How Do You Report on Yourself In the Magazine?

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, March, 2000

Can you do a candid assessment of how your magazine's products or shows stand up against the competition? Should you? "How do you cover yourself?" is an age-old challenge that has intensified as magazine publishers have extended their brands into many areas their editors write about and evaluate.

Here are the decisions shared by editors at a recent gathering of magazine management: (1) Tell it like it is: A computer magazine editor reviewed Web sites, including its own. In one instance, the magazine gave its competitor a much higher score. "We did it because it was the best thing for our readers," said the editor, "but we didn't make friends with some of our colleagues." (2) Just do a list: Forget the rankings if you find or suspect your product isn't going to rank well. This is the approach of one editor who said she was not as brave" as the computer magazine editor. (3) Write about your own product first: Another editor, whose magazine has an annual festival, said, "There are all these wonderful festivals, and I want ours to be successful. So I tell our eight million readers about the other festivals, but I try to tell them about ours first so that discretionary income comes our way." (4) Write about your own product last: One reviewer looked at guides on the Internet covering events, restaurants and so on. One of the sites was run by the magazine. The rest were "absolutely our direct competitors for advertising. We decided that we couldn't not mention ourselves if we wanted to be complete for our readers," the editor said. "But we had to do it in a way that wouldn't seem snarky. So we handled the other sites straight and put ours at the end, only saying, 'and then, of course, there's our site.'" Was that being too modest? someone asked. "Probably," said the editor. "But I'd rather err on the side of modesty. My fear is if we err on the side of immodesty, it's a short walk from there to death."