Survival soldier of fortune style

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, March, 2002 by Joe Hagan

The post-Cold War era hasn't been kind to this blood-and-guts military adventure title. But the events of September 11 are fueling a surge in readership, and its founder is sizing the chance to ditch its rogue mercenary reputation and position SOF as the patriotic authority and on overseas combat.

IT'S A TRANQUIL MORNING in the progressive mountain town of Boulder, Colorado, where the powder-blue sky and snow-covered Rockies inspire silent awe. But inside the headquarters of Soldier of Fortune--where peace of mind is a loaded .45--a barrage of expletives ricochets around a wild clutter of rifles, war medals and mounted animal heads adorning the office of editor and publisher Robert K. Brown. "Very shortly, this whole****ing office is going back to smoke signals!" barks the cantankerous ex-Green Beret, who founded the magazine 27 years ago.

A virus has crashed Brown's computer-again--and it couldn't have come at a worse time: Last night, SOF lost a long-time advertiser for no apparent reason; today, Brown is begrudgingly making nice with a photo agency rep after a "pissing contest" over some overcharges. In less than 48 hours, the crew is catching a Las Vegas-bound flight for a trade show, and they're out of media kits. The production director is trailing Brown around the office trying to pin down exactly how many "Terrorism Stops Here" T-shirts to send to Vegas. And downstairs, the part-time receptionist is appeasing irate readers whose latest SOF issues didn't come concealed in a polybag.

Through the mayhem, Brown's hearing aids--the result of a lifetime of close-range gunfire--are feeding back in a high-pitched squeal on his desk. "Chaotic?" responds Brown to a reporter's observation, his weather-beaten expression not unlike that of the mounted black-tailed gnu above his head. "What do you mean, 'chaotic'?"

Welcome to the seat-of-the-pants world of Soldier of Fortune, the embattled military adventure monthly that, since 1975, has published first-hand blood-and-guts combat stories for its audience of gun-loving, would-be mercenaries and armchair devotees of military arcana--and lived to tell about it.

SOF readers have been denied an all-out war since the Persian Gulf, and the title's circulation has suffered the consequences-until now. Fueled by the September II attacks and the start of the war against terrorist forces in Afghanistan, SOP is making a comeback. Newsstand sales, which constitute three-quarters of its 65,000 circulation, are up 77 percent through year-end 2001, from 27,000 in August, to 48,000 in December. Sell-through has soared to over 41 percent from a low of 26 percent.

The question now is, just how long can SOFride the coattails of the patriotic, anti-terrorism fervor? The post-Cold War era hasn't been kind to a magazine that specializes in conflict. Since its heyday in the mid-eighties-when circulation topped out at 180,000-SOF has struggled not only with peacetime, but against a cut-throat newsstand climate, failed expansion plans, gross mismanagement and it's own bad-ass reputation. Not to mention a roster of misfortunes that most publishers rarely encounter: multimillion-dollar lawsuits, war casualties and the hindrance of having your subscriber list made up of people like Timothy McVeigh-which makes advertisers more than a little wary.

The fact that SOP has survived as long as it has is probably a small miracle. Brown confesses to having spent every dime of profit on wild excursions to Third-World hell-holes. Just last year, SOP was narrowly saved from collapse by an unlikely business consultant named Marie Brake-a lawyer, CPA and professor at Denver's Graduate School of International Law- who stepped in to streamline the magazine's unwieldy business practices.

But at the heart of SOF's endurance is its owner's stubborn, relentless passion for "a whole lotta guys running through the bush with guns." And it's going to take more than a few fickle readers, a media recession or a victory against terrorism to stop his presses.

THE BLACK HELICOPTER CROWD

Tom Reisinger, the magazine's assistant editor and an on-again/off-again employee since 1977, says most SOF readers are wannabe soldiers, "armchair Walter Mittys," with the rest a mix of former and active military personnel and assorted gun enthusiasts. But the truth is, no one really knows who the readers are. Brown has never attempted an accurate audience study, and dismisses its necessity. ("How many times have I ever filled out a questionnaire? Never!") So far, the biggest face-to-face encounter with readers took place at the now-defunct Soldier of Fortune Convention in Las Vegas, in which hundreds of aging white males converged to indulge in "Uzis, floozies and Jacuzzis," buying and selling firearms, training videos and "Kill a Commie for Mommy" T-shirts.

Brown knows readership studies would almost certainly be wasted on the SOF crowd. Its crazy-mercenary-magazine reputation persuades the bulk of SOP readers to pick up a copy on the newsstand rather than have it delivered to their doorsteps. In a word, they are paranoid, says Kathleen Allard, the production director and a staffer since 1986. "Readers are afraid to subscribe because of the government lists," she says. As a result, efforts to build subscription sales have crashed and burned. And aside from short-lived spikes in newsstand sales during the government's raids on Waco and Ruby Ridge (which got McVeigh subscribing), circulation has been waning.