Magazine Ex-Pats Bet On A Powerful Media

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 1, 2000 by Andrew Marlatt

The company's top editor explains why a group of print magazine stars left the old media for the new with their entertainment industry trade/consumer hybrid.

A few inaccuracies have cropped up amid the hype surrounding Powerful Media, says editor in chief Michael Hirschorn. First, its Web site is not going to be called Inside Dope, despite the fact that PM owns the insidedope.com URL. (Its actual name will probably be public by the time this is printed.) Second, despite all the interest lavished on the forthcoming online magazine by the media, "This is not a media site."

Instead, this spring Powerful Media plans to launch an online magazine that covers entertainment--the music, film, television (broadcast and cable), streaming video, online publishing, and book industries--and do it in a way that, say the publishers, no one has done before. "Redefine journalism," is how Hirschorn puts it.

Certainly, Powerful Media has amassed an impressive arsenal of talent. Co-chairman Hirschorn was the editor of Spin; co-chairman Kurt Andersen co-founded Spy, former Brill's Content president Deanna Brown is CEO; and its projected staff of 65 includes many top-shelf journalists lured from print. But the idea of covering such a vast array of topics in-depth, and providing information that will attract both a trade-magazine audience and consumers, has potential competitors betting--or at least hoping--that it will fly like a canary in a doomed coal mine.

And all this is to be achieved on the Web, with primary revenues coming from advertising, syndication and subscriptions, despite the shaky history of the Internet subscription model.

In late February, Foliomag.com talked with Hirschorn about what Powerful Media is doing, what he expects its impact will be on the entertainment industry and print media, and why its founders believe that for it--and for other print Publishers--the Web is a superior medium.

FOLIOMAG.COM: Other than the theoretically lower costs involved, why do this online only?

MICHAEL HIRSCHORN: Well, I question whether it's cheaper to do it online. It's extremely hard to start up a Web site. Unlike the magazine industry, there is nothing you can tap into, and some of the tools are remarkably primitive. For instance, there are no off-the-shelf applications for Web publishing, so we've had to build huge amounts of software from scratch. So the start-up costs are higher. But then, publishing on the Web is cheaper and it scales better. Once you've started, every additional customer you obtain is free.

We're not averse to an offline distribution deal if it comes up. We've certainly been approached with several cases of doing a print magazine, but there are opportunities and creative possibilities that can be exploited on the Web that you cannot do in print. Immediacy is the most obvious, and fluidity. I see us doing a new kind of journalism--less buttoned-up. The Web demands a different sensibility and approach than print. We can have databases, instant feedback, audio and video--a richer experience. People want instant information, not just on their computers, but on phones, pagers. And increasingly, the notion of doing something in print is a needless delay and nuisance.

Q: This redefined journalism sounds a bit presumptuous. Does "less-buttoned up" mean your pieces will have an opinion?

A: I'm not being that presumptuous, really. Say you re writing a story and there's something you personally know is true. You can't say it yourself--you have to call an analyst and have them say what you already knew. It's pseudo objectivity, really. So just by changing that, we're doing something different.

But we won't do opinion. Gall it smart analysis. We're not interested in cheap attitude. The people we've hired have huge amounts of experience in their fields, and they know their subjects. We're going to free them up to tell it like it is. It does not mean we want them to sit there and do chin-stroking--it'll be hard, reporting-driven analysis.

Q: You're cutting a pretty wide swath in terms of coverage. What are some examples of your stories, and how many print magazines do you see yourselves competing with?

A: I don't think we have more than a 10 to 15 percent overlap with other publications. We'll compete slightly with the FOLIO:s, the Billboards, Variety, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. But our intent is not to duplicate. Our hope is to provide something richer and far different.

We'll cover all the news and journalism sites, the broadband sites, the teen sites; the Web where it pretends to be media and entertainment. We'll cover Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble as well.

Q: So far, some potential competitors have publicly written you off, saying you'll be spread too thin and will fail to deliver.

A: It's true we are extremely ambitious. Of course, there is always the possibility of failure. If it was so easy, everyone would have done it by now. But I also think we're smart enough and self-aware enough to learn from past mistakes. We're supple enough to say, "This didn't work. Let's go to plan B." That's one of the advantages to being online. We're going to get immediate feedback from our readers about our site, and we'll be able to immediately respond.