The Business of Magazines

[diorelle]

Yeah W desperately needs a revamp. I was a subscriber for a few years and it really isn't worth the $1 sometimes. Hopefully Mr. Tonchi will make it worth buying again.

 

[MissMagAddict]

More...

Tonchi Named W Editor In Chief: In what was perhaps an anticlimax, Condé Nast on Tuesday ended a week’s worth of speculation and named well-tipped (including by WWD) front-runner Stefano Tonchi editor in chief of W magazine, effective April 12. Tonchi was editor in chief of The New York Times’ T magazine and, prior to that, fashion creative director of Esquire. At W, he will report to Condé Nast editorial director Thomas J. Wallace. Tonchi succeeds Patrick McCarthy, who helped oversee the transformation of W from a broadsheet into an oversize glossy in the Nineties and turned it into a title that has since received regular ASME nominations for photography and general excellence, including three nods this year. McCarthy remains chairman of Fairchild Fashion Group, parent of WWD, until the end of the year.

The appointment represents a homecoming for Tonchi, who began his career at Condé Nast Italy (working at L’Uomo Vogue from 1987 to 1994). He then moved to the U.S. to be creative director of Self magazine from 1994 to 1996. “To go back to Condé Nast is kind of a dream come true,” he said. “There’s been an incredible relationship between myself and Condé Nast and I’m very grateful to be back.” Tonchi had been eager to leave T for more than a year, lobbying hard for a senior position at Condé Nast — as well as exploring the potential of high-level jobs at Hearst Magazines and Time Inc.

Regarding speculation he will bring top-level T staffers or other editors with him to W, Tonchi said, “No comment.” He added he was still unclear about the staffing situation at W, following the reassignment of shared WWD and W senior employees to WWD last week. “There is no way to think about a team until you know, one: the game, and two: the players who are already there,” Tonchi said.

He also emphasized the transition will be a peaceful one. “Nothing is going to be traumatic,” he said. “I don’t think there is any rush to make a revolution. It’s an evolution, it’s not a revolution.”

However, Tonchi is expected to make big changes when he takes the reins at W, and those at the top of the masthead, such as creative director Dennis Freedman, deputy editor Julie L. Belcove and fashion director Alex White, are thought to be the most vulnerable.

For her part, White is believed to have been actively lobbying for the editor in chief’s position prior to Tonchi’s appointment, allegedly asking Karl Lagerfeld and other designers to write letters to Condé Nast chairman S.I. Newhouse Jr. on her behalf. (White did not return phone calls and e-mails seeking comment.) Meanwhile, insiders say Freedman has already reached out to Tonchi to discuss the incoming editor’s plans for the magazine, which reportedly include decreasing the high-fashion quotient so as to appeal to a wider audience.

Tonchi is expected to address the magazine’s staff today.

Meanwhile, Wallace spoke with W staffers Tuesday and, according to several people who attended the meeting, the Condé Nast executive emphasized the increasing importance of magazines’ Web sites as drivers of subscriptions and revealed the company’s plan to begin work on a digital version of W (for e-readers) this fiscal year, though it may not be published this fiscal year. “He made me feel more secure for the magazine in general by talking up the future,” said one W employee. “But as for me, personally? I think I will know better about that after tomorrow’s meeting [with Tonchi].”

As for Tonchi’s replacement at T, a Times spokeswoman said the search for a successor has begun and the company hopes to name a new editor by May 1. And, as to be expected, the guessing game as to who that might be has already begun: Former Domino editor in chief Deborah Needleman could be a contender, as could T’s online director Horacio Silva, though neither could be reached for comment. Other names being tossed around include former Wallpaper editor Tony Chambers and Time contributor Kate Betts. Before a summer lull, there will be five Ts out between Sunday and May 23. Those issues are presumably well under way, which will allow Tonchi’s successor to put his or her firm stamp on the fall women’s fashion issue, out Aug. 22.

source | wwd.com

 

[MissMagAddict]

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source | wwd.com

RETURN JOURNEY: It was Peter Lindbergh’s decision to return to Vogue after 18 years of shooting for Harper’s Bazaar. Lindbergh, who formerly worked for Vogue, had been lured to Harper’s Bazaar by the late Liz Tilberis, who arrived at Harper’s Bazaar in 1992.

