The Business of Magazines

[MissMagAddict]

^Interesting...I really like Common & Sense Man
Thank you for the info mishahoi


Source | WWD

FIRST-HALF FUMBLES: If publishers weren't nervous about the economic downturn a few months ago, they should be petrified by now. According to Media Industry Newsletter, most fashion magazines reported significant declines in ad pages for the first six months of the year, as the broader recession has clearly begun to affect the magazine business. And, if June is any indication of things to come (with many fashion titles posting double-digit declines for their June issues), publishers are going to be hard-pressed to grow business over the course of 2008.

Overall, the luxury fashion magazines are still performing better than the mass market titles — as most will argue, the rich keep shopping no matter the state of the broader economy, and luxury brands are still doling out dollars to market to that fat-pocketed demographic. Among the high-end fashion titles, Elle and Harper's Bazaar are reporting gains and Vogue and W are reporting relatively flat numbers. At Elle, which tacked on page gains for every issue in the period except June, ad pages jumped 6 percent through June, to 1,175. Harper's Bazaar increased ad pages 9 percent, to 890. Vogue reported flat numbers, coming in at 1,328 ad pages. W reported a 2 percent drop in ad pages, to 878.

Meanwhile, the mass titles were challenged during the first half. Cosmopolitan posted a 15 percent decline in ad pages, to 791, a loss of 141 pages for the six-month period. Glamour's ad pages dipped 8 percent, to 859, and Marie Claire reported a 7 percent decrease, to 600. In Style, which is prepping for a major redesign with its August issue, reported a 9 percent decline in ad pages, to 1,349. Shopping magazine Lucky reported a 13 percent decline in ad pages, to 718, and More, which lost editor Peggy Northrop to Reader's Digest late last year, reported a 23 percent drop in ad pages, to 452. With such dismal results for the first half of the year, publishers are going to be under pressure to drum up business for those usually advertising-heavy September issues to make up their losses. But even matching last year's results in this climate seems unlikely — several magazines trumpeted their best Septembers ever in 2007, before the full brunt of the economic downturn took hold.

 

[MissMagAddict]

Source | WWD

SOME ARE RICHER THAN OTHERS: Marie Claire's female readers don't have the highest median household income (HHI) among fashion and beauty titles, but the magazine scored the highest increase in the category, according to Mediamark Research & Intelligence's spring 2008 figures, which were released Tuesday. The Hearst title is up approximately 22 percent in spring 2008 to $72,832, versus spring 2007. Other gainers included Town & Country, up 11.5 percent to $60,676; In Style, up 3.8 percent to $78,860; Cosmopolitan, which rose 7 percent to $59,400; Glamour, up 7 percent to $65,623; Allure, which rose 3 percent to $65,605, and Vogue, which had a slight increase to $66,191.

On the flip side, decliners included W, Harper's Bazaar, Lucky and Elle. W was down the steepest, at about 30 percent to $72,242. "It is not uncommon for an upscale title like W, which has a smaller circulation size, to experience swings in the MRI data," said a W spokeswoman. "Competitively, W continues to rank ahead of our competitors in HHI as a luxury fashion title."

Harper's Bazaar fell 17 percent to $63,826. "The MRI sample for non-mass magazines is extremely small: only 392 people were interviewed about Harper's Bazaar, and our circulation is 729,000+," said Valerie Salembier, senior vice president and publisher. "In the last MRI study, Harper's Bazaar did extremely well, yet we continued to discount its value. Simply stated, in most cases, MRI's methodology does not accurately portray the audience of non-mass luxury magazines. Our luxury advertisers rely on Vista, because Vista measures true reader involvement and responsiveness, including recall and action taken on specific brands." Lucky, which holds the number-one slot in median HHI at $82,430, nonetheless declined 5.2 percent versus a year ago. Elle also declined 3.8 percent to $67,862.

 

[MissMagAddict]

source | nymag

Just How Tragic Is Bonnie Fuller?

All she wanted to be was a goddess.

