The Repositioners

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May, 2000 by Jennifer F. Steil

Identity crisis: How do you know when your magazine needs a new name, audience, frequency on editorial position? Executives from three born-again magazines tell their stores of revival.

The difference between a redesign and a repositioning can be just a question of semantics. Usually, however, it's the difference between success and failure. Redesign implies an updating or polishing of a successful magazine. A major repositioning, almost by definition, occurs when something isn't working. Repositioning is the ultimate risk.

There are abundant reasons to reposition--a major shift in the market, for example, either among advertising customers or readers, that presents a new and unforeseen opportunity. Or perhaps the initial editorial idea has proven to be off the mark, and greater opportunity lies elsewhere. "Markets evolve and you have to constantly rejigger the formula--it's risky, but it's also risky not to do anything," says New York-based publishing consultant Steve Rosenfield. "But the reason people reposition is because the numbers don't work. I've never been in a room where people have done it for any other reason. And that's the motivator for taking the risk."

FOLIO: recently spoke with three executives at the vortex of a repositioning to find out how they knew they needed to change, and how they're getting on with it.

More of Us

One thing about Wenner Media's Us that everyone agrees on is that it has potential. "It has the potential to be bigger than Rolling Stone," owner Jann Wenner told FOLIO: recently. But "potential" is a double-edged sword for a magazine that is 22 years old. The implication, of course, is that it has never lived up. Indeed, the last few years have not been kind to Us, the entertainment title positioned somewhere between People, Entertainment Weekly, Premiere and even Vanity Pair.

The magazine produced ad revenues of $26.8 million in 1999, a decline for the second year in a row and down dramatically from the $37.2 million generated in 1997. Ad pages have declined similarly in that period, from 755 to 538. And circulation has dipped from 1.1 million in 1997 to one million last year.

By contrast, the Time Inc.'s twin juggernauts People and Entertainment Weekly generated $714 million and $206 million, respectively, and both enjoyed double-digit ad revenue increases from the prior year, according to PIB.

With that as the backdrop, Wenner Media executives began two years ago to think about shifting Us to a weekly frequency and going essentially head to head with Time Inc. In a sense, the move, announced late last year and implemented in March, is an attempt merely to keep up with the pace of news and reader appetite. "Readers cannot get enough entertainment," says Wenner Media spokeswoman Kim Light. "It was an overall environment thing."

Editor in chief Terry McDonell, who was brought in to guide the shift, adds, "This was not a reaction to a situation--this was enterprise. You can't have a magazine like Us and not wonder what would happen if it were a weekly."

One other factor for Wenner was the longstanding perception of Us as a good--but not mustread--title. "It's very difficult for a magazine that has been perceived as an also-ran to overcome that perception," says magazine-industry consultant Rebecca McPheters. "The risk of going weekly is just so phenomenal. I really applaud their gutsiness. That said, I would never have recommended that they do it."

Alan Jurmain, executive director, media services, for Lowe Lintas & Partners, says, "People, even though it is celebrity focused, still has timely covers. I don't believe Us has done that. You can't just have pretty women and actors on the covers. If you don't have the baby in the well, I don't know how you're going to sell copies. You need to have something timely to sell magazines in this country."

That's exactly the point, says McDonell. The most important factor in the move was timeliness, he says. "You cannot overestimate the importance of the frequency change. That makes this magazine about news, and news is what people want."

A Wenner Media veteran, McDonell was one of the founding editors of Outside and served as managing editor of Rolling Stone from 1981 to 1983. He previously edited Men's Journal, doubling that title's circulation during his two-year tenure. "The difference is that this is a newsweekly--but Us will retain the voices of various writers, and not consist of rewritten press releases," he says.

The hardest part of changing the frequency was hiring 70 new staff members who can work creatively at the accelerated pace of a weekly, McDonell says. "That's the most important thing, and the most difficult." He says he began hiring around Thanksgiving and still lacks a full staff: "There aren't that many people who have had experience doing this kind of thing."

The second key reason for the shift in frequency was that Wenner executives saw a gap in Us's competitive set. People was doing phenomenally well, but was geared toward an older demographic, they concluded. "We thought, 'What if we went younger and concentrated on popular culture?'" McDonell says. The magazine's new target demographic is women in their twenties and early thirties who understand pop culture. This is slightly younger than the monthly's demographic, which had a median age of 34.9. People, by contrast, has a median age of 39.2, while EW's is 32.1, according to Mediamark Research.