Features

Introducing the MagaBook‌ An ex-editor wants to teach old media new tricks 14 NYRM

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By Cordelia Jenkins

dvertising Age has started a feature called “The Last Page.” It’s a chronicle of doom: “a continuing farewell to magazines that quit under pressure from recession and digital media.” Pretty grim reading, even though its premise is old news by now. We all know that the magazine industry is in trouble, even without @themediaisdying Twittering the gory details at us 24 hours a day. Paul Armstrong, founder of that blithely named news feed, has described the experience as “akin to watching Titanic and The Perfect Storm as if they were one movie.”

But if magazine editors are worried, then book publishers must be despairing. Last September, New York magazine established the collective mood of the industry in a feature titled “The End.” In a January article for Publishers Weekly, Peter Olson, former chairman and CEO of Random House, declared, “While 2008 ended on a disappointing and even discouraging note for many in the book industry, the outlook for the New Year is even bleaker.” The cover story of the March issue of Harper’s was a description of last year’s Frankfurt Book Fair. “The Last Book Party,” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, began: “The problem with publishing is the relentlessness of the apocalypse.”

All things considered, 2009 doesn’t seem the ideal moment in which to create a brand new publishing house, especially one that would concentrate on commissioning long-form nonfiction, short stories, essays, and novellas, as well as the usual fare; one that would, in effect, gather together the very worst cases in a hospital for the mortally wounded and send them back out to battle. But that is exactly what Dedi Felman, a former senior editor at the publishing giant Simon & Schuster, has proposed. And she has found a term for the kind of hybrid works (longer than a traditional magazine article but shorter than the average book) that the company will produce. She calls them MagaBooks.

Ought Felman to be carted off to a lunatic asylum?

The suggestion would be a reasonable one were it not for one important detail of her business plan. The clue is in the name. Born Digital Books will be just that: a digital publishing company. As Felman says, “It’s publishing for the way we read now.” And, increasingly, the way we read now is on a screen. Writing produced for Born Digital Books will be versatile enough to be downloaded onto any electronic reading device or read on a monitor. “Born Digital Books will be the first trade publisher devoted to fostering fluid, electronically-based, mobile, global and

…

Illustration by Stephen Garrett

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highly engaged communities of readers around long-form narrative works,” says the manifesto. In other words, Felman’s new business will embrace a perceived shift in reading habits toward the digital and try to engage with it.

The Internet has been cast as the newest villain in that ongoing saga, “The Collapse of the Print Industry.”

And it’s true that the Web is largely responsible for the floundering of both the magazine and the book industries, seducing advertisers and readers alike, making available for free that which previously had a price. There still exists a stalwart old guard of literary types who growl that none of us prefers a slide-able, tappable, pocketable piece of plastic to the reassuring weight of dead tree in his hands. But Felman disagrees. So does the Online Publishers Association, which estimates that reading digitally is more popular than ever. According to its Internet Activity Index, which uses data captured by Nielsen Online, “January 2009 was a boon for total time spent online.” Viewers spent more than a trillion hours browsing the Web, an increase of 12 percent over January 2008.

And that doesn’t count the people who were downloading text to read later, using electronic devices like the Amazon Kindle, the Sony Reader, the eBookman from Franklin, or even the Apple iPhone.

Felman is uniquely placed to witness the way the Internet has changed a generation of readers. Before working for Simon & Schuster, Felman was an editor at Oxford University Press, where she read manuscripts in large bundles of printouts. Now a freelancer, Felman reads digitally—all her editing is done onscreen. While at OUP, Felman co-founded and edited a Web-based organization called “Words Without Borders,” which published foreign literature translated into English for an American audience. She was surprised to notice that much of the magazine’s online audience came from outside the United States. “We realized we were not just publishing the rest of the world to the USA, but the rest of the world to the rest of the world,” she said.

Felman is a tall woman with inquisitive, blue eyes, expressive hands, and a tendency to digress on such disparate topics as hip-hop music and data manipulation. When describing her vision, she oscillates between dreamy theorizing and a shrewd precision of thought.

Her career in the literary world has spanned 20 years, and yet she is exceptionally up-to-date on the vicissitudes of the trendy world of new media. When Simon & Schuster started shedding jobs, including Felman’s, in December 2008, she decided it was time to launch a new business. “I felt like, editorially, there was a space opening up in that nether land between magazine format and book length,” she said.

