A Girl World Closes, and Fans Mourn
When Domino magazine folded last week, another casualty of the economic smack-down, a howl of protest rang through the blogosphere. Fans of the girlish, how-to decorating magazine owned by Condé Nast were vociferous in their disappointment, posting anguished comments on design sites like Apartment Therapy, Decorno and Design Sponge (which accrued 498 remarks in just a few hours), as well as nondesign sites, like The Huffington Post. Even Gawker readers set aside their snark to mourn.
The commenters bemoaned the death of a magazine that “felt” like them, and worried that their Domino subscription renewals, already paid, would yield subscriptions to Architectural Digest, Condé Nast’s remaining shelter title (median reader age: 50).
Most commenters linked to their own blogs or Flickr pages, and slideshows of their own homes, each bearing the distinct Domino imprimatur (much throwing of sheepskin, chic-cute tablescapes and Lucite furniture).
Many compared the arrival of their monthly Domino to Christmas morning.
“Noooooo,” lamented Sewbettie on Design Sponge, “this is the one design magazine that I really related to — it had design I could actually aspire to (instead of, um, yeah, maybe after I win the lottery).”
Sewbettie is the screen name of Cara Angelotta, 25, a second-year medical student in Chicago who runs a fabric company, Sewbettie.com, with her boyfriend, Mark Cesarik. Web-savvy and creative, Ms. Angelotta is emblematic of the Domino readership. For a few hours last week, posters on Design Sponge grew so excited by their own numbers, they wondered if they might petition Condé Nast and agitate for a stay of execution for their beloved title.
And why not? In under four years, Domino had succeeded in attracting the young, energetic readers that all media profess to desire beyond all else. Indeed, their sheer numbers seem to pose a question: why would a giant media company like Condé Nast cut off access not only to its present — energetic young women eager to shop at Target for mirrored tiles to glue around a fireplace, as Sandee Royalty did recently in her suburban Houston home, following something she saw in Domino — but also to its future? Here was vivid proof of a dedicated fan base for a magazine that seemed perfectly poised to transition to the Web, that in fact already had an appealing Web presence, rather than the awkward foothold sites of most Condé Nast titles.
But while its circulation was strong and growing, advertising numbers, much more important, demanded it die: it received less than half the amount of advertising pulled in by Architectural Digest last year (a drop of 26 percent from 2007, according to Media Industry Newsletter).
Did Domino’s demise augur the crumbling of a larger, cultural movement, characterized by a girlish and fizzy optimism and an appetite for Jonathan Adler ceramics and Parsons tables from West Elm, and peopled by thousands of crafty, handy young women — like Carrie Bradshaw but cooler, with fewer shoes, better values and a mortgage?
In 2004, when Deborah Needleman, then a young House & Garden editor, pitched a new shelter magazine to James Truman, Condé Nast’s editorial director at the time, she described it as “Lucky for the home.” While Lucky sells itself as a “magazine about shopping,” from the get-go in September 2000 it had been modeled in part on Sassy, a young women’s title that spoke directly to its readers in their own vernacular, and with staff writers who were characters on the page.
“The shelter format was 100 years old,” Ms. Needleman said recently. “There seem to be two kinds: either the out-of-reach aspirational ones,” and the very direct, how-to titles like Real Simple and Better Homes and Gardens.
“I didn’t want to do either of those things. Truthfully, most magazines talk to ad categories, like ‘the beauty buyer.’ I just wanted to talk to the reader. The whole idea was, What is each person’s idea of how they want to live and how can we give her the tools?” Domino would be generational, and reflective of its time; it would engage with its readers with hand-written type, headlines like “Trad Is Rad,” and features on how to translate the colors and style of an outfit into a room, or another called “You bought it, now what?”
By most yardsticks, the magazine largely succeeded in its mandate. Its rate base — the number of paid subscriptions advertisers are guaranteed — reached 850,000 this month. Its newsstand sales were increasing, according to Jack Hanrahan, a media consultant and the editor of CircMatters, a newsletter about the magazine business.
Mr. Hanrahan noted that Domino’s newsstand sales averaged 111,000 last June, up from about 96,000 the year before. And since last March, he said, “they’ve been serving 200,000 more than their promised 850,000, because they took on House & Garden’s subscriptions when it folded.”
“They are promising 850,000 and delivering 1.161 million paid and verified copies, which is a huge bonus to advertisers,” he said. “The readers are there. It’s the advertising that’s got to come back around.”
