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Will Esquire DropDead?
April 23, 2009
So 24/7 Wall Street is claiming. The collapse in print advertising has pushed revenue at most of Hearst’s large magazines down by double digits after a bad year in 2008. &;Hearst is going to have to cut some of its anemic magazine titles. Esquire is among the weakest of the major men’s magazines on the basis of advertising page performance. Through April, ad pages at the magazine dropped 27% to 206. Men’s magazines are one of the most crowded categories in the industry. Esquire is up against GQ, Details, Men’s Journal, Maxim, and a number of men’s fitness and health publications. The men’s magazines which are performing the most poorly will not last long. Understandably terrified of being teabagged by a tag-team Maxim/GQ combo, Esquire denies that they are an endangered species. To that list I would add Playboy. The current issue, with Lisa Rinna (who?) on the cover and nekkid inside, is an anemic 118 pages. Combined with the size shrinkage of the magazine and thin cheap paper stock, it&;s an unprepossessing half the size of my Dad&;s Playboys from the early 1970&;s, when I developed an interest in the genre. While Playboy the magazine doesn&;t know who it is either, at least their Bettie Page fixation is harmless, if gay. But I have an active dislike of Esquire, partly based on their ever-snobby attitude. (And just who are their real readers, anyway?) But I mostly dislike them because of the &;investigative obituary&; (investigating her sex life, I recall) of Judith Resnik, the Challenger space shuttle astronaut, right after she was tragically killed. Way to go, Esquire. We won&;t miss you when you&;re gone.
Tags:Bettie-Page, death-of-magazines, Esquire, Judith-Resnik, Lisa-Rinna, Playboy Posted in Men's Magazines, Playboy, Publishing | Leave a Comment &;
ABC&;s Spelling Error: Journalism&;sDecline
November 14, 2008
The copy editor and the fact checker are no more. Also no more, sadly, is proper spelling, attention to detail and just basic accuracy. Take today&;s ABCNEWS.COM story about the Montecito fires&;please. That&;s Montecito, ABC&;not &;Monticeto.&; In October an LA Times writer referred to an interview subject keeping a pair of &;Ford Malibus&; in his front yard. There&;s lots more of this every day. After an outcry from the readers, they fixed the Montecito story, but as one wrote, &;The town is Montecito, not Monticeto. Spelling matters. In a previous posting someone asked whether the line editor was asleep. Nope. Probably didn&;t see that the spelling was incorrect. Watch the crawl on CNN or MSNBC. During the course of a day there are scores of errors. As a nation we&;ve lost the art of paying attention to detail. That&;s why our economy is in trouble. We didn&;t read the fine print when we signed the mortgage papers.&;
Thousands Flee Tony California Town as Blaze Rages
Thirteen injured and more than 100 homes destroyed in fast-moving fire in Montecito
By MIKE VON FREMD and JONANN BRADY
Nov. 14, 2008
18 comments
Flames that ripped through multimillion-dollar mansions Thursday evening continuing burning this morning in the upscale Southern California community of Monticeto, near Santa Barbara. At least 100 homes have been destroyed.
Tags:copyediting, death-of-newspapers, fact-checking, Montecito, sloppy-journalism Posted in Journalism, Publishing | 2 Comments &;
Billy Graham Not Dead, Jewish JournalDecides
August 15, 2008
Without giving credit to us, the Jewish Journal fixed their web story where they had the advanced, untrue news of Billy Graham&;s death. But in their haste to fix the story, they added a subhead on: &;Rev. Wick Warren&;s speech at Sinai Temple.&; Jeez, the guy&;s name is Rick Warren, he&;s sold ten forty million books. Sloppy&;
Tags:death-of-journalism, death-of-newspapers Posted in Journalism, Publishing | 1 Comment &;
Time to Blog! Newsweek and Time as ElectronicSweatshops
June 21, 2007
When MSG Communications media-trains executives, a key point we make is that just like their own industries, journalism, media and publishing is all about doing more with less. If a newspaper had three reporters covering consumer electronics and gaming, for example, now there might be just one. On a media tour with a client to Newsweek, we were having an engaged discussion with a key editor. Suddenly, someone burst in. &;Time to blog!&; they sang out brightly. The editor&;s look of incredulity, scorn and resignation was priceless. The same pressure exists at Time. Time Editor Rick Stengel wrote in a recent memo to staff: Let me make this explicit: evaluations of every Time writer, correspondent, and reporter will be based on the quality and quantity of the contributions each of you makes to both the magazine and to TIME.com. TIME.com is a daily responsibility; Time magazine is a weekly responsibility. We are now both a 24/7 news organization online and the indispensable weekly magazine that we have always been, and always will be. We don&;t own our readers or their time &; we have to earn their attention and loyalty every week, every day and every hour in a media landscape that is only getting more competitive. Let&;s go to work. Like the editor at Newsweek, the Time staff doesn&;t get paid extra for their new 24/7 workload. If they&;re lucky, they get to keep their jobs as long as there&;s a Time in print&;which Chairman Ann Moore claims will be as long as we live.
