Gabbing With The Gooch

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 1, 2004 by Jeff Bercovici

Byline: JEFF BERCOVICI

It's probably safe to say that when Gear magazine shut down this time last year, it wasn't for lack of opinions on the part of its founder and editor-in-chief, Bob Guccione Jr. The son of Penthouse's legendary creator, Guccione (who also started Spin) is happy to talk about just about anything, it seems - except his top-secret plans to get back in the publishing game later this year.

Folio: It's been a year now since Gear shut down. At the time, you said your plan was to relaunch it. Is that still happening?

Guccione: I do want to relaunch the magazine without question because I think there was a lot of virtue to it. We suffered really only from a lack of funds, and the timing was incredibly difficult. But one has to be honest with one's self. Some things went wrong. Not every advertising agency and every product maker saw what we saw in Gear, and we failed to distinguish ourselves from Maxim and FHM and the lads' field, which was a problem because editorially the magazine was distinctly different from those magazines. What we were trying to do was more complex - to be a younger GQ, a more intelligent men's magazine.

Folio: You talk about doing a younger GQ, but in the time Gear has been gone, GQ itself has been trying to go younger. Does that affect your calculations?

Guccione: Every movement in the field affects one's calculations, but none that I've seen affect it so significantly as to make me think, oh well, that's done now. GQ has always done a good job. I thought it was a bit stuffy for the young guy. I think today they're caught somewhere between not being stuffy and not losing the guys they had. I think there's a great market in the audience they have had for a long time, which is slightly older guys. There's nothing wrong with being a slightly older guy. Being a much older guy, I long for the days I was young enough to be slightly older.

I think that too many magazines in America, and GQ is one of them, have lost the source code - they're operating without the original manual. Magazines today are too knee jerk. They see something that's working and think that if they copy it they'll drive up circulation.

You have to look at how large the men's market is. Today, all the magazines in the men's field combined in circulation do not equal Penthouse and Playboy together in 1984, when it was 10.5 million copies, the majority of them on the newsstand. So the market is vast. There's plenty of room. It's a fabrication of ourselves and the media to think that something is crowded. It's certainly not crowded with quality.

Folio: You launched Spin in 1985. How has magazine journalism changed since then?

Guccione: I hate to say it but I think the most important change has been the slow, continual eroding of the value placed on independent journalism. We only exist as an industry to have something to say and say it. My hat's off to Lucky and InStyle and In Touch. As a business, they're brilliant. But just because somebody has successfully packaged paper and ink and glue and has earned more than they spent in the process, that doesn't mean we should hand out little gold stars.

There's not a lot of bold journalism out there. I don't mean that in an idealistic way. I actually mean it in a very cold, industrial way. If we don't do what we are meant to do, which is to say something provocative or courageous, take a stand, not collapse every time a retail chain says 'We don't like the way you look' - then we're doomed.

Folio: Are there any magazines or publishing companies now that are taking big risks?

Guccione: It's a generally pervasive problem, like your sperm count being low. It's not like you can pull any one guy out of the room and say, 'Your sperm count's way up, or yours is way down.' But generally the population has a lower sperm count than it had 30 years ago, and I think the magazine industry has a lower sperm count too.