Omni

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Sept 1, 2004 by Rachel Lehmann-Haupt

Byline: Rachel Lehmann-Haupt

In the 1970s, Bob Guccione had it all - almost. Money poured in, as Penthouse, with its racier approach to soft-core porn, took on Playboy. He had successfully moved his enterprise from London to New York and was living in Judy Garland's old apartment with longtime companion Kathy Keeton. The former painter had everything except respect.

Keeton, a South African ballerina-turned-exotic dancer, had a suggestion: Since Guccione was a publisher, and publishers of intellectual magazines such as Science Digest were treated with respect, why not launch a magazine that combined science and fine art?

Guccione ran with the idea. The new magazine would be based on his belief that science had succeeded where religion had failed. Plotting the launch, he consulted numerous science journalists, including Frank Kendig, a science writer at Time Inc. who had also worked at The Saturday Review and Science Digest. In 1978, Guccione surprised Kendig by announcing that Kendig was the new executive editor of a mass market science magazine that would be called Omni. "I had not agreed to take the job," says Kendig. "It killed my bargaining power."

Kendig says Guccione did not act out of malice; that was just how things were done at General Media, Guccione's holding company. "It wasn't very organized," says Kendig. "Penthouse sold millions, but it was run like a mom-and-pop candy shop." Nonetheless Kendig signed on for the opportunity to run a popular science magazine and to escape the strictures of Time Inc. "The way you did science was to wait until the academic journals did a story," he recalls. "Journalists knew about things that were happening and everyone wanted to report earlier."

FACT AND FICTION

Guccione spent heavily to make a splash, launching the first issue in October 1978 with 1 million copies. The cover featured a shot of an open road by former Look photographer Peter Turner, fiction by Isaac Asimov and an interview with physicist Freeman Dyson. Guccione didn't do a subscription mailing. "Bob was a pure newsstand man," says Dick Teresi, editor of Omni from 1981 to 1984. "Selling the reader on the newsstands month after month was part of the drive."

The magazine published both groundbreaking science reporting and controversial pseudo-science. Contributors ranged from David Rorvik, the New York Times and Time writer known for his book about a human clone, which a 1981 court case ruled as a "fraud and hoax," to Eddie Adams, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnam War photographer. Omni ran stories about parapsychology and UFOs - a fascination of Guccione's - next to interviews with Nobel Laureates such as Jonas Salk and Richard Feynman. Ellen Datlow, who became fiction editor in 1979, published short stories by Harlan Ellison, Clive Barker, and Joyce Carol Oates. But she says it was a challenging place to work: "The Gucciones kind of eat up and spit out editors. It was always someone being forced out or being frustrated."

Patti Adcroft (now executive editor of Marie Claire) tried to raise the level of journalism at Omni as editor-in-chief from 1986 to 1990. "The magazine had a lot of pseudo-science," she says. "My goal was to join hands with the universities and the scientific community." But, in 1990, when circulation was dropping, Guccione wanted to put a Motorola ad on the cover. The ad didn't run, but Adcroft resigned over the incident.

The next editor was Keith Ferrell, a General Media executive. By then, Penthouse was losing millions due to declining ad sales and the rise of X-rated videotapes and emerging Internet porn. Guccione ceased the print edition in 1996 and experimented with a relaunched Omni on the Internet. "There was enough optimism about the Internet and if anybody could do it, a science and technology magazine could," says Rob Killheffer, an editor in the effort. "But it was difficult. Most of the staff were print editors and we were strapped for cash."

The team created some innovative new media such as Live Science, an early bloggish daily report filed from various scientific institutes. But eventually General Media shuttered the site. "I don't know how we couldn't make money online when there are guys in their basement with one server doing it," says Killheffer. "What happened to us had to do with the whole context of the company losing money. We were stuck in a whirlwind going in the wrong direction."