The business model for magazines, of course, is based on ad revenues, not magazine sales. And home advertisers, like everyone else, are beyond skittish. In a press release issued Dec. 28, Charles Townsend, president and chief executive of Condé Nast, announced, “This decision to cease publication of the magazine and its Web site is driven entirely by the economy.” The company declined to comment further for this article.
“I think it’s pretty simple,” said Charlie Rutman, senior adviser to MPG North America, a media buying company. “The magazine industry in every category is under extreme pressure, extraordinary pressure, for a lot of reasons: the Internet, the cost of subscriptions in a tough economy, the tough economy, you name it. By the way, there probably are too many magazines, but if companies can’t survive these kinds of pressures we’re not going to have any magazines in the future.”
Recently Mr. Hanrahan ran some numbers on the shelter category (what he called “the home service category” and which includes titles like Family Handyman and Hobby Farms — who knew?). He compared the number of titles in 2008 to the numbers in 2006. “The category had 38 magazines in 2006,” he said, “and 38 in 2008.
Four dropped out, but were replaced by four new ones.” Overall, he continued, “single copy sales lost 2 percent, a very minor slip when you think about how bad the single copy sales have been overall” — sales of all magazines were down 8 percent early last year. “This is why I came to the conclusion that this category is as vibrant to readers as it’s ever been,” he said.
Jamie Meares, 28, would certainly agree. Ms. Meares, who has a business screen-printing T-shirts in Raleigh, N.C., lives in a ’50s bungalow that she and her husband are slowly decorating, with Domino as inspiration. She buys two or three copies of each issue — the pristine ones go in a binder, others are torn up for ideas.
Ms. Meares is hip enough to listen to My Chemical Romance, but she’s grown-up enough to have a mortgage. And she has a blog, isuwannee.blogspot.com (a Southernism, she said, for “I swear, or have you ever?”), which details how when “Domino spoke, I listened,” as she put it. Indeed, links to her Flickr files showed a nice sampling of her at-home interpretations of elements from the Domino canon like a “landscaped” bureau, and the deployment of woven ethnic textiles called suzanis.
“Domino worked for me because there were women in there that were my age,” she said, “and I loved that. It’s not Karl Lagerfeld's house, not totally unattainable. And they would tell you where to get things, at places like West Elm or Target or Pottery Barn, places you could go and touch and feel and be a part of.” It worked, too, for Sandee Royalty, a stay-at-home mother in her late 30s, living in Houston’s outer suburbs. “Domino was my major resource for anything practical. I would get my
100-calorie M&M’s and my hot cup of tea and my Domino and go through the whole thing cover to cover.” Her Flickr pages show a contemporary house, all ’30s glam, with a white shag rug, white leather chairs and a white fireplace tiled with mirrors — a Domino trick, she said — and guarded by two white resin poodles (“$29.95 at T.J. Maxx,” she said proudly) copied from a Domino photo (“except their poodles were $400”).
She explained a pastime she calls “magazining” — sitting on the couch with her friends and “traveling” through the pages of Domino. “Like shopping, but we don’t spend any money,” she said. As much as she uses and likes them, the design blogs aren’t a satisfying substitute. “I need something I can archive, something I can ‘magazine’ with my friends,” Ms. Royalty said.
Marian Salzman, a trend spotter and partner at Porter Novelli, a marketing and public relations company, wondered if, as she put it, “these women may have made Domino a part of their life, but they may not have made consumption a part of their life.” Nevertheless, she said, the Domino reader may not be buying now, “but she is the consumer of the future.” Condé Nast, she suggested, had severed “another link to that emerging market of tomorrow.”
Domino’s demise does not, in the end, sound a death knell for the girly aesthetic it promoted. It leaves a vacuum in the print media, to be sure, but on the Web, Ms. Angelotta, Ms. Meares, Ms. Royalty and their sisters all contribute to what Ms. Salzman, the trend spotter, would describe as a “granular” portfolio of ideas, “you know, something by, for and about them, friend-to-friend stuff,” she said. In other words, the blogs.
On Friday, Domino’s offices were nearly all packed up. “We did our serious drinking and packing all day Thursday,” Ms. Needleman said. You could hear the sharp crackle of packing tape in the halls and the pop of bubbles in the wrapping; Chase Booth, the renovation editor, was handing around bottles of Stella Artois to the remaining staffers. Cynthia Kling, a contributing editor, paused on her way out the door and offered this epitaph.
“It’s like that scene in ‘Dinner at Eight,’ ” she said, shrugging parka-clad shoulders, “the part when the husband comes home and tells his wife he’s lost his job.
And she says something like, ‘Darling, that’s fabulous! All the best people are losing their jobs.’ ”
that's amazing 
I can't wait too see the video, and see what Oliver R. will do 
