The Un-magazines

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

Byline: Simon Dumenco

Everything, we're conditioned to think, is dead or dying. The new economy? Dead. The music industry? Dying. Network television? Dying. Telecom? Dead. And magazines? Well, the industry may not be dead - it seems to be enduring, more or less, in this recession, with many magazines posting year-over-year ad page increases this fall. But the conventional wisdom is that the magazine itself - the very idea of the magazine as a robust media/art form - is dead.

The average magazine reader, we generally believe, doesn't have time to read magazines anymore. Readers are abandoning glossy pages for glowing computer screens (even though, curiously, the In-ternet is dead) and/or other disparate distractions. They're avoiding newsstands and magazine racks, and they're only begrudgingly re-upping their subscriptions (once publishers beg and plead and prostrate themselves with cut-rate renewal rates, even as printing and postage costs soar).

Magazines, the sense is, are so over. So five minutes ago - or more like so 20 years ago.

I'm not going to entirely disagree. But I will say this: The evidence to the contrary that magazine people like to cite - the hearty living of the likes of FHM, In Style, and O - actually has little to do with magazines. None of those pubs, I'd argue, is thriving because it's connected with its inner magazine-ness. Rather, each is thriving because it's a sort of un-magazine.

We magazine people think we're part of some great narrative, journalistic tradition. But, in fact, the most interesting and successful stuff that's going on in magazineland these days involves the pouring of a different sort of media ethos into magazine-like vessels.

Sometimes this is obvious: In Style is a catalog. So is Lucky. Of course, the big fall issues of the fashion glossies sell so well every year not because they're magazines, but because they're catalogs that out-catalog real catalogs.

Other magazines are actually catalogs of another sort: They're repositories of a fixed body of knowledge that is reiterated ad infinitum in magazine form. Men's Health, for instance, is basically the coolest, sexiest health-and-nutrition book ever, serialized over and over again and updated incrementally. (The "Hard-Body Instruction Manual" that appeared in a recent issue is not a whole helluva lot different from the "Hard Muscle: Your Start-Up Plan" article that appeared in an issue two years ago. With apologies to Gertrude Stein, a biceps curl is a biceps curl is a biceps curl.)

Oprah's O magazine is basically a therapist or motivational speaker - or a borderline cult, really - in print. (Each issue, Oprah basically tells her readers to get off their suburban asses and seize the day already - but not before they watch her TV show!) Martha Stewart Living's a cult combined with a serialized homemaking instruction manual. (Rosie was supposed to be a kinder, gentler cult/instruction manual - a pamper-yourself-with-crafts-and-sweetness indulgence for Middle American moms who find Martha too shrill and Oprah too messianic - but now that Rosie O'Donnell is battling with her publisher, Gruner + Jahr, about the soul of Rosie and who controls it, the magazine's become performance art more than anything.)

FHM, Maxim, and Stuff are basically television on paper - "Saturday Night Live"- style skits, with a lot of skin thrown in for good measure. (Think of the busty cover girls as guest hosts who are generally incidental to the funny business at hand.) Flipping through the densely packed, multi-itemed pages of these glossies is roughly akin to remote-controlling your way up and down the cable dial, with a lot of stops at Comedy Central, the Cartoon Network, ESPN, MTV, and the soft-core "adult" channels.

Blender, the rapidly rising music mag, brilliantly combines the TV-sitcom pacing and P.O.V. of its Dennis Publishing siblings Maxim and Stuff with a canny catalog function: The magazine reviews more than 200 CDs every month. This killer app can't be underestimated: When you pick up Blender - as opposed to Rolling Stone or Spin - you simply have a much better shot, statistically speaking, of getting a yea-or-nay topline on the CD you're thinking of buying. That, not narrative, is what music-obsessed readers really want.

Meanwhile, the old-school magazines that seem most hobbled at the moment are run by narrative-obsessed magazine people who think that to compete in magazineland you simply must strive to make the very best magazine.

Maybe in the assorted glory days of magazine history - you know, Esquire in the '60s, Rolling Stone in the '70s, yada yada - that was true. But today's magazine industry innovators are those who realize that they're not really magazine people. They're merchants, or cult leaders, or service serializers, or TV people who are cleverly and subversively using the magazine format to work un-magazine-like agendas.

In other words, if it looks like a magazine, smells like a magazine, and barks like a magazine, it's not necessarily a magazine.