Sources claimed it was the photographer’s decision not to renew his contract at Hearst. Whether that’s true or not, one thing is clear — he won’t have a contract at Vogue. A Vogue spokesman was unsure when Lindbergh’s work will begin appearing in the magazine.

 

[missbluejean]

Sources claimed it was the photographer’s decision not to renew his contract at Hearst.

So I'm guessing The Imagist was referring to him in this blind item:
http://forums.thefashionspot.com/showpost.php?p=5715681&postcount=11278

 

[Flashbang]

When Stefano Tonchi was announced as W's new editor-in-chief yesterday, he said he only began talking with Conde Nast about the position last week. But WWD reports that Tonchi had been looking to leave T for more than a year, and was lobbying hard for a senior position at Conde Nast as well as looking at the possibility of a high-level position at Hearst or Time Inc.

Big changes for W under Tonchi are expected, and although he emphasized that the transition will be smooth — “Nothing is going to be traumatic. I don’t think there is any rush to make a revolution. It’s an evolution, it’s not a revolution” — those at the top of the W masthead — creative director Dennis Freedman, deputy editor Julie Belcove, and fashion director Alex White — are said to be in vulnerable positions.

WWD reports that White was interested in the W editor-in-chief position herself and allegedly asked Karl Lagerfeld and other designers to write letters to Conde Nast chairman Si Newhouse on her behalf. Freedman, meanwhile, has reportedly reached out to Tonchi to discuss the latter's plans for the magazine.

Tonchi, who starts April 12, is expected to "observe" W staff as they finish the June issue, oversee July's book, and then debut a full redesign in September. He'll also be dealing with W's flagging ability to pull in ad revenue, which could be especially hurt now that W and WWD are separate entities; as the New York Post reports: "fashion insiders long believed that an ad in W could stave off criticism in WWD."

There's already plenty of speculation about Tonchi's replacement at T — WWD adds former Domino editor Deborah Needleman, Time's Kate Betts, and former Wallpaper editor Tony Chambers to the quickly growing list of potentials. A Times spokeswoman confirmed the search has already begun and the company hopes to name a new editor by May 1.

fashionologie

 

[MissMagAddict]