“Magazine people say they can’t print something because it’s too long and book people then say it’s too short. I think that those kinds of editorial choices are an imperfect form of filtering.” Felman frowned,

searching for an example. “It’s not that people don’t like to read short stories anymore,” she said. “They do, but a book of short stories is not easy to market.”

Felman approached Richard Nash, who had just quit his job as editorial director of the indie publisher Soft Skull Press, and asked him to come on board as co-president. The two editors have complementary interests; while Felman has concentrated on editing nonfiction and current affairs books, Nash specializes in edgy pop culture and literary fiction. Felman will head MagaBooks; Nash will be in charge of a second Born Digital imprint, Liquid Press.

The average piece of writing commissioned by Born Digital Books will be about 20-to-40,000 words in length. Rather than a dense chunk of text, the writing will be “fluid,” complete with links, illustrations, extensive photo galleries, jacket art, audio commentaries, and video clips. Fans can start discussion groups, ask questions of the authors, link to writers’ websites, and even make virtual scribbles in the margins of the text, just as they would on a paper book. Readers can access a single work for around $9.95, or buy a yearly subscription for roughly $50—“like a Book of the Month Club,” said Felman. Advertising will be restricted and not allowed past the subscription wall. “In a lot of ways it’s closer to a magazine model: similar pricing, similar ad revenue, you can buy something off the newsstand or as subscription. But the product itself will be closer to a book.”

Felman thinks that the freedom granted to authors by the format might even encourage them to experiment with new writing forms.

“I don’t know what it will look like yet,” she said. “We won’t know how they’ll do it until we give them the tools.” Having worked mostly in nonfiction, Felman has noticed that novelists tend to be more creative with form than their journalistic counterparts. “You see it in poetry and in New Journalism,” she said. “Nonfiction writers don’t experiment with form that way; they’re supposed to convey the information in these set ways.” Not anymore.

On Felman and Nash’s turf, writers will have the space and the flexibility to try out different narrative forms. Felman hopes that a lot of new writing will be fostered on the site rather than languishing at the bottom of a slush pile. “If I had a nickel for every book proposal I’ve had which should have been a magazine article I would be a very rich woman.” But that is not to say that Felman advocates sloppiness; each piece will be subjected to rigorous quality control.

Literary types have often been suspicious of the caliber of online writing, largely because of the crimes of indiscriminate bloggers and self-publishing amateurs, but Felman does not believe that the online format precludes a sound editorial process. “I have a defined view of what an author is and what an editor is,” she said, “but I believe

The Internet has been cast as the newest villian in that ongoing saga, “The Collapse of the Print Industry.”

JJJ

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“People say: ‘Here’s the Web. I’m a publisher. How can I use the Web to help my publishing house?’ I say, ‘How can I use the Web to be a publisher?

and online across all the major digital that there is a community process before retail outlets. An important distinction and after the book. These imprints will between self-published authors and be surrounded by a community.” digital publishers is that the latter have The community aspect is one that access to these channels of distribution, particularly excites Felman. As well such as Amazon and the Apple Store, as reading finished works, subscribers rather than selling through a website. will be able to view and comment upon Speed is of the essence, said Felman. works in progress and arrange themselves “Because the digital publication process into fan groups around authors they is an immensely fast one, because we enjoy. Tina Brown, editor of the online ’” are looking for shorter works and, news aggregator The Daily Beast, has said Dedi Felman, creator finally, because we may jumpstart our observed that publishers have missed an publication process with some already opportunity for marketing books through of Born Digital Books completed works, we anticipate that the the medium of social networking sites first books will be in retail as early as nine like Facebook. Felman was animated months in.” on this topic. She believes that Brown’s Felman expects to start receiving comment reveals the shortsightedness revenue for those titles within 90 days that publishers have shown when it of startup. The bulk of the income in the comes to embracing the Web. “That’s the first two years is expected to come from wrong way around,” she said. “We should be involving these groups in the process in an active and mutual way the print and digital revenues (and, at the outset, the company will rather than trying to market to them. People say: ‘Here’s the Web. be selling print versions of their works in addition to digital files).