Posted in Journalism, Media Training, Newsweek, Publishing, Time | Leave a Comment &;
Kevin Bacon: Too Old forPlayboy
June 12, 2007
Sorry BabyBoomers, you&;re too old for Playboy. It&;s not an indignity limted just to women born in &;64 and before; the tyranny of youth applies to guys as well. Actor Kevin Bacon was summarily dumped from a scheduled Playboy interview because an editor decided he was &;too old.&; Miffed that he couldn&;t join his acting idols Lee Majors and Telly Savalas in its hallowed pages, (he apparently read Playboy for the articles), Bacon wrote this song. Oh, Playboy will gladly take your money, even if you&;re out of its desired demographic. But then you&;ll end up writing letters like this: Having passed midcentury a few years ago, I believe my tastes may not reflect the average reader&;s. I find WWE diva Ashley Massaro&;s lip rings extremely unappealing. She looks like a vampire. Ronald Solomon, State College, Pennsylvania Good thing Playboy&;s editorial policies don&;t apply to the frolics of its founder.
Posted in Ashley-Massaro, Hugh-Hefner, Kevin-Bacon, Publishing, Secrets of Men's Magazines, Sex and Society, WWE | 3 Comments &;
From the SF Chronicle to Chrysler: Dislocation at InternetSpeed
May 23, 2007
The San Francisco Chronicle is making one of the biggest newsroom cuts yet; 25%, writes a Chronicle reporter(!) Eighty reporters, photographers, copy editors and others will be laid off. &;Analysts predicted the reductions at The Chronicle could have repercussions for readers. While an increasing number of people get news from online aggregators such as Google News and Yahoo, those stories are most often originally reported by print journalists. &; Then there&;s the news website in Pasadena, that has unrepentently (and to great publicity) outsourced its city council coverage to India to reporters paid $7500 a year. While I have sympathy for those cutback or outsourced, I&;m not going to cry crocodile tears. As my Dad told me more than 30 years ago, you&;ll never see pro-labor sentiment in a newspaper because they&;re an employer. As the last person I know who owns three American cars, (a Ford, a Lincoln and a Jeep) where were these people and their publications in terms of supporting U.S. industries? Still, it&;s tough times, and for a communications person, the whirling scythe dumps more competitors into the pool.
Posted in death-of-newspapers, Ford, Journalism, newspapers, Public Relations, Publishing, sf-chronicle | Leave a Comment &;
Ringmaster Richard Parsons Tames Time WarnerCrowd
May 22, 2007
On May 17 I attended the Time Warner annual meeting in Burbank. CEO Richard Parsons gave a presentation, told us &;we toil on your behalf&; and said after years of “going sideways, we finally got some movement in the stock.” He pointed to the board of directors, &;I work for them, they work for you.&;
He went over numbers and showed graphics like InStyle with Haile Berry, Bugs Bunny and CNN with Anderson Cooper, adding &;I&;d like to salute publicly our journalists who put themselves in harm&;s way.&; Befitting the Warner Brothers location, he showed a pair of film clips. The latest Harry Potter looked vivid and great, while the new Hairspray left me wondering if John Travolta (in drag as the mom) has a speech impediment. Parsons noted the studio won 10 Oscars in 2007, but I don&;t see Travolta finally getting his for this. Nonetheless, Parsons urged the audience to see the films “early and often.&; “Can old media exist in a digital world?&; is the challenge for content creators, according to Parsons, and is something a writer like myself struggles with every day. &;We&;re in the content creation business; ink on paper, television, video. Our challenge is to move our company into digital, whether you own it, rent it, watch it on an iPOD.” Parsons is unflappable, as befits a man who says he’s a big fan of Happy Feet. He also has a good sense of humor, staying calm while noted corporate gadfly John Chevvedden talked about Parson&;s high ($22 million) compensation. When another stockholder admonished Parsons for selling Google years ago, he said, &;We could have done better, but no one has ever gone broke taking a profit.&; What&;s Time Warner all about? Parsons put it this way: 1. Make money for our shareholders. 2. Do some good in the world. 3. Have some fun doing it. From a media training point of view, couldn’t have said it better myself.