With her resignation as $2.5-million-a-year editorial overlord of tabloid combine American Media last week, it’s time to look back at the Bonnie Fuller Phenomenon. A Canada-born editor who came to the U.S. in 1989, she almost instantaneously had the magic touch, goosing circulation first at teen title YM, then at Marie Claire, then Cosmopolitan, then Glamour (“get moregasmic!” one cover screamed) with a lowbrow lustiness. Along the way, she annoyed just about everybody, especially her abused, overworked charges—legend has it one assistant retaliated by putting snot in Fuller’s lunch.

Her imperiousness (and expense-account abuse) pissed off her bosses and her peers—including Vogue’s Anna Wintour, whose Catherine Zeta-Jones cover she preempted while at Glamour, a cluelessly impolitic move that helped get her booted from Condé Nast. Fuller became glossy publishing’s bête noire. But then she landed at Us Weekly, transforming the servile People imitator into an obsessively stalkerish deconstruction of fame. Celebs became “just like us!”) It quickly became a runaway newsstand hit, and a target for its targets, with Gwyneth Paltrow calling Fuller “the Devil.”

Manhattan media grandees alternately envied her and loathed her—for raising the bar by lowering standards. When she decamped in 2003 from Us for a perk-laden payday at American Media, where she was ostensibly put in charge of everything from the National Enquirer to an Us-ified Star, her critics piled on, calling her an “evil genius.” She was really something of an idiot savant: the perfect media power player for our uniquely idiotic times. But what are we left with when the savant loses her touch—her Star didn’t rise—and the culture gets even more idiotic all on its own? The celebrity media that she helped mean-ify just got meaner: Gawker added its Stalker Maps, Perez Hilton started scrawling genitalia on celebrity pics for fun and profit, and TMZ unleashed itself on Hollywood.

Along the way, Fuller wrote a self-help book. Originally titled, perhaps too tellingly, From Geek to Oh My Goddess: How to Get the Big Career and the Big Love Life and the Big Family—Even If You Have a Big Loser Complex Inside, it was renamed The Joys of Much Too Much: Go for the Big Life—the Great Career, the Perfect Guy, and Everything Else You’ve Ever Wanted. (You can pick up used copies on Amazon starting at, no kidding, one cent.) Sometimes, it turns out, much too much is too much.

 

[MissMagAddict]

Source | NY Times

Felix Burrichter, is a New York-based architect. Burrichter, who was born in Germany, is also the founder and editor of PIN-UP, an independent biannual magazine launched in the fall of 2006, whose unlikely editorial foundations are architecture and sex.

I have been obsessed with magazines for as long as I can remember. So for today’s post I have selected a number of publications — vintage and current, rare and abundant — that light my rocket, although the list is by no means complete.

The first two titles that etched themselves into my mind were a mainstream German architecture magazine called Häuser (pictured below is an issue from 1984) and Playboy, copies of which my best friend’s father conveniently kept in the bathroom of their guest bedroom.

I found the obscure East German photography magazine Fotografie in a discount pile at Gallagher’s in New York. (I liked it so much that I took it to my first meeting with Geoffrey Han and Dylan Fracareta, the graphic designers of PIN–UP.) Fotografie is strangely timeless: the clean design and typography recall the 1960s, but the issue pictured above is actually from 1987. It’s also refreshingly void of advertising (one of the few perks of socialism).

J’adore l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, one of the oldest architecture magazines around. If today’s edition leaves me a little cold, vintage copies from the 1930s, such as the one from 1939 pictured above right, are meticulously designed and full of beautiful images.

Even though I hate musicals, I do love me some old Playbills and the genius After Dark. Not surprisingly, I also collect vintage pin-up magazines, whether they’re French and from the ‘50s (see Paris Frou Frou, with cover girl Sophia Loren) or Playgirl from the ‘70s. A 1979 Playgirl spread set on a building site actually inspired the first two PIN-UP parties, where topless construction workers served the drinks.

BUTT and Fantastic Man hardly need an introduction, but I would like to list them here nonetheless, since the founders Gert Jonkers and Jop van Bennekom made me want to start my own magazine after working for them in Amsterdam one summer. They are two of my favorite homosexualists and their magazines get better and better. Fantastic Man is perhaps the only fashion magazine I enjoy reading from cover to cover, and in only seven years BUTT has become nothing short of a cultural phenomenon.

