Mr. Magazine

Honesty hurts. Double standards hurt too. Lung cancer and heart disease are the two leading killers of women, yet you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of articles on the subject in women’s magazines. Breast cancer, on the other hand, is covered almost weekly and monthly in the same magazines. Double standards reason: there is no cash cow behind breast cancer and heart disease. The other one has big tobacco advertising behind it. And you would to convince me that there is a separation between church and state? Well, the reason for this introduction is the great commentary that my friend and former editor-in-chief of both Cosmo Girl and Seventeen Atoosa Rubenstein wrote this week on Forbes.com. “Prostitution Is Legal,” is the title of the piece that Ms. Rubenstein wrote. It is a great insider’s view of the reality of what goes on in the media world on a daily basis. Hypocrisy is king and queen. Thank you Atoosa for sharing your views. Read the entire “Prostitution Is Legal” here.

I just returned from an excellent three-day Mississippi Press Association‘s Annual Convention and was encouraged more than ever about the future of the printed newspaper. Some of the high-powered speakers talked about the on-line newspapers and the transition from the traditional media to the new media. What surprised me, and a lot of the attendees, is that more than 80% of what was said applied to less than 20% of the newspapers in attendance. I was always taught that that formula should be just in reverse of what took place. In Mississippi there are 124 newspapers, 100 of them are non-dailies and 24 are dailies. The majority are community newspapers serving the needs and wants of their local community, and serving them well. What they are looking for is more help in expanding that help to the whole community. As one publisher puts it, “Our paper is the only paper that cares about our community.” And “care” in the community newspapers is completely different than the “care” in the national and regional newspapers. I came back more encouraged, and more challenged, from this convention that as a professor of journalism a teacher of future journalist, and a consultant I must devote even more time in addressing the “care” of the majority of newspapers in our state and the country. Mississippi newspapers are not any different than the rest of the country. The majority of newspapers in this country are local and community papers. We owe it to them to start focusing on their future. I reckon that if you add the revenues from all the local and community newspapers you will not be talking about small change. It is the future of the newspapers… the future as in ink on paper. Will “Billy” Morris III, Chairman and CEO of Morris Communications, said it best when he visited Ole Miss and spoke to my students. He reminded the students that the future of journalism is in “the necessity of journalism.” Journalism is needed, and is needed now on the local and community level more than ever. We owe it to our future journalist to prepare them to serve the needs of their communities and local communities in general. Yes, the world is flat, but we live in a completely “isolated connectivity” world. We feel connected, yet we are more isolated than ever. Our communities are in die-hard need of being really connected. The “necessity of journalism” plays a big role in that connectivity. Newspaper publishers and editors must shift the focus of their discussions to the “necessity of journalism” in their communities. That should be priority number one. Shift the focus to content; otherwise you will not have a future to worry about.

My friend Bob Sacks wrote an article entitled “Printed Magazines Will Follow the Path of the Plastic Record,” which you can read here. Well, needless to say I do not agree with Bob on this issue. Here is my take on music records and magazines.
Unlike music CDs, mp3s, vinyl, or tapes magazines are disposable items. Magazines are not meant to be kept, collected or read and reread over and over the same way you listen to a song or enjoy an album.
(Well, ok I know I am an exception to the rule. I keep every magazine and my collection is now up to almost 23,000 first editions. I also know that some of those magazines will have a big monetary value, but that is not the reason they were published. Hugh Hefner never put in his business plan that the first issue of Playboy will sell for thousands of dollars in the future).
The beauty of magazines is that you read them, you toss them, you recycle them, you share them and a new one will appear on the stands or in your mailbox the next day, week, month, quarter, etc…magazines are not meant to be collected, they are meant to be used and abused. Every issue is different yet the same. You see Cosmo this month you know it is Cosmo…music albums, even those of the same band, do not carry the same design, the same feel or even the same look. Once an album is born fans listen to it, keep it, download it, re-listen to it, etc., you get my drift…no relationship to the next one. You do not listen to an album in a sequence and you do not dispose of it when it is over. It has a repeat value, a very high repeat value that is exactly the opposite of magazines. The only repeat value magazines have is in their changing content. Music does not have a concept that needs to be implemented and repeated one album after the other…magazines do.
Music is universal. You do not translate the Beatles music to your own language. In Lebanon as in the UK and the USA you listen to the same music. You do not translate…music can show that the world is flat, that is not something new (I grew up in Lebanon in the 60s listening to the same music teens were listening to in the UK and the USA). Magazines are just the opposite…In Finland the magazines mainly are in Finish, in Lebanon in Arabic, in the States in English…and guess what? Each has its own personality and its own reflection of the society that surrounds it. So fear not, the future of magazines is not going to be for the few collectable copies like vinyl…that is not the reason people buy magazines for…People will continue to look for a warehouse of information in which once they consume the goods in it, they look for more goods. Magazines are like a box of chocolate, once you consume the chocolate you do not refill the box, you buy another one. So the next time someone tells you the future of magazines are like the future of vinyl, just tell them how many people they know read the same magazine over and over the same way they listen to their music

For those of you who continue to doubt the power of the printed word (read this again P R I N T E D, as in ink on paper) try to read Stephen King’s “The Gingerbread Girl” in its entire twenty-one thousand words on any screen but that of the crystal clear July’s Esquire screen of ink on paper. A historic milestone for Esquire since this novella represents the longest piece of fiction ever published in Esquire. And if the novella is not worth your $3.99 cover price, take a look at the exclusive pictures of Angelina Jolie in the same issue. To put it in Esquire’s own cover words, “Some Angie, A Little King… What Else Does A Man Need For Summer?” Esquire has “come a long way baby” since David Granger took the helm as editor-in-chief ten years ago.

Four out of the top five magazine titles with the highest ratio of subscription price versus newsstand cover price are found to be publications of the Bauer Publishing company. A comparison of magazine newsstand cover prices and the “average price” the publisher is selling a subscription copy for, was completed by Harrington Associates, publisher of The New Single Copy. The list (Published in the June 18 issue of The New Single Copy newsletter) of major titles with the highest ratio is dominated by the titles of Bauer Publishing. “The company’s weeklies, Life & Style, Woman’s World, and In Touch, are the only magazines combining average newsstand sales of more than 500,000 with ratios of over 70%,” Harrington’s study found. “A fourth Bauer title, the monthly First for Women, is next on the list with a 58.3% ratio.” Time Inc.’s People magazine rounds up the top five. It should be noted that Bauer is launching another weekly this coming September, Cocktail Weekly which may end up rounding all top five titles in John Harrington’s next year’s study. Those of you who may recall my call for bold steps at the newsstands two weeks ago (read them here), can see why Bauer Publishing is an excellent example of the “right way to handle magazines and their audiences.” I am sure that there is more than one lesson to learn here, but is anyone listening?