Battle for the country - shelter magazines with country themes

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 1, 1993 by Leah Rosch

Although Emmerling and Stewart (also a multi-book author for Clarkson Potter) dominate different segments of the domicile set, there is bound to be some reader crossover. Stewart's magazine is not about country, per se, but it is about collecting, crafts, lifestyle and (endless) how-to home projects--the same formula for most of the country titles, including Emmerling's drawing-board version. So will Mary's magazine mean competition for Martha's? "I don,t worry about competition; I worry about content," says Stewart matter-of-factly. "Mary's approach is very different from mine. I'm much more interested in explaining everything a reader wants to know. I'm sure I'll look at her magazine and that it will be wonderful. But I don,t know that I'll use it.

"How does Emmerling see it? "Rather than tell you everything about my life, which is Martha's approach, I'm much more interested in telling about what other people do. And there's another difference," she says with a laugh. "I don,t want to see my face on the cover."

Meanwhile, the two clear power players in the field, Hearst and Meredith, are working to forestall any new competition by segmenting the market. Each is currently test-launching a gardening magazine ("to keep up with aging babyboomers, desire for more back pain," quips one media analyst). The first issue of Country Home Country Gardens came out in spring 1992 with a distribution of 3,000,000; the second issue, which bumped that up to 4000,000, hit newsstands on January 26th. Not to be outdone, Hearst's Country Living Gardener one-shot goes on sale March 16 with a distribution of 400,000.

Meredith is also at work on an "upscale" quilting magazine and a "highend" crafts magazine. "With the right slices of that market," says Scullin, "the permutations may be endless."