source | nytimes.com

A Collector of Scoops Steps Down by Eric Wilson
“There were times when I got bad reviews in Women’s Wear Daily,” Calvin Klein recalled in an interview this week, “but at least I always felt their criticism was written fairly, because that’s what Patrick McCarthy did.”
Last week, with the news that Mr. McCarthy, 58, was out after a long run as the overseer of a small but powerful stable of fashion publications, designers could not help but wonder if his departure marked the end of an era. As the editorial director of WWD, the industry newspaper, and W, its glossy sister magazine for consumers, Mr. McCarthy always considered his publications to be the singular powerhouse for scoops, whether a designer was changing jobs or a retailer was headed for bankruptcy. In fact, his reign was so great that it was called “the McCarthy era” in a 1997 profile in New York magazine.
That was the year Mr. McCarthy became chairman and editorial director of Fairchild Publications, now called the Fairchild Fashion Group, succeeding his mentor, John Fairchild, the notoriously take-no-prisoners publisher. For a long time, if a designer gave a story to anyone but WWD, he would pay dearly in its pages. It was the Fairchild way, and Mr. McCarthy brought his own combination of aggressiveness and brash humor to the task of keeping its subjects in line.
“Bite the hand that feeds you,” Mr. McCarthy told the writer Michael Gross in the New York article. “Never stop biting it. And you know what? It will feed you more.”
Mr. McCarthy had risen through the ranks, from a reporter in the Washington bureau in the ’70s to London correspondent to Paris bureau chief to the helm of WWD in New York, where, in 1993 he remade W, which Mr. Fairchild had started as a society broadsheet in 1972, into the monthly glossy that it is today. (On Tuesday, Stefano Tonchi, the editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, was named the new editor of W, which will be split from Fairchild and folded into the glossy magazine portfolio of Condé Nast and Advance Publications, which acquired Fairchild in 1999.) Though Mr. McCarthy could be tough with designers, he was less capricious than Mr. Fairchild.
“Let me just say that before Patrick took over, Women’s Wear Daily and W were run like a personality game,” Mr. Klein said. “Patrick brought evenhandedness and a professionalism that frankly were not there before. Fairness is a big thing in the fashion world because there is not a lot of it.”
Though Mr. McCarthy in recent years had stepped back noticeably from the industry circuit of dinners and cocktail parties, he was widely regarded as an astute journalist who instilled in his reporters a sense of aggressiveness and importance of purpose, whether they covered Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld or pantyhose and swimsuits.
“It was all about the story,” Mr. McCarthy said on Wednesday. “Get the story. It doesn’t matter what it is: a fashion show, a party, a movie star or a celebrity. If you can get it first, it’s even better.”
Mr. McCarthy will remain with Fairchild through the end of the year, but he is unsure of what will happen after that. He said he will miss the place where he had spent virtually his entire career, the arguments with colleagues and the sometimes crazy episodes he has encountered as the head of a newspaper about fashion.
Countless reporters, including this one, can recall Mr. McCarthy’s playfulness with the overinflated egos of fashion. (Fondest memory: After Mr. McCarthy ordered a hit on Sarah Jessica Parker for attending too many fashion shows one season, she called the next day to complain — and he printed her response.)
“It is the end of an era,” said Caroline Herrera, a close friend, “but everything in fashion is changing now.”
Perhaps it makes a certain amount of sense to break W’s bond to the paper in the Internet era, when scoops will no longer wait for a daily publishing cycle, let alone seem relevant in a monthly magazine. WWD, which turned 100 last year, has lost ground to some scrappy new online rivals, but its editors foresee a strong “multiplatform” future in the post-McCarthy era. Nevertheless, it had to hurt to read the scoop about his replacement, which was first reported by dailyfrontrow.com

 

[MissMagAddict]

source | runway.blogs.nytimes

Thinning Out by Cathy Horyn
I’ve been looking at the April issues, the month for taxes and shaping up and being sexy (in 60 seconds!), and I’m feeling strangely energized, if not entirely hopeful about the future of magazines. I enjoyed Alexandra Jacobs’s piece about Polyvore in the style issue of The New Yorker. (I also was excited to see the piece on Brunello Cucinelli; interesting business, with annual sales of more than $200 million, reports Rebecca Mead, and I know a lot of women who like the clothes, expensive though they are. But I was bored reading about him.) One thing in the Polyvore piece that amused me was the description of the company’s office, the atmosphere of tact and friendliness — unlike magazine offices which, as Ms. Jacobs noted, “are widely perceived to be snake pits.” But looking at clothes and brands and trends on a computer screen is a different experience, isn’t it? Magazines are diva pits, flesh-and-blood places, and they are probably less so today than 10 or 20 years ago, and of course that outsized feeling and passion for clothes is what helps stir the imagination of designers and editors alike. I guess things are thinning out now, and not just magazine pages. Polyvore is a useful site for people, but it does, as Ms. Jacobs’s reporting suggested, reflect a remote, blunt, user-friendly time.
Other things to note about the April books: Grace Coddington’s timely piece in Vogue called “Changing Directions” (I’m always interested to see how she puts clothes together, and I loved seeing Sophie Theallet’s striped long dress (with a Marc Jacobs khaki twill jacket); my friend Teri Agins in her younger days with an Afro; and Kim Noorda’s account about her eating disorder. After a slow start at the front of the book, Glamour has a hot well (though maybe after Paris Vogue’s military issue, we’ve seen enough combat boots — ’til the fall). Elle has a smart spread about reinventing the workaday uniform; ditto a piece at the front about five inspiring retailers/stylists.

 

[mikel]

So I'm guessing The Imagist was referring to him in this blind item:
http://forums.thefashionspot.com/showpost.php?p=5715681&postcount=11278

That's what I thought as well when I heard the news, and perhaps the stylist was Rachel Zoe?

