Cookie Crumbles, Gourmet Starves, Modern Brides Jilted
The twisted and confusing world of magazines and audiences
2009-10-08
By Eric Easter

When the popular media website Gawker posted a story that publishing powerhouse Conde Nast was evaluating which magazines would be dropped from its roster, it launched a “Death Pool” giving readers a vote. As has been reported, Modern Bride, Elegant Bride, Gourmet and Cookie got the guillotine. Only one Gawker voter won the pool.

Clearly, almost none of the smart, worldly and sophisticated readers of Gawker, nor the rest of New York, imagined that the excellent and influential veteran Gourmet and the Bible of hot, hip Prada-mommies, Cookie, would get the ax.

But then no one expected the fall of Domino, Men’s Vogue, Portfolio or Best Life either. All great. All dead. Yet they were smart, humorous, challenging, fun, informative, well-designed and well-written voices of the successful, diverse and urbane.  That’s what audiences say they want, isn’t it? That’s what Americans are and aspire to be today, right?

Maybe or maybe not.

A look at whose fortunes rose this year is telling. In the second quarter of 2009, only eleven consumer magazines had growth in advertising revenue: Cooking with Paula Deen, Country Weekly, Family Circle, Fitness, Organic Gardening, Sports Illustrated Kids, Scholastic Parent & Child, Fitness, Muscle & Fitness, People Style Watch, OK Weekly and The Week.

Family, food, fitness, home, gossip. Not a bastion of intellectual rigor, modernity, cutting edge design, hipness or cultural “relevance” among the lot. Just simple, plain, recession-proof vanilla. While the hipsters want to know which guest list they should be on and which new hotel to stay in, it seems all the rest of America wants to know is how to make a cookie in the shape of a spider for Halloween.

But whose culture and whose relevance are we speaking of? Could it be that the people with the loudest voices and the most access to media are the ones who are out of touch with the real America? Is smart dying, or is being smart elitist? Can hip make money or will it always be a flash in the pan?

That’s the constant dilemma of writing and programming media.  How do you please an incredibly fickle audience that seems to crave one thing but patronize another? PBS fades but MTV prints money. The Great Debaters tanks while Madea Goes to Jail tops the box office. Mad Men gets great reviews but no one watches while Real Housewives of Atlanta kills. But come up with a cheesy idea that sells and prepare to be viciously criticized for playing to the lowest common denominator.

Witness the criticism of Ebony and Jet as rumors swirl about their shrinking fortunes. Opinion-givers of every stripe insist that the magazine would be thriving now if it were only more substantive like Emerge (dead), had more scantily clad beauties like KING (dead) or were more in tune with the music and entertainment world like URB (on hiatus). Others think EBONY should be rooted in black history and the civil rights agenda as was Johnson Publishing’s influential, very smart (and yes, also dead) magazine Negro Digest/Black World. But those people so fond of history forget that EBONY was created as a lighter, celebrity-focused version of Negro Digest because Negro Digest was -- well, smart.

Of course, the chatter about relevance and content has almost nothing to do with why so many magazines are dying now. The real reason is almost entirely due to advertising. According to a recent Magazine Publishers Association white paper, the rate that mags are dying in 2009 is the same or less than during each of the last two recessions, both which happened well before the proliferation of the internet and digital media. Furthermore, many of the magazines that shut down this year were actually experiencing gains in readership.

Nevertheless, media organizations are nothing if not reactionary, and in editorial board meetings around the country, publishers are frantically re-branding, reorganizing, rearranging deck chairs and researching, all in hopes of finding the magic bullet that will get them to that elusive audience that will love them forever.

But that’s not how the world works, and the magazines that made money this year prove that. What guides a book like Family Circle is that it knows whom and what it is, likes what it is and more importantly, is perfectly OK with who likes it. It knows and accepts that the cool kids are not Family Circle people – until they have kids and need to carve a pumpkin. And once they do, Family Circle will be there waiting.

Magazines are like furniture stores, after all. You’re an Ikea person until you grow up and become an Ethan Allen person then become an antique person. But you don’t see Ikea selling French provincial, and God forbid you should eat meatballs at Ethan Allen.

So too with mags. You’re a Maxim and Complex guy until you’re a Men’s Health guy, then you become a GQ and Esquire kind of guy, then a New Yorker guy, then an AARP guy. And AARP should no more be trying to attract Maxim’s audience than the reverse.

It’s the circle of life, for every stage a change in taste, for every period of growth a new outlook. Rather than chase audiences through their various changes, the evidence says the most successful magazines with longevity are those who pick a side. They want and encourage their audiences to grow.

That doesn’t preclude growing, evolving and innovating, but it does mean being loyal to your base and developing a thick skin against the inevitable barbs that come your way when today’s audience starts to grow into their next phase. You must simply say goodbye to those who move on and smartly prepare to welcome those who grow into you.

Whether hip or homey, I suppose the greatest lesson for the magazine world is one that used to end the old cartoon, Tooter Turtle. Tooter spent each day asking his friend, Mr. Wizard to make him the latest greater thing, only to fail every time. Mr. Wizard’s sage advice: “Be what you is and not what you is not.”

Eric Easter writes about politics, technology and culture for EbonyJet.com