New Eras, New Challenges

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Oct 1, 2002 by Cable Neuhaus

Byline: CABLE NEUHAUS Editor-in-Chief cneuhaus@mediacentral.com

Last month, you may recall, we began to tinker with the architecture and tone of FOLIO: magazine, and we introduced several clues to the "new" book, the one that, at the time, was still soaking in the development tank. Reader response was favorable - a very nice thing, as I'm the new fellow here and eager to please. This month we draw back the veil and reveal the freshly hatched FOLIO:, which we hope you will find more useful, more enjoyable, more beautiful. Other than that, what could an editor possibly ask for?

Every redesign is, however, imperfect. That is especially true when a staff is working with scarce resources (a euphemism for "We're going to do this with what kind of budget?!"). These are difficult days for most magazines, all the more so for small b-to-b titles such as this one. I won't kid you: In the current economic climate, it was a bear to take a venerable 30-year-old magazine and refresh it practically overnight. So, in the great tradition of magazine re-do's, we'll continue to tweak the book. In coming months, expect to see new features, new contributors, even new paper.

You'll also see on every page a passion for magazines. Those of us who produce FOLIO: - from our new production assistant (Shannon Morris) here in Manhattan to our creative director (Alan Alpanian) in Los Angeles - share this one trait: We are deeply devoted to magazines. We appreciate them as an art form as well as an impressively robust means of communication and commerce. FOLIO: will continue to be what it has been for three decades, a guide to better mag-making. But it won't take you long to detect that, in this most current incarnation, FOLIO: will increasingly be about the totality of the multibillion-dollar magazine economy. The magazine business is responding in ways that it must in order to remain profitable in a challenging media environment. For those who need to keep abreast of our industry's new dynamics, FOLIO: will, I hope, be a monthly must-read.

We begin our new era, appropriately, with a cover feature on Ann Moore, who herself is just imagining a new era at Time Inc., over which she now presides. Moore and many of her colleagues gave FOLIO: unprecedented access over a period of weeks. In my view, our writer for this assignment, Jeffrey L. Seglin, was ideally suited to the task of illuminating the early days of Queen Ann. Not only has he written 10 books about business, but he currently heads the magazine program at Emerson College in Boston. Plus, importantly, he writes the business ethics column for the Sunday New York Times. It's for that reason that he asked us to reveal that he has, at times, done work for various Time Inc. titles. Gladly done, Jeff, gladly done. One thing we especially appreciate about our newest contributing editor: Like Ann Moore, those of us at FOLIO:, and, we hope, you, Jeff has a palpable, nearly irrational passion for magazines. Around here, that's a personality quirk that's mighty in-style indeed.