Also from the Netherlands are Oase and Volume. The former is a cult architecture magazine designed by Karel Marten, and some of the oddly formatted perfect-bound editions are now collector’s items. For its part, Volume is an unusual collaboration between Rem Koolhaas’ office in Rotterdam, AMO (the think tank counterpart to OMA) and the architecture faculty of Columbia University. The design isn’t always what I would call user-friendly and the sheer amount of information in each issue is not always easy to take in, but the longer I keep them around the more I appreciate them.

Probably the most exhaustive show to date about architecture magazines — sounds sexy, huh? — was staged about a year ago by Beatriz Colomina and her graduate students at Princeton. It was called Clip Stamp and Fold and it charted the evolution of “little magazines” in architecture from the ‘60s to the ‘70s. Every single issue on display was absolutely fantastic and full of ideas and idealism. Above is a 1975 cover of Casabella, featuring the iconic Madelon Vriesendorp painting, “Après L’amour.”

I would like to close with a few contemporary titles that aren’t exactly insider anymore, but nonetheless continue to inspire: Jörg Koch’s Berlin-based 032c and Fanzine 137, a Madrid-based magazine founded and edited by Luis Venegas. Jörg and Luis are extremely passionate about their publications, and it shows on every page. It’s also true of World of Interiors, which for an unabashedly commercial magazine can be delightfully idiosyncratic — and that’s exactly what I love. Who said print is dead?

 

[tigerrouge]

The current UK cover selection for the SATC characters seems, for some of them, to reinforce slightly less flattering aspects of their 'identities':

How the magazine market split up Sex and the City's fab four
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Laura Barton, [/FONT][FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Monday June 2, 2008[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/women/story/0,,2283327,00.html[/FONT]

[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Somewhere, far, far away on the horizon, there is a day when all of this will be over: when we will no longer have to wade through countless editorials advising how to dress a la Sex and the City (corsage, heels, air of post-coital abandon), when we will no longer be expected to care about Mr Big and Steve and "funky spunk". Until that glorious time, however, SATC will remain an unavoidable presence in our lives, the names Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha as ubiquitous as branches of Starbucks.[/FONT]

[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]This month, in honour of the SATC film, the show's four stars have taken over our magazine stands, and tedious though their newsstand presence may be, it is nonetheless interesting to see which star graces which cover: Marie Claire, for example, has a double whammy, offering readers a choice of covers - Sarah Jessica Parker, who played the series's columnising hero Carrie Bradshaw, or Kristin Davis, who was the simpering, immaculate Charlotte. "Are you Carrie or Charlotte?" its cover demands (a choice that frankly strikes me as something like being stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea). Oh, and there's a pair of free flip-flops for every reader. [/FONT]

[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Easy Living, a magazine that is one part cashmered indulgence, one part simple-summer-recipes, has also scored Davis; its cover shows her in dangly turquoise earrings and promises that inside the actress "tells all" (in truth she's telling how she tries to be eco-conscious and that her secret vice is baking). [/FONT]

[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Meanwhile, in Psychologies, Cynthia Nixon, better known as Miranda, is busy announcing that "I've lived my life backwards". Psychologies, marketed as the brainiac working-woman's publication, is the logical choice for Miranda, who was SATC's resident career woman (and she had the short hair and trouser suits to prove it, buddy). [/FONT]

[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]And finally, what of Kim Cattrall, SATC's resident sexaholic Samantha? Well, Cattrall, at 51 the oldest of the four actors, rocks up on the cover of the over-50s magazine Saga striking a sultry pose beside the headline "The vamp is back".[/FONT]

[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]And upon reflection it is Cattrall who triumphs here in the newsstand showdown, if only because "The vamp is back" seems a darned sight sexier than "free flip-flops".[/FONT]

 

[la_sonnambula]

Ahahaha! I love Laura Barton. And oh how she hates Sex and the City.