I’m a publisher. How can I use the Web to help my publishing house?’ Individual book sponsorships will also be sold; although, given the current state of the advertising market, advertising is not expected I say, ‘How can I use the Web to be a publisher?’”

The answer is that Felman will employ three part-time “Web to make up a significant portion of the revenue at first. Felman has community masters,” one for each line (Magabooks, Liquid Press, considered the idea that all the funding might not come at once. and also a sci-fi/fantasy imprint), who will be responsible for creating “If we had even as little as $100-to-200,000, we could pay some and sustaining the online community around each publication, advances, get the website up, and start on a smaller scale,” she said. stoking the interaction between authors and readers. Though each Born Digital Books was not incorporated at the time this article was line will have its own separate editor-in-chief, “These community written, but the domain name had been registered, and Felman and masters will liaise with authors, readers, other online publications, Nash plan to announce the launch officially at the 2009 BookExpo bloggers, webmasters at indie bookstores and other retail outlet,” America convention at the end of May. Until then, Felman will be juggling freelance editorial work said Felman. “They will work very closely with editorial and will infuse each imprint’s section of the site with that imprint’s own with attendance at both business seminars and New York City particular sensibility, at the same time that they cultivate its bloggy Entrepreneur Week, and the hunt for potential employees. The last of these tasks is proving the easiest, given the number of her and Twittery voice.”

At this stage, the hunt for investors is the most pressing colleagues that have been laid off from their jobs in recent months. issue. Felman and Nash are trying to raise a million dollars from Felman is particulary keen to encourage journalists who are openapproximately 10 investors to start the business and keep it running minded about working in multimedia; she sees opportunity in the for slightly over a year. Of this first round of fundraising, Felman and current spate of layoffs and insists that there can be a future for Nash anticipate being able to raise 10-to-20 percent from personal long-form journalism. “In this climate it’s unbelievable the quality of contacts, family, and friends, and they are looking to investors in the people that you can get,” she said, her eyes widening. “I don’t know media world to provide the rest. The money will be used for salaries, whether to be elated or terrified.”

Nor do I. If Felman can build a successful business in the current advances for the authors, production and distribution costs, and website development (which is planned in stages and can be scaled environment, she will have created something truly remarkable: a up or down accordingly). As well as the three editors-in-chief and company, built on the backs of two failing industries, which provides the part-time Web community managers, Born Digital Books will one answer to the question: What will the migration to the Web employ a chief developer, a production manager, and a business mean for long-form writing? If not, Born Digital Books might end up developer/advertising manager. Freelancers will be employed to do as just one more entrepreneur’s pipedream—and one more casualty of Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s relentless apocalypse. So, reader, if you have the initial Web design, accounting, jacket design, and proofing.

Felman and Nash are confident that their startup costs will be a spare $100,000 cluttering your bank account and an affinity for relatively low. They have confirmed a partnership with a distribution your electronic reading device, you are well positioned to make sure company that can produce and distribute their works in print that doesn’t happen.

JJJ

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Bartleby the Blogger I’d prefer not to

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By Cara Parks

ecently I got an e-mail from my editor at Publishers Weekly, a magazine for which I write book reviews.

She was complaining that five people at the magazine had already been laid off that week.

It was Tuesday.

Working in any sort of book journalism at this particular moment in time—be it reviewing, literary criticism, or book news—is a one-two punch of obsolescence, somewhat akin to being behind the telegraph desk at a canal company, wondering about all this railroad chatter. Book magazines are laying off workers or shutting down, and newspapers’ book sections are closing. The book publishing industry is aiding and abetting this decline, cutting print advertisements and relying less on reviews and criticism to sell books. This is all blamed, of course, on the Internet, that remorseless destroyer of journalistic lives and literary pursuits, not to mention high culture, reflection, and an adult attention span that outlasts that of a gnat.

It occurs to me, however, that I consume 95 percent of the book journalism I read online. I read The New York Review of Books and Bookforum online. I read the online magazine and blog Bookslut and The Daily Beast’s book section. I read my own reviews online, having, for the first year of my employment at Publishers Weekly, never held a hard copy of the magazine in my hands. I read these—and also book publishers’ websites—and then I use this accumulated information to cover book news for Interview magazine’s website. Physician, heal thyself!