Posted in CNN, corporate-gadflies, Investor Relations, Media Training, Public Relations, Publishing, Shareholder Revolt, Time-Warner | Leave a Comment &;
Amanda Beard Swims Nude in Sea ofHypocrisy
May 10, 2007
Welcome USA Today readers! Amanda Beard will be appearing nude in a Playboy near you.
Who is Amanda Beard? She is an 7-time medal winning swimmer and Olympic athlete. Obviously, Ms. Beard feels the exposure (insert your own joke here) will help her career and bank account. But the nay-sayers are out; posing sexily is seen as bad for women&;s sports. Does Amanda have an obligation to promote women&;s sports, or is it OK just to promote her (naked) self?
Sports Illustrated writer Aditi Kinkhabwala takes up the issue here. Money quote &;Sexy pictures don&;t make people more likely to read about women&;s sports, they don&;t make anyone more likely to attend a women&;s sporting event, and they sure don&;t drive any season-ticket sales.&; But Kinkhabwala&;s point is compromised by her platform; when I read her story online the ad next to it was for one of Sport Illustrated&;s many Swimsuit edition products. Also unaddressed was why Beard needs to put her obligations to some amorphous larger group (women, women&;s swimming, women&;s sports) ahead of her own personal interest.
Posted in amanda-beard, Publishing, Secrets of Men's Magazines, Sex and Society | Leave a Comment &;
Rare Reversal: Editor in, Publisherout
May 10, 2007
In a rare reversal, management at IDG (publishers of PC World) have kicked the CEO/publisher upstairs and brought back editor Harry McCracken. He had resigned over editorial independence issues when a story, &;Ten Things We Hate About Apple,&; was killed by the CEO for fear of offending same. As IDG finally realized, at the end of the day, a magazine is a lot like a person; ultimately, all you&;ve got is your reputation.
Posted in Apple-Computer, Harry-McCracken, PC-World, Public Relations, Publishing | Leave a Comment &;
PC World Editor Harry McCrackenQuits
May 7, 2007
Tech journalists would generally rather write about cool products and score them for themselves than attack powerful companies. Computer magazines, like automobile magazines, are generally uncritical &;enthusiast&; publications. Journalists for both love to write stories with leads like &;The new
is the best
yet.&; However, sometimes push comes to shove, and Harry McCracken, editor in chief of PC World, resigned last week after the magazine&;s chief exec (or publisher) killed a story about Apple Computer. The story, perhaps not wisely for McCracken&;s tenure, was called &;Ten Things We Hate About Apple.&; That kind of story is only OK with the publisher (read &;chief ad salesman&;) if all &;ten things we hate&; are on the order of &;1. Apple is so darned innovative that&;s it&;s hard to keep up with all their insanely great products.&; With more and more readers migrating to the Web, and thus not actually buying magazines, advertising, both print and web, becomes increasingly important. Indeed, the PC World publisher, Colin Crawford, claims 35% of IDG&;s income comes from digital sources. So what&;s been called the &;Chinese wall&; between the editorial and advertising sides is becoming increasingly porous. As McCracken seems to have discovered, editorial independence is falling by the wayside, and the &;new Golden Rule&; is in place: &;He who has the gold, makes the rules.&;
Posted in Apple-Computer, Computers, Harry-McCracken, Journalism, PC-World, Publishing, technology-journalism | 1 Comment &;
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