level of confidence and a totally new model of publishing.”
Creating a “microphone to the world” was the genesis of the idea Alston presented to the Rev. Rick Warren. RD is a global company and Warren is global. RD is a multi-media and so is Warren. RD, the 3 billion dollar company has a giant marketing arm that can reach afar. “So, taking the message and vision of Rick Warren and putting the two power houses together, Purpose Driven Connection was born.” Warren has the content, the vision and the longevity. He is “an everyday visionaire” said Alston and we wanted to take that vision and content and create “an ongoing communication vehicle.”
Alston asked herself a series of questions regarding this ongoing vehicle. “How to disseminate the content? What is the best medium to do such a job? What is the best approach to create such a vehicle?” Well, the answer came in Alston’s vision of a new publishing model: the membership model. “We have the message, we have the audience, now we have to create the channel,” she said. So, a magazine alone was not enough, but a rather a bundle of information (a magazine, a video, a workbook, a website, etc) all aimed at members rather than just readers. “That bundle of information will provide a lot of value to the consumers and will have a much bigger value than the price the consumer will pay for the product.”
The Purpose Driven Connection is being launched with a circulation of 500,000 with the aim of reaching a million circulation by the end of the first year. The publishing model is based on a two-tier model. First tapping in the 100,000 plus churches that are affiliated with Rick Warren, than other churches offering them memberships in the Purpose Driven Connection. Direct mail and e-mail blasts and kits will be reaching those churches and their pastors inviting them to be members of the PDC. The other part is putting the magazine on the newsstands providing the same opportunity for folks to join the network. “This is a circulation driven model,” Alston said. “The focus is on building the membership first.” Next in the plans for the PDC and Alston is the launch next week of the “biggest Christian website ever built.”
You will think that the Purpose Driven Connection project should be keeping Alston busy 24/7. Well, think again. The mission-driven publisher with the purpose to reach customers who count is launching two other titles at the same time. Fresh Home and Best You are two new quarterlies that share one secret according to Alston. “The model is completely different. I am leveraging the assets of our global company and I am leveraging the content from other countries,” she said. “You can’t publish a new magazine today if we don’t find a better way of efficiently planting seeds.” Fresh Home is using re-purposed content from a sister magazine in Australia and Best You is doing the same from a sister publication in Canada. “We will not do it if it was not for the content re-purposing,” Alston said. “The cost will make it prohibitive in today’s marketplace. I have no other choice.”
Alston is using the newsstands as the “acid test” for those two new magazines and hoping that the “consumer demand” that their research showed will come true on the newsstands. Both magazines offer fresh (no pun intended) content to serve the best of you. This is the real world indeed, and those are real magazines. Alyce Alston is helping plant some new seeds to create a new publishing model. The time is right, and as Alston said “content is king” and “consumer demand” will be the key to open the new publishing kingdom doors.
No wonder Alyce Alston is a purpose driven publisher.

I will leave it up to other media reporters and critics to report the bad news of our industry. As for me, I will continue to be the bearer of good news, and talking of good news I am glad to report that the number of new magazines launched in 2008 has exceeded that of 2007 by two titles. Our final tally of new magazine launches reveal that in 2008 a total of 715 new magazines were launched compared with 713 in 2007. Of note is that this number exceeds all predictions (including mine) that the number of new launches in 2008 will be down. Of more interest is the number of new launches 20 years ago totaled 491 new magazines. Of course, for those of us with short memories, there was no internet in 1988.
While the number of magazines published with a 4X frequency or more continues to witness declines in the last few years, the number of annuals and specials are on an increase. Publishers are finding solace in all those book-a-zines in which the cover price ranges from $9.95 to $14.95. Even the annuals have taken a back seat to all those specials that have no frequency commitment (lovingly referred to in our industry as one-shots).

The chart below illustrates the breakdown of titles in 1988, 2007 and 2008.

For those who need the exact breakdown, here are the numbers for 1988, 2007 and 2008:
Annual: 157, 21, 22
4x or more: 290, 243, 217
Special: 44, 422, 456
Total: 491, 713 , 715

And if that is not enough to give you some hope, take a look at the chart below to see the number of new magazine launches during the last 20 years and how did we fare in this business.

So, the next time you hear or read about yet one more magazine beating the dust, just in keep in mind that it is not all bad out there. It is just so hard when the times are tough to see the light at the end of the tunnel. We can only see the train coming. I hope the charts above will act as a reminder that it is much better to “light a candle rather than curse the dark.”