[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Oh, and there's a pair of free flip-flops for every reader.[/FONT]

I love that UK women's magazines give away rubbish. The desirableness of flimsy umbrellas, scarves that are fashionable lifetimes ago, bags with garish prints etc, shoots up from zero to one when they are enclosed in a plastic bag alongside with a periodical. I like Marie Claire's er, spunky nod to Carrie's love of shoes. Ideally, Manolos would be the free gift, but that issue of Marie Claire would be like £500, so...flip-flops! Even Carrie Bradshaw wears flip-flops! I think.

 

[Miss Dalloway]

Here is an interesting article from The Guardian. I love the bits where they touched the subject of weekley fashion magazines v. monthly, and how the market is changing.

Behind the gloss
The smooth managing director of Condé Nast UK talks to Stephen Brook about working with Tina Brown, why he takes two baths a day - and how a certain rival women's weekly doesn't bother him at all.

Stephen Brook
The Guardian

Two hours with Nicholas Coleridge is like time spent with a particularly diverting glossy - witty, entertaining, anecdote-tastic, you depart with a warm glow but a curious doubt about penetrating the heart of the matter. Lunch was with Gore Vidal; tonight it's drinks at Christie's or Sotheby's, one or the other. Then there is the costing to attend to for the 300th anniversary party next year of Tatler, whose editor, Geordie Greig, has just co-hosted a party with the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Coleridge, managing director of Condé Nast UK for 17 years, says that he liked the film The Devil Wears Prada, which many thought parodied the company, "very much", and is frequently asked if it was a true depiction. "I always say yes. Of course it isn't at all like that, but it invests the magazine world with a slight excitement."
He has reason to be cheerful. The company has expanded its volume of lucrative advertising pages in the upmarket sector - it used to trail in third in advertising volume, but has held the No 1 spot for the past two years. But with the looming credit crunch, can the good times last?
It seems very unlikely. There's an old adage that luxury is recession-proof - but the credit crunch promises to be a very different type of downturn. Glamour, the company's most mid-market title, has seen its ad volume drop 10% in the first half of this year. Already Coleridge, the eternal optimist, worries about advertising for top-end US retail, although European luxury houses are holding up. "If we could match 2007 I'd be happy," he says.
Beneath the charm, Coleridge, a former British Press Awards young journalist of the year who was flung in jail briefly in Sri Lanka after reporting on the Tamil Tigers, is a sharp operator. He spots a scrawled reference to the legendary Tina Brown upside down in my notebook across his glass-topped desk. "She was a ballbreaker," he recalls of their time on Tatler from 1979 to 1982, when Brown edited the magazine and it struggled for survival. "She was very inspiring and she was also very ruthless. When I joined I was either No 13 or 14 on staff - three years later I was her deputy because everyone else was axed. It was like being a member of Idi Amin's cabinet. Each day another body was found floating."