There is an almost reflexive defense of printed literary criticism from many in the field, but is the act of holding a copy of The New Republic in your hands an inherently better way to read literary criticism? Can the reader 18 NYRM

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have the same experience while staring into the shiny, happy screen of a MacBook? Even the staunchest print defenders are being forced to admit that the Internet has already fundamentally changed the way we deliver and consume information, and yet the plaintive cry continues: Whither book criticism?

One of these printophiles is Steve Wasserman, who was the editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review for almost nine years before leaving in 2005, and he remains partial to print. “I still find the best criticism to be the criticism that is offered up by writers who are edited by editors of such old-fashioned publications as The New York Review of Books and The New Republic and some other publications,” he told me.

These publications, whether on paper or online, have the benefit of a staff of copy editors, fact checkers, and editors conditioned to lavish time on the work of their writers in the traditional print model.

Nevertheless, Wasserman himself has transitioned to the Web, editing weekly book reviews for the online magazine Truthdig. He has attracted many notable reviewers to the site, including recently The Nation’s Norman Birnbaum and literary man-about-town David Rieff. Despite this experience, however, Wasserman remained highly ambivalent about the role the Internet will play in sustaining literary criticism.

He paraphrased his friend Leon Wieseltier, literary editor at The New Republic, saying, “This is the first instrument of communication in the whole of human history that privileges one’s first thought as one’s best thought.” In Wasserman’s eyes, it seems like the best readers can hope for is that the Web is somewhat of a tabula rasa, predisposed toward reactionary and poorly thought-out criticism but capable of any form of expression a writer cares to promote. It’s possible, in his view, that “the message is not the medium,” although he’s clearly not pleased with the way things have gone thus far.

On the other side of the digital divide we have Jessa Crispin, editor of Bookslut, an online magazine dedicated to the literary scene. She has seen her publication suffer from dropping ad revenue from the book industry but remained highly optimistic, Illustration by Pat Parks

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both about her site’s future and the sustainability of book journalism online.

“Watching the publishing industry implode has been interesting this year,” she said. “Publishers tell me ads don’t do anything, and they don’t see results from criticism.” “Interesting” is an interesting word to use—I would have gone with something closer to “horrifying”—but Crispin remained downright breezy.

“I think the transition is going to be tricky because it always is, but I don’t think in the long run there’s going to be any problem,” she told me.

She also didn’t feel that the Internet’s reputation as a collection of sound-bitelength articles is warranted. “We run some extensive interviews and we do some long-form essays and things like that, and I’ve certainly read essays and criticism online that were 3-to-5,000 words.” When asked what she reads for a lit fix, she cited a print publication, The London Review of Books, and said that she doesn’t read blogs. But Crispin saw nothing intrinsically superior about a print experience.

“I’m not beholden to the book sections,” she noted. “I say good riddance. A lot of the book sections we lost were completely boring, so I don’t see what the giant loss was.” Ouch.

Back in the print world, Craig Teicher, a freelance writer and editor at Publishers Weekly began our interview by saying, “Now is a terrible time to get into book journalism, if that’s an ambition one has.” Sigh. But Teicher’s message was not all soul-crushing and dreamslaying; in fact, he was refreshingly open minded. He felt that the literary print journals will continue to have these strong followings if they can make the transition online. “The big challenge,” he said, “for an Internet magazine, or any Internet site—since you don’t have to pay for printing, you don’t have to pay for distribution—is trying to win authority. In the transition to a Web presence, old print publications—if they can do it without being totally awkward, and without using the rules they’ve used to publish in print—already have the authority that everyone else is trying to build.”

One successful recipe for new sources cropping up online is to use print-experienced staff and high quality control standards to lend them authority. Tina Brown, the editor of The Daily Beast, was committed from the outset to having a book section on the site because of the tradition of British publications’ strong book content.

When she spoke at the Columbia Journalism School earlier this year, she reaffirmed her commitment to the book section and talked about possibly expanding it. She tapped Alexis Gelber, formerly of Newsweek, to run the section. Gelber believed that neither the print world nor online publications had a monopoly on the future of literary criticism and book news, describing the diversity as comparable to the plethora of sources that once existed in print, before the most recent spate of financial woes.

“I don’t think any one thing supplants anything else,” said Gelber.

