Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May 1, 2002 by Simon Dumenco

Byline: Simon Dumenco

Once upon a time writers wrote articles, editors would edit them, publications would publish them, and readers would read them. Sometimes readers would write letters responding to those articles; sometimes not. Either way, life would go on.

Then the era of buzz began, and a not-so-subtle transformation occurred.

Now when writers write articles and editors edit them and publications publish them and readers read them, it's no longer entirely fulfilling. Other writers must read the articles - and then the publications they write for must publish their write-ups about what's been written.

If you're expecting me to say this is all Tina Brown's fault, you're right: It's all Tina Brown's fault. Or it was Tina's fault to begin with. (She mastered the black art of getting other media to write about her media when she was at Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, though she faltered at Talk - until, of course, the failure of Talk itself became all anybody wrote about for a while). But now it's all of our faults. More than ever, media people crave the formal recognition of other media people.

How terrific, then, that media people now have The Week - a publication that exists solely to recognize and quote other publications. Each week, more than 100 magazines and newspapers are name-checked. Modeled on the virtually identical original British edition, the slim news digest - subtitled "All You Need To Know About Everything That Matters" - is published by Felix Dennis, the British magazine baron behind Maxim, Stuff and Blender. It's meant to be an invaluable reader service, and it is: The Week distills all the wit and wisdom of other media down to bite-size bits. As I noted at the time of its launch a year ago, it's a sort of Junior Scholastic for adults.

But considering that The Week has positioned itself as an arbiter of all that matters, there's a curious quirk to its personality: It desperately wants other media people to say that it matters. Every single issue, a different endorsement blurb appears on the cover, such as:

"The Week makes my week, every week." - R.W. Apple Jr.

"The universe is held together by gravitation, the strong force, and The Week force." - P.J. O'Rourke

"The Week saves me $10,000 a week in magazine subscriptions!" - Christopher Buckley and, inevitably, "The Week is better than my CIA briefing!" - Tina Brown (Huuuuh? Who knew Tina Brown got a CIA briefing?!)

The truly odd thing is that while some of the seeming endorsements are simply quotes from published reviews, many are actually solicited by The Week. That's right, The Week basically calls people up and says, "Will you say nice things about us?"

"It started with Felix," says Martha Thomases, whose firm, General Strategic Marketing, does PR for The Week. "People like Chris Buckley are in his Rolodex, and he started to send them The Week."

And once he got them hooked, Dennis asked for a little lovin' in return.

Thomases makes some of the calls, she says. "My favorite is the one they didn't use from Peter Carlson at The Washington Post: 'It's better than sex!' They made me go back and ask for another one," she says laughing.

And how perfect is this? Thomases says that "Harold Evans, who's a consulting editor at The Week, knows a lot of people and solicits quotes from them." Evans, of course, is Tina Brown's husband.

Once again, it took a Brit to figure out the obvious: Magazines need to capitalize on the good will they generate in the marketplace. Given that most pubs right now have depressed ad revenues and sagging newsstand sales, it's easy to forget that readers still love magazines. All we have to do is ask around.

I wouldn't recommend that other magazines crib The Week's cover blurb strategy (picture Glamour with "Glamour helped me get slimmer thighs!" - Sandra Bullock). But every magazine from The Atlantic to Cat Fancy has fans, and surely there's, say, a respectable direct mail application for blurbs from passionate, prominent readers.

After all, a blurb is a brand-building opportunity not just for the blurbee, but the blurber. Speaking of which, near the end of our conversation, Martha Thomases told me, "If you gave me a blurb, we'd use it."

Suddenly, the pressure was on - but I knew I could deliver. Several late nights and hundreds of drafts later, I reluctantly discarded some of my favorites ("The Week is more addictive than crystal meth!" and "The Week is more exhilarating than breaking into Felix Dennis' gated estate and skinny-dipping in his backyard Olympic-size swimming pool under the stars!"). And then I settled on this:

"The Week is better than sex with Peter Carlson!" - Simon Dumenco

Simon Dumenco ( sd17@aol.com ) has never met Peter Carlson.