Stellar celebrity covers

Coleridge hasn't followed her example, it seems. Condé Nast editors are noted for their longevity: Alexandra Shulman has been editor of Vogue for 16 years, Sarah Miller has edited Condé Nast Traveller for 10, Dylan Jones has run GQ for nine. They are some of the best-known names in the industry. And circulations at the top end continue to grow: GQ enjoys a rising circulation, just, and Vogue has enjoyed its 12th consecutive circulation rise (again, just). "It's to our advantage that they [the editors] personify their magazines," says Coleridge.
The strategy pays. In April, his star editors produced some stellar celebrity covers. Victoria Beckham on Vogue upped sales 10% on last year. Princess Eugenie on Tatler sent circulation soaring 35%. So had the celebrities approved copy and photographs beforehand? "It's very rare for a magazine here to give prior sight of a piece. We do everything we can not to get involved in those kinds of agreements," Coleridge says. Which presumably means that, sometimes, it does happen.
Not all Condé Nast's titles are doing so well - the younger, middle-market magazines launched on Coleridge's watch are faltering. Glamour fell a painful 6.5% year on year, although it still comfortably outsells NatMags' Cosmopolitan by about 90,000. But Condé Nast's Easy Living, down 2% year on year, puts up little resistance to NatMags' mighty Good Housekeeping, more than 260,000 ahead.
The company still, however, achieved a record profit in the UK last year - it is whispered that its margin was a very healthy 20%. Coleridge feels magnanimous towards rivals. "I get on well with [NatMags' chief executive] Duncan Edwards, [the two share a distributor] so I am going to try and avoid my usual snipey remarks." And yet, didn't you once say that everyone at NatMags wanted to work for Condé Nast? "I think that I was stating the obvious there," he laughs.
How annoying, then, that the magazine lauded by the Periodical Publishers' Association as a "media icon of our times" was Bauer Consumer Media's glossy fashion title Grazia - a weekly. It sells more copies in one week than Vogue manages in a month. Coleridge praises it as a "fantastic success" and admits he wanted to buy it last year before Bauer did. But it isn't all admiration; its circulation has "hit a glass ceiling", he says, noting that outside of London Grazia is price-cutting - he sees the local TV adverts at his weekend home in Worcestershire.
Condé Nast won't launch a weekly against Grazia, says Coleridge. It would only contemplate a more upmarket rival, but that would be less profitable. While in Italy and Germany the company launched Vanity Fair as a weekly - a success in Italy but not in Germany - the "much breezier" weekly VF won't be seen here. Stand by, says Coleridge, for falls in women's weekly magazines. "There may simply be too many. You do not feel any shame, after reading a weekly, leaving it on the tube seat."
After a spate of launches over the past five years (Look, First, In the Know, Love It!, Grazia, Pick Me Up, Nuts, Zoo) the magazine industry seems to have lost its enthusiasm for risking new products. But not Condé Nast. "I would be very surprised if we didn't launch something next year, and quite surprised if we didn't launch something the year after as well," Coleridge says. "We are quite advanced in our planning." Those launches will occur "irrespective" of the advertising downturn, of which "we haven't seen any real evidence in our upmarket titles".
So what will he launch? Neat freak that he is, Coleridge admits to have tidied away evidence before our arrival. He skilfully bats away attempts to press him, but expect something upmarket and niche. Something, perhaps, like the technology glossy Wired, or possibly Portfolio, the US business magazine that launched last year with a budget reported to be an eye-watering $100m-plus. (When Condé Nast and the Financial Times launched the UK glossy title Business in 1986, it was killed by the 1991 recession.)

Completely obsessed

But you have to wonder if people really want more monthly magazines, if they don't want weeklies. Who has the time to read it all? Coleridge says he takes two baths a day. "I have a bath in the morning and in the evening. I have a lot of magazines to read."
Most readers, however, are surely more likely to be found using a laptop than in the tub? Coleridge defends his company against accusations that it doesn't have a digital strategy. For many years, magazine sites were dismissed as little more than subscription sites. Condé Nast was a digital pioneer, "like the Guardian", he says, online for 13 years with a staff of about 40 in London and profitable for the past five.
Indeed, Vogue.com attracts about 1.3 million unique users a month and has just relaunched, expanding its fashion show reporting, so readers can expect all 250 pieces from the Chanel runway uploaded online with a "loved it, darling!" commentary within an hour of the show.
Coleridge believes magazine conferences are "completely obsessed" by digital, even though the revenue is not there. "The percentage of advertising that comes into magazines dwarfs it and is still growing." Digital revenues at the company might be growing at 40% a year, but they account for just 7% of total revenues.
With Coleridge also a vice president of Condé Nast International, and India a particular area of responsibility - "such fun" - he spends a lot of time on his BlackBerry. "My wife won't allow me, but if she's away I will sleep with it in my left hand. If I see the red light flashing my curiosity gets the better of me and I can't not answer it."
Vogue India, which launched last year, will break even in its first full year. GQ India, all Bollywood stars, cricketers and playboys, launches in September with a print run of 40,000. Condé Nast stole a march on rivals by gaining sole ownership of its Indian subsidiary and has seen growth in Russia and China. "In the long run I am backing India. It's a democracy and a very sophisticated democracy."
But start talking about the economic downturn and the good cheer drops. It is only at this point that Coleridge reveals that he is "always cautious". The very words jar with the bravado on display for the last two hours. Maybe it is a brief peep at the private Coleridge. "I have been braced for a downturn for more than five years now and each year I have thought, 'it can't go on this good forever'." He is about to find out if he is right

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/02/condenast.pressandpublishing

 

[tigerrouge]

> "You do not feel any shame, after reading a weekly, leaving it on the tube seat."