“In the print world, we saw that there was room for many kinds of literary journalism, and I would expect that eventually the same will be true on the Web.” The Daily Beast has been designed to appeal to its audience by using an insouciant but well-informed tone and providing a multimedia experience whenever possible. “I think it’s really nice to be able to exploit the different things that the digital world can provide,” she said.

At this point, I must interject that Brown mentioned social networking as a possible route to saving the book industry, as did every single person I spoke with for this article. Social networking

was the subject of my thesis this past year, so I’d like to toss in my personal caveat: Social networking is cool and useful, but it is not the magic bullet everyone seems to think it is. On its own, it is not going to save literature, cure cancer, or end war. Just take my word for it.

As Gelber pointed out, however, there are other advantages that the Internet can provide: hyperlinks for those Melville references you totally don’t understand; audio of author interviews alongside a review; and the ability to aggregate information on a particular work of literature or writer of note, or to consume the writings of a favorite critic with the click of a button. As Wasserman pointed out, the message need not be the medium. We can have reflective, long-form criticism on the Internet.

It is not, I suspect, the mode of delivery that hurts criticism online, but our response to it as readers. Like many people, I live a large part of my life on a computer, usually doing something that is roughly work related (assuming you’re willing to accept a broad interpretation of what constitutes “work”). When I click through a book review online, there’s at least part of my mind that is in work mode and, therefore, somewhat focused on the things I should be doing instead of trolling ALdaily.com. I’m not immersed in the experience. In contrast, when I curl up in a chair with a magazine, it feels luxurious, even indulgent, and it causes me to privilege the writing I encounter there, to grant it an elevated status. If that writing seems more carefully thought out and edited, perhaps it’s because I am thinking about it more clearly, and savoring a fine turn of phrase that I might gloss right over online.

Teicher may have put it best when he described the back and forth that goes on between books and their critics over a long period of time, as a reader “sips” a New York Times Book Review over a period of weeks, then buys the book, then years later finds the review in an anthology and goes back to the book, and on and on. Can any of us truly claim to have that kind of relationship with our browsers’ bookmarks folder? “Book criticism, hopefully, aspires to itself be literature, to be prose worthy of reading and then rereading,” said Teicher. “With the Internet—at least as we use it now, largely because we’re forced to sit in front of a computer instead of somewhere more intimate—we tend to read things that you can read quickly and don’t need to keep in your head.”

Perhaps, then, there is something being lost as magazines and newspapers drop book sections or transfer them online. But with online dissemination changing as quickly as it is, there’s no reason to think we couldn’t patch up our relationship with the medium. Steven Adler, the editor of BusinessWeek, visited the Columbia Journalism School recently and spoke extensively on evolving technologies such as electronic ink and flippable online pages. (That is something I still don’t understand, to be honest, and would really love to experience.)

The Kindle, to mention one digital device, is increasingly found on nightstands and could prove to be an invaluable way of monetizing our online criticism consumption while replicating print’s privileging of reflective consumption. Someday soon, we could be curling up with an online magazine, flipping through its pages in the comfort of our beds. With this in mind, we lovers of book criticism should take inspiration from literature and, thinking of E.M. Forster, look at the print debates “neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.”

“Now is a terrible time to get into book journalism, if that’s an ambition one has.”

JJJ

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Beyond the Pale Fashion editors need to open their minds—and their pages—to greater racial diversity

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By China Okasi

hen I came home from college after my sophomore year (circa the end of the 20th century), I figured I’d model—just like I figured I’d try a new restaurant in SoHo, or write a collection of poems, or learn to speak Tagalog. I had modeled in small shows before, but since I was graduating from college the next year with much squarer career goals, I wasn’t aiming for supermodel status or anything. I just wanted to book a gig or three with a New York agency, and say that I’d done it.

So, I hopped on the subway to find an agency downtown (there were tons of them on my list). At one, a tall, brown-haired man with patchy, pale skin and a crooked nose called me in. Before I could touch my bottom to a chair, he sighed, as if I’d been blocking his view at a movie theater and said, “Look. Let me just be frank with you. We need girls that look like that, strictly.” Then, he turned around and pointed to a sea of models on the gigantic wall behind him.