 

[tarsha]

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy To Guest Edit Madame Figaro

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy has confirmed her status as first lady of French fashion with a guest-editing stint at Madame Figaro magazine, which asked designers including Karl Lagerfeld and Jean Paul Gaultier to sketch one-off outfits for the former model.

The weekly, which hits newsstands on Saturday, features an interview in which Bruni-Sarkozy addresses recent rumors regarding her marriage with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

“[Rumors] have always existed. But I despise those that stem from a blog and that are written by people calling themselves Mickey or Superman,” she says in the issue. “I also despise so-called journalists who use blogs as a credible source of information.”

Bruni-Sarkozy, who also has a successful career as a singer, took advantage of her temporary editor in chief position to commission features about some of her favorite things: her charity foundation, U2 front man Bono and her close friends Farida Khelfa and Marine Delterme, who appear in a photo shoot lensed by Ellen von Unwerth.

wwd

 

[tarsha]

Interview Magazine in iPad

Interview magazine: 'The iPad is the future and we embrace it openly'

So what's the thinking for publishers who are preparing for an iPad app launch in 2010? Journalism.co.uk spoke to one such organisation, US magazine Interview, which is readying itself for an iPad release next month. Interview's Scott Lambert sees the iPad as the future of publishing:

When will the first Interview issue for iPad be available?
[SL] The first Interview issue on the iPad (April 2010) will launch on the day the iPad goes on sale. We will also follow with back issues (40th anniversary issue with Kristen Stewart, Dec/Jan 2010 issue with Penelope Cruz and Feb 2010 with Jay-Z). This is the biggest launch of its kind - Interview will be the showcase magazine application for this device.

How much will it cost and are you offering subscription deals?
There will be a subscription-based system in place using Apple's capabilities to deliver this service. The price of an app on the iPad will be $1.99.

Is there something that the iPad offers magazine publishers that previous digital edition technology has not?
The application will utilise all of the latest Apple technology, which for anyone who saw the launch presentation by Steve Jobs will know is mind blowing. We have learned from our digital magazine and iPhone app experience how to deliver in these environments and the Interview Apple iPad app will be the pinnacle of these developments. It will be a true magazine showcase on a screen which is quite simply, made for a title like ours.

At the same time we have a version of Interview for laptops and desktops and another for separate mobile devices; and each of these are extremely high quality products in their own right. It really has to be said though that the iPad is a showcase in its purest form; slick, sexy and portable.

Full Article

journalism.co.uk

 

[MissMagAddict]

Please continue the discussion at the new thread.

http://forums.thefashionspot.com/f78/business-magazines-2-a-99811.html

 

[montrealm]

anything at low cost to expand the magazine range is good decesion

 

[tigerrouge]

I think magazines would be mad not to experiment with every possibility, but it takes a skilled hand to ensure the product retains a certain depth. It's a bit like a rubber band - sometimes the wider you stretch something, the thinner you make it.

That said, if Interview is suffering economic woes, then moving towards a new way of doing business is more of a necessity.

 

[MissMagAddict]

source | wwd.com

CAUGHT IN THEIR WEB: Vogue.com is staffing up. The site has brought on Alexandra Mack, formerly managing editor of Interview, to be managing editor of vogue.com, a newly created position, effective this week. Though still technically a part of Style.com, vogue.com has expanded its offerings in the past year as it prepares to become a stand-alone site in 2010, adding more Web-only features, behind-the-shoot videos and editor blogs. “As vogue.com grows, we will be staffing it accordingly,” a Vogue spokesman said. The appointment comes as there is enduring speculation about the future of Style.com, which some insiders believe could perhaps suffer a similar fate as Men.style.com. Condé Nast shuttered the men’s fashion site last fall, opting to focus on new dedicated Web sites for GQ and Details. At vogue.com, Mack reports to online editor Caroline Palmer. And, for anyone who’s wondering, Anna Wintour is editor in chief of vogue.com.