If someone leaves it behind, it's because they bought it in the first place.

I think weeklies are a much greater menace to monthlies than people like Coleridge would like to admit. A weekly publication comes much closer to offering the instant gratification that the internet does; a weekly can offer far more timely fashion news and gossip coverage than the slow-moving monthlies, at a greatly decreased price.

When I have any money to spare for magazines, I always go for a weekly, these days I wouldn't bother spending my money on most monthlies on the UK newsstand (and those that I would - UK Vogue, Bazaar and Glamour - I've already subscribed to at the cheapest rate I could find).

 

[MissMagAddict]

Source | WWD

MATURE BY NATURE: Move over, spring chickens. Femmes, a new French glossy targeting the mature woman, has hit newsstands. The launch issue of the Groupe Prisma Presse-owned monthly, which targets 40- to 45-year-olds, features 50-year-old Andie MacDowell on its cover and includes profiles on Sean Penn, Hillary Clinton and Melita Toscan du Plantier, director of the Marrakech International Film Festival. Counting 205 pages, including 50 ad pages, topics covered include fashion, culture and lifestyle. Advertisers in the first issue include Prada, Yves Saint Laurent and Lancôme, as well as lifestyle brands such as Nepresso and Mercedes-Benz. The average page costs 15,000 euros, or $24,000. According to a spokeswoman, investment in the magazine, which has a planned print run of 100,000 copies, totals 10 million euros, or around $15.8 million. The cover price is 3.90 euros, or a round $6, reduced to 2 euros, or approximately $3, for the first issue.

 

[MissMagAddict]

Source | Digital Arts

Getty Teams Up With Vogue Paris

Stock library Getty Images has announced that it will launch 'Collection Vogue Paris' on June 17, comprising 80 years of fashion and beauty images from the style bible.

‘Collection Vogue Paris’ will be available via the Getty Web site and will feature images taken by some of the longest-standing and most widely respected photographers working for French Vogue, including Hans Feurer, Jean-Daniel Lorieux, Thierry Le Goues, and Henry Clarke.

The fashion, lifestyle and portrait images encapsulate modern-day glamour, from the first and most prestigious title of the Vogue group.

The collection, which spans from 1926, includes images featuring fashion by designers such as Dior, Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Van Cleef and Arpels.

Adrian Murrell, senior vice president, Editorial, Getty Images, said: “Customer demand and interest in high-end haute couture imagery is continuing to grow and we are thrilled to be able to represent this iconic collection of imagery from the world’s foremost fashion magazine in our archival collection. French Vogue is synonymous with high fashion and has not only shaped the fashions of the 20th Century, but perfectly encapsulated the style of each era in its unique and unrivalled fashion spreads.”

Xavier Romatet, CEO of Condé Nast France said: “We are very excited to make our stunning collection of images available for the first time via such a prestigious platform as Getty Images. This partnership will enable Vogue Paris to benefit from its images being alongside the world's best and broadest imagery collections.”

Members of Getty Images’ Hulton Archive and Contour team spent two weeks in Paris, working in collaboration with Vogue Paris scanning, editing and helping to caption the images. The collection is made up of unique content, most of which has never before been licensed.

 

[MissMagAddict]

Source | New Media Age UK

CondéNet to roll out digital-only brands in UK

CondéNet International is set to launch two pure-play digital brands to sit above its existing magazine websites in the UK.

The digital division of Condé Nast International, which oversees all countries outside the UK, will soon launch the Style and Men's Style brands in this country following successful tests in Italy.

The company believes the move will give its commercial and editorial teams the flexibility to dominate the online space for both affluent men and women. The two brands are likely to be rolled out throughout all CondéNet's territories.

The Style site will sit as an umbrella brand above CondéNet websites for the likes of Glamour, Tatler and the recently relaunched Vogue, while the Men's Style site will sit above men's titles like GQ.

The move is key to CondéNet president Stefano Maruzzi's strategy of centralising brand and technology development before rolling out concepts to the rest of the world.