“You mean, girls with—uhm—,” I started to say, as my eyes scanned the pictures on the wall. Not one black girl posed on that wall, not one Asian girl, not one Latina girl—not even a girl with half a tan. Everybody looked white. OK, fine, maybe one or two girls had tans, but seriously, very little melanin oozed from that wall.

“You mean, girls with—uhm—,” I said again.

Black may be in Vogue Italia, but it’s still not in vogue

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“Girls with that hair texture, eyes, skin—you know,” he replied hurriedly.

“Of course,” I said, smiling, and not moving. I was sure he was going to shove my shoulder playfully, throw his head back, release a loud laugh from his gut, and tell me he was kidding. He didn’t.

When I left his office, I found another agency willing to work with me, but by that time, I was so turned off by my initial experience that I abandoned my adventures in “black-girl modeling.” I simply went back to school and focused on parties and boys, like every other hyperactive college student.

However, my more serious peers, like Nnenna Agba of America’s Next Top Model, endured the plight. She’d been attempting to model for years, signing with a small agency in her native Texas, before Tyra Banks’ Top Model show opened up spaces for girls of every race to compete for modeling contracts on reality television.

The striking Agba didn’t win the Top Model prize, but she kept her signature bald head, which she’d shaved during her appearance on the show in 2006. She is now signed to Karin Models in Paris. She makes good money modeling for commercials, fashion shows, and magazines. Still, she admitted that very few black girls appear in fashion magazines and that it’s much harder for her to land a job than her white counterparts.

“I did a lot of research,” Agba said about her search for an agent after America’s Next Top Model. “I knew that these agencies had about one or two black girls maximum. [I went to] every single website for these modeling agencies, and [saw] how many girls they have—and how many are black. Very few.”

The whitewashing of the modeling industry has been common for years. According to Jezebel.com, there were 3,697 open spots for models in the New York Fashion Week held this February. Of the 668 total models of color, roughly 273 were black. That’s just seven percent for black models, and 18 percent overall who were nonwhite.

Last year, New York Fashion Week used even fewer models of color.

In the fall of 2007, one-third of the New York shows used no models of color at all, according to Women’s Wear Daily.

In April 2008, Franca Sozzani, the editor-in-chief of Vogue Italia, told The Independent, a newspaper in the United Kingdom, “Nobody is using black girls. I see so many beautiful girls and they were complaining that they are not used enough.” In July of that year, Sozzani put her magazine where her mouth was—she set the seams of the fashion world ablaze with an all-black issue of Vogue Italia, in which only black models appeared.

The magazine stunned the fashion world by overturning previous notions of race in fashion. More than a hundred pages of the issue, including the cover, had images of black women of all shades, shapes, and sizes, photographed by Steven Meisel, an acclaimed New York based photographer. Among them were the very dark and bald Alek

Wek and, in a black headwrap, the model-turned-mogul Tyra Banks.

Even Agba’s fellow America’s Next Top Model alumna, Toccara, who is a plus-sized model, landed a spot in the issue.

Sozzani said that the ascent of Barack Obama last year, coupled with the age-old tales of discrimination in fashion, inspired her to put out the precedent-shattering issue.

Vogue Italia’s black models issue received an overwhelmingly positive response from the public. A spokeswoman for Condé Nast, which owns Vogue Italia, said the all-black issue increased distribution in the US by 40 percent that month—and completely sold out.

The Fashion Bomb blogger Claire Sulmers said she helped some of her readers secure copies of the issue. “I participated in the Italian Vogue fury, ordering boxes upon boxes of magazines and shipping them out to readers who might not be able to buy them in their states,” Sulmers said. “I literally sat at the post office and addressed packages to Nebraska, Wyoming, Ohio.”

But, one Fashion Bomb commenter, who goes by “Tisha,” was in no mood to celebrate. She wrote on the blog’s comment board: “Everyone’s running to make Italian VOGUE the best selling cover ever. How many of us support forums that support us�all the time!?!

Suede and Vibe Vixen come to mind.

And I’m making a donation to the Fashion Bomb. We take notice when others show us some love, but show no love (monetarily) to pubs that love us consistently. Something’s wrong here.”

