Yankee Ingenuity

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 1, 2004 by Leslie Knowlton

Byline: Leslie Knowlton

For many New England fans, the family-run Yankee Magazine was a long-revered icon, a quirky homespun testament to traditions of independence, thrift, potluck practicality and common sense.

Besides finding features, poetry and fiction about the region's history and heroics, aficionados could "swop" a wedding dress for a woodstove, learn to preserve pears, track down lost ancestors, order hand-dipped candles and find out how to de-yellow vintage linoleum floors.

But after more than six decades, the paragon of puritan New England has been transformed into a slick modern product-centered book designed to attract richer readers and more advertising dollars. Gone are the poetry and fiction, the illustrated covers, script logo and popular "House for Sale" and "Plain Talk" columns. In their place, Yankee offers three new sections - home, food, and travel - more photography, white space and the tagline "The Magazine of New England Living."

BOOSTING THE DEMO

In other words, Yankee, which helped create the notion of a regional magazine when it appeared in 1935, now looks a lot like all the other regionals that have come along since. The shift from Down East potato farmers to the acquisitive suburban SUV set may be short on sentimentality, but it honors a core Yankee value: making money. Ad revenue increased almost 10 percent in 2003 and pages rose 13 percent, to 560.06, says Jamie Trowbridge, president of Yankee Publishing Inc. (YPI) and grandson of the magazine's founder. "And we did that in a down ad market."

The lifestyle move garnered at least two new national advertisers, Home Depot and Quick Step. "Those are ads we never would've gotten before," he says. Yankee recently raised its cover price with no decrease in sales. The mag's circ, at 500,000, is small compared with "super-regionals" such as Southern Living, Sunset and Midwest Living, but bigger than any state or city magazine in New England. Company lore has it that Yankee, founded by frustrated freelance writer Robb Sagendorph, sprang from a shack in Dublin, N.H., with a Franklin stove, a typewriter and a salvaged printing press. In two months, there were 5,000 subscribers. Four years later, Sagendorph bought the popular Old Farmer's Almanac, a 151-year-old franchise, which would provide the cash flow to assure Yankee's survival.

For the next 50-plus years, YPI stayed in the family, grew, and branched out into books and a New England travel guide. In the mid-1980s, publisher Rob Trowbridge (Jamie's father) launched an aggressive acquisition campaign: He marketed Yankee nationwide, grew circ to over 1 million, and purchased three new magazines - Texas Business, ALASKA and ASTA (American Society of Travel Agents) Travel News. But it was too much, too fast. "We had an aggressive-growth mentality as opposed to an aggressive profit-making one, and it got out of hand," says Jamie, who took over in 1999.

YPI then retrenched, sold all but its two core brands, and gradually managed down Yankee's circulation to 500,000. Jamie Trowbridge explains that because most of the company's profits came from circulation, it didn't make sense to maintain a high rate base. "At the million level, with many changes in direct-mail response, and the increasing cost of acquiring subscribers, the whole formula wasn't working for us," he says. "We weren't getting it back on the ad side."

Although the shareholders resolved to keep the company independent and family-owned, the managers knew they had to make major changes. The magazine had not kept up with changes in New England: Focus groups revealed that Yankee was not regarded as timely or service-oriented enough.

"Readers want a magazine that's very accessible and useful to their lives," says Trowbridge. Yankee's new editorial mission is "service, service, service," says editor Michael Carlton, who came to Yankee in October 2001, after repositioning Southern Living, published by Time Warner's Southern Progress.

At Southern Living, former travel writer Carlton staged a gradual redesign. At Yankee, however, he launched a complete overhaul on readers with the July/August 2002 issue that "included a new logo, grid, fonts, TOC, columns and a new format to make the book more navigable," says Carlton.

Illustrated covers were replaced with photography. Features became shorter and more topical. Recent stories have covered a New Hampshire soldier's death in Iraq and the lives of Somali refugees in Maine; and a black-and-white spread called "The Many Faces of Maine" illustrated ethnic and racial diversity. "It shows New England is not the WASPy place some people think it is," says Trowbridge.

The service well is dedicated to home and garden, with enhanced food and travel sections. The closest the old Yankee came to shelter was the "House for Sale" column, which profiled the history of a New England home that readers could actually buy. The home section features a designer show house, house plans, product recommendations, and columns on antiques and collectibles. "What advertisers think of as a home section is very visual," says Trowbridge. "You have to pick a house for how it looks, not how rich its history is."