He said the Style digital brands, which already exist in the US, give CondéNet a new editorial and commercial flexibility. "Under the Vogue brand you can't talk about parenting or motherhood or recipes, but this is possible under the umbrella brand. It has the flexibility to avoid being defined by the attributes associated with a specific brand," said Maruzzi. "Style is backed up in Italy by Glamour, Vogue and Vanity Fair but it can be stretched in more directions than you could with the likes of Vogue.

"The idea is that both the male and the female universes will be covered by these brands," he added.

Maruzzi said that in certain "linguistic areas" the Style and Men's Style brands will act as the magazines' only sites, while in others they will pull together the magazine sites, as in the UK.

 

[MissMagAddict]

Source | MagForum

Digital subs from Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble is to start selling subscriptions to more than 1,000 magazines, in both digital and print formats through its website. The US bookseller claims prices will be up to 90% cheaper than buying the magazines from a newsagent.

BN.com is using Zinio for the digital versions and M2 Media to send out magazine subscriptions. Readers will be able to use a ‘see inside’ feature to preview some magazines. Also, 12,000 back issues of hundreds of titles will be available as single copies in digital format.

 

[mishahoi]

I love this thread....thank you always for all of the information

 

[MissMagAddict]

Source | WWD

As The Wall Street Journal gets closer to the September launch of glossy magazine WSJ., it's releasing more information on the particulars and sending out editor Tina Gaudoin to advertiser-oriented events — a buzz-building strategy more akin to the magazine world than the ink-stained Journal legacy.

In an interview Monday, Gaudoin emphasized her task has been "translating the DNA of the paper into a magazine," but with more visual flair, and said that in commissioning pieces, she has drawn about 60 percent from Journal staff and 40 percent from outside freelancers. But the former also includes the staff she herself has hired, which is overwhelmingly drawn from the magazine world, another sign to Journal insiders that the new supplement won't necessarily cohere with the traditional culture. (Gaudoin said she has also taken advantage of the Journal's extensive network of foreign correspondents, with the help of WSJ. features editor and former Weekend Journal travel editor Janelle Carrigan. Journal reporters have been told they can have "a little more freedom in terms of how they write" to adapt to magazine style, Gaudoin said.)

Sarajane Hoare, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair known for her work in British fashion magazines, will style a shoot in the first issue, and will also be a contributing editor. In keeping with the magazine's dual audience, fashion and beauty coverage will be split between male and female perspectives, often on the same page. In the beauty department, for example, editor at large Jeffrey Podolsky takes on men's grooming, while Bliss founder Marcia Kilgore will write from the women's side. More contributing editors will be added, Gaudoin said.

WSJ., which found a publisher in American Express Publishing veteran Ellen Asmodeo, has also disclosed several of its advertisers so far. Those new to the Journal include DKNY, Dior and Bottega Veneta. Hermès and Versace, which have previously advertised in the paper, have also signed on.

 

[MissMagAddict]

Source | WWD

The home industry has little good news to share, what with a tanking housing market and a mortgage crisis to navigate, so it's perhaps no surprise that Domino is also facing challenges to its business: ad pages declined two percent though June, to 298 (publisher Beth Brenner blames shrinking automotive advertising; 20 pages evaporated from this year's issues.) What to do? Well, borrow a page from other magazines' playbooks and look to television and other brand extensions to help expand the bottom line. This fall, Domino creative director Sarah Ruffin Costello will appear on a Sundance Channel show "Architecture School" and, in October, the magazine will release its first book, "The Domino Book of Decorating."

There's more: On Monday, Domino partnered with Discovery Communication's new Planet Green network for its reality show "Alter Ego," starring Adrian Grenier. The program instructs celebrities (and, presumably, normal folk) about how to live a more green lifestyle, with Domino's contributing editor Nathan Turner as one of the green curators. He will decorate Grenier's Los Angeles home, and will appear in at least eight of the 13 episodes.

The new partnerships offer opportunities to generate advertising, but more importantly, according to editor in chief Deborah Needleman, the shows "introduce the brand to more people. All I care about is getting the magazine into the hands of people who don't know it."