Agba, too, questioned why Vogue Italia’s all-black issue needed to be a “special” issue and not the norm. “I realize that issue sold out because it was a controversial issue, and because everybody was talking about it,” she said. “It was not an issue like, ‘Oh, that’s a normal magazine, let’s buy it because it’s nice.’ No.” Sulmers’ view was, “I was extremely happy to see women of color featured so beautifully and prominently. Then again, it seemed like a gimmick.”

Perhaps it’s premature to call the all-black issue of Vogue Italia a gimmick, but for now, a visit to the website of any of the top modeling agencies confirms Agba’s statement that some skin-color discrimination exists in the fashion industry.

One would think that such a major break in the status quo by a magazine as influential as Vogue Italia might completely change the way the fashion industry views race today. But there are no signs of such an overhaul yet.

If you visit the website of the New York branch of Next Model Management, for example, you’ll notice just five black models out of the 132 women featured on the site (approximately 4 percent). If you cruise over to the Ford Models website you’ll find that, of the 140 female models on the site’s main page, no more than four appear to be black (roughly 3 percent).

Next and Elite are so important because they are at the beginning

Perhaps the fashion industry’s greatest irony is that, when it comes to race, it is still horribly out of fashion.

JJJ

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of a chain reaction: They provide models for advertising directors to use in fashion ads. These ad directors then place the fashion ads in fashion magazines. With modeling agencies that are so predominantly white, you get a fashion magazine industry that runs pages and pages of ads, cover shots, and photo shoots with mostly white faces from mostly white agencies, every season, every year, with very rare thematic breaks.

It’s a trend that goes beyond fashion magazines. For example, Vanity Fair featured one African-American on its cover back in 1993—the singer Tina Turner. Then came 12 years without another black person on its cover, until the pattern was broken with Beyoncé in 2005.

“There has always been a fear—in that kind of a closed industry— of products advertised by people of color,” said Pravat Choudhury, a professor of marketing at Howard University and the author of several articles on diversity advertising. “Historically, whites believed that products endorsed by whites met some kind of imagined standard—and blacks believed in that standard, too. It wasn’t until the Seventies and Eighties that people started coming up with the concept of “ethnic” [branding], and embraced color—magazines like Ebony... you know, Jet magazine, things like that, started coming up.”

African-American magazines like Essence (founded in 1970) and Ebony (1945) cater to an African-American audience, so much so that almost all their models are black, and even their advertisers are careful to use images of black women. But even though Essence boasts a circulation of over a million, it is nowhere close to defining the fashion magazine industry. According to a September 2008 Forbes report, which claimed to have researched “every monthly U.S.-based magazine [with] a significant amount of fashion editorial, including teen magazines,” the top magazines in this category—Glamour, Elle, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and In Style—have mostly white demographics.

Forbes ranked the editors of these five magazines as the “Most Powerful U.S. Fashion Magazine Editors.”

It is a shame that, in the 21st century, the “most powerful” fashion products are, in truth, among the most racially segregated. Even white models like Lynsey Carr complain that when black models are cast for jobs, they tend to fit one stereotype or the other. “At my modeling jobs, I felt bad for a lot of black girls... because they either had to be very light-skinned like Tyra or they had to look like they just left a dark tribe in Africa,” Carr said. “There was [no middle ground] between being very light-skinned and being very tribal and ‘exotic’ looking, and that used to bother me.”

“Elite is one of the most diverse agencies out there,” said Chris Constable, an Elite Model representative. “The white model majority you see in modeling is just because you have a white majority population in America in general.” Asked why modeling agencies don’t reflect the entire multicultural makeup of the United States, with its increasingly sizable minorities, Constable said that race was a touchy issue and that modeling agencies just hire the girls that the designers demand.

When designers are asked to explain why they use so few black models, they blame their lack of diversity on everything but the shoe stand. Some declined to go on the record for fear that they’d be stirring up controversy. (No surprise there. Blackness equals controversy. Got it.)

One designer, Simon Ungless, director of graduate fashion at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, has clients who include the

designers Alexander McQueen, Paul Smith, Donna Karan, Index, Versace, Ralph Lauren, Nigel French International, and French Connection. He spoke frankly, saying, “Sometimes casting is about the body type, and it may be [politically incorrect] to say this, but it’s hard to find a black girl with a [less voluptuous, industry standard] body type.” Ungless went on to say that race was not the only difficulty in the modeling industry. “Sometimes I’ll look for young girls, but then I don’t want them too green, because then they can’t walk,” he said. “Then I don’t want the ‘beauty girls’ or ‘swimsuit girls’ from Los Angeles... because [the fashion] we do is more about selling ideas than about selling product.”

Selling products, he added, is what commercial advertising departments that cater to “middle America” are doing. And those advertisers think that images of white girls are needed to sell products to middle America. After all, middle America comprises mostly white people. On the other hand, Ungless said, when you think of big names in fashion, many that come to mind immediately are those of black women—Naomi Campbell, Iman, Veronica, people like that.

I do think of those names when I think of top fashionistas.

But, as self-centered as models have been accused of being, those top fashionistas don’t just think of themselves. Veronica Webb, for example, appeared on The Today Show in July 2008 with Elite Models’ director, Neal Hamil, complaining that there are not enough black models in the fashion industry. Webb added that, not only are there not enough black models, there are not enough black fashion editors, writers, photographers, or magazines. She said: “You need more people who are power brokers. You need more black photographers.

There aren’t many. I can count them on my hand. You need more black editors. You need more black hairstylists, makeup people. The more people there are in the industry, behind the scenes, making decisions, the change will come.”

When I asked Kate White, editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan, during her spring 2009 Columbia University Delacorte Lecture, why her magazine didn’t feature more black models, she mentioned that she had put Beyoncé and Rihanna on the cover, and might consider putting Rihanna on again. She said that the fashion industry knows that diversity is important, but that she can only put faces on the cover of her magazine about which her readers are “ravenous.” “We figured out that blondes sell more covers than brunettes,” she said.

As per black models, White said that “because the stakes are so high, I can’t just say I want to [put black people on the cover of Cosmopolitan] because it’s the right thing.” She has to worry about numbers and selling to her audience, she said.

According to a November 2002 New York Times article written by David Carr, Halle Berry, in December 2002, became only the fifth black to appear on the cover of Cosmopolitan since the magazine began using cover photographs in 1964, and she was the first since Naomi Campbell in 1990.

So, readers of fashion magazines aren’t “ravenous” about people with dark skin tones? The Times reported that Vogue had gone out of its way to let Michelle Obama choose her own stylings for their February issue. Maybe readers are more interested in diverse covers than editors give them credit for. Lost on the fashion industry is that racial discrimination in the year 2009 feels fashionless, tired, old. It is a concept that needs to be pushed to the back of the closet, never to be worn again. Perhaps, the fashion industry’s greatest irony is that, when it comes to race, it is still horribly out of fashion.

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W

hen Google Book Search approached Johnson Publishing in the spring of 2008 about digitizing their magazine archives— free of charge—it was an easy sell.

Previously, Eric Easter, Johnson’s chief of digital strategy, had had a hard time getting his print-centric company to buy into the idea. The Chicago-based publishing firm owned the two most important magazines for 20thcentury African-American cultural history, Ebony and Jet. Easter had estimated that digitizing the archives of their nine titles would cost millions of dollars, with no clear return on investment. By the time Google approached him, he had been exploring ways to get the archives online for about a year. This time the price was right.

Google’s offer seems, at a glance, like a great deal for Ebony and Jet, as well as for New York magazine and Hearst’s Popular Mechanics, the other titles included in the December 2008 launch of magazines for Google Book Search. Readers now have free access to previously unavailable material. And, of course, by enriching its search engine— which ultimately translates to online ad revenue (and bragging rights)—Google also benefits. The Google-Johnson deal and others like it sound like win-win-win situations for publishers, the common folk, and Google. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

In the publishing world, the question of whether online content should be free or not has been the subject of heated debates that range from ethical to economic and that frequently become legal.

The Johnson-Google model—and why both parties seem so tickled over their arrangement while other magazines, like Harper’s, would not consider entering into such a deal—is an important part of these debates, which, so far, have been focused on books and newspapers.

Magazines, it’s your turn.

First of all, Ebony and Popular Mechanics? Really? Those magazines seem randomly selected because they were. Andrew Madden, a special product developer with Google Book Search, said he used lists from the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) to begin reaching out to publishers about five years ago. The process wasn’t scientific, he said. “Really, there were only three of us [