 

[gian-franco]

subscribing

 

[cesarcmma]

I saw this video prototype of Interview on the iPad a while ago here (can't embed), not sure what to think, maybe it is the future and if it'll save magazines I don't know, It just seems kind of intangible for me

 

[missbluejean]

Confirmed: Longtime Creative Director Dennis Freedman Leaving W; Camilla Nickerson Likely Switching to Vogue

Just a week after Stefano Tonchi was confirmed as the new editor-in-chief of W, comes the announcement that, as expected, longtime creative director Dennis Freedman is leaving the magazine.

Freedman, who has been at W for almost twenty years, confirmed the news to WWD: “I have had the most extraordinary experience working with some of the most talented and brilliant photographers, artists and editors in the world, and these collaborations have brought me unbelievable joy and satisfaction. For me, this has been one of the greatest opportunities I could ever hope for.”
Meanwhile, W's senior contributing fashion editor Camilla Nickerson is said to be heading back to Vogue as a contributing editor. Reached by phone, Nickerson told WWD she couldn’t comment. Vogue also declined comment. More departures from the magazine are likely — fashion director Alex White, who reportedly campaigned for the editor-in-chief role, was photographed working with Karl Lagerfeld on the Fall 2010 Chanel campaign shoot around the time when Tonchi was scheduled to first address the W staff.

fashionologie

I've always loved Camilla Nickerson in Vogue and I was hoping they would get Alex White too.

 

[Flashbang]

TONCHI’S FIRST CHANGES: W magazine’s longtime creative director, Dennis Freedman, is leaving, marking the first major exit of the new Stefano Tonchi era at the title. Freedman, who had been at the magazine for nearly two decades, confirmed his departure Wednesday. “I have had the most extraordinary experience working with some of the most talented and brilliant photographers, artists and editors in the world, and these collaborations have brought me unbelievable joy and satisfaction,” Freedman told WWD. “For me, this has been one of the greatest opportunities I could ever hope for.”

During his tenure, Freedman made W’s photography one of the standouts in fashion publishing, often pushing artistic boundaries. He attracted such major names as Bruce Weber, Steven Klein, Paolo Roversi, Craig McDean and Juergen Teller to shoot extensive and varied portfolios for the magazine. Under his creative direction, W was regularly nominated for National Magazine Awards, most often for photography. The title received three nods this year.

In related news, it looks like Camilla Nickerson is headed back to Vogue. The stylist, who had been senior contributing fashion editor at W, is said to be leaving the magazine to again work for Anna Wintour as a contributing editor. Reached by phone, Nickerson said she couldn’t comment, and Vogue had no comment, either. Before making the jump to W in 2005, Nickerson was an editor at Vogue, in various roles, for more than a decade.

wwd.com

 

[Flashbang]

Oh wow..

Last night, WWD confirmed that both Dennis Freedman, the magazine’s Creative Director, and Camilla Nickerson will leave W in the wake of Stefano Tonchi’s appointment to Editor-in-Chief.

Nickerson will go to Vogue, where she worked pre-W up until 2005, and we’re still waiting for word of Alex White’s fate. Under Freedman’s guidance, Nickerson and White embodied W, so whether Tonchi wants a vastly different magazine or not, he’s going to get it.

But we hear Marie Amelie Sauve will pick up where their genius styling left off.

Sauve, who made headlines during Paris Fashion Week thanks to the Balenciaga/French Vogue drama, was Carine’s Fashion Director until leaving last year. She’s continued to style for international Vogues, Interview, AnOther, and most notably, T, which means she’s already built a relationship with Tonchi.

She doesn’t need a spot on a masthead to cement her role in the industry, but given the opportunity to makeover a magazine like W, we hope she’d accept. Meanwhile, if Tonchi really wants to make the magazine “more of a general-interest style magazine, and less of a fashion-obsessed publication,” Marie-Amelie sounds like an odd pick.

fashionista

 

[t-rex]

“more of a general-interest style magazine, and less of a fashion-obsessed publication,”

W has already been skimpy on fashion content for a while now. W under Tonchi doesn't sound too good.