That said, circulation is the stronger side of the business for Domino. In August the title will boost its rate base to 800,000 from 750,000. Domino's circulation base received a boost from old subscriptions from House & Garden — but of the 500,000 names it received when the title folded in November, it is planning for only 50,000 of those to convert to long-term subscribers. Newsstand sales through April are up five percent over last year, however, selling on average 110,000 copies a month. Domino has started to feature more celebrity covers, but Needleman says February's organizing issue with no celebrity face fared better. "Organizing — it's like the sex of the home set. It's the 'lose 10 pounds' or 'have a better life' of the home set. It's something that women are obsessed with."

 

[MissMagAddict]

Source | WWD

US Vogue's longtime design director Charles Churchward is leaving the magazine after 13 years. He resigned from his post on Monday, but will stay on through July to help close the title's famously large September fashion issue. After that, Churchward will continue to work with Vogue for projects including books and special issues. "There are many projects that I've been wanting to do that I can't put aside the time for when I'm going to an office every single day," said Churchward. Such projects include a biography of photographer Herb Ritts, for which he's currently conducting interviews.

"I personally am so grateful to Charlie for everything he's done. He's been a great colleague and an asset to all of us," Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour told WWD.

Churchward has been with Condé Nast for nearly 30 years and was a protégé of former editorial director Alexander Liberman. He first joined the company as senior designer of Mademoiselle in 1975, but left two years later to join The New York Times Magazine. Churchward returned in 1982 to become the art director of House & Garden and, later, became the executive design director of Vanity Fair. In 1994, he moved over to Vogue. At the time, Churchward replaced Raul Martinez, who later started his own design firm, A/R Media, with partner Alex Gonzalez.

In addition to overseeing all of Vogue's visuals, including fashion, Churchward helped spin off Teen Vogue and is still listed as a design consultant on the magazine's masthead. He also worked on Vogue's coffee-table book, "Vogue Living: Houses, Gardens, People."

"[Churchward] very much comes from that school of design and thinking and appreciation of great photography and journalism," Wintour said. "He understood the importance of journalism, the importance of paparazzi, the importance of bringing in new photographers, but still have our anchor of photographers like Steven Klein or Irving Penn or Mario Testino. He understood that Vogue had to remain, particularly in such a crowded market, above the fray, and remain, as Alex used to say, 'mass with class,' friendly and accessible, but chic and elegant. He was always able to translate both sides of the coin."

A search for Churchward's successor is under way, but Wintour said she has not yet come up with a list of potential replacements. As to whether or not Churchward's departure means visual changes or a redesign at Vogue, Wintour insisted otherwise. "We're not interested in a major overhaul or redesign," she said.

 

[Omnis]

Numéro Russia

I read in the cover rumour thread that the founder of the original Numéro is planning a Russian version .. I think this news deserves it's own thread! I personally am a great fan of the original Numéro. I also think Numéro Tokyo is ok. I am really looking forward to this new magazine .. I think it has great potensial!

Does anyone have any more information about this? Who will contribute? When will it be out?

miu_miu's original post;

Sunday Times (UK) Magazine has an article with Elisabeth Dijan of Numéro magazine...



Full article here

 

[MissMagAddict]

Source | WWD

Vogue has a new design director. The magazine on Tuesday tapped Danko Steiner, its current art director, to move up the masthead and replace longtime design director Charles Churchward, who resigned from his post after 13 years to pursue personal projects. Steiner has been with Vogue since 2005, joining the magazine from Harper's Bazaar, where he was design director for four years. Steiner was also a designer at Visionaire. The transition will happen in July, after the close of the September issue. "Working with Charlie, when you're around people like that you don't realize what you learn along the way," Steiner said of Churchward. "I really admire his dedication to the magazine and the overall vision that he tried to maintain." A search for Steiner's replacement is under way.

 

[celery]

Has anyone heard of Stimuli and Paradis magazine...??
Both Luxury titles
One is mens and one is high on design and creativity
www.paradismagazine.com
www.stimulimag.com

more here:
http://issuu.com/stimulimagazine/docs/issue01
http://issuu.com/stimulimagazine/docs/stimuli02_final

 

[MissMagAddict]

Has anyone heard of Stimuli and Paradis magazine...??
Both Luxury titles
One is mens and one is high on design and creativity

We have a thread on Paradis & you created thread in 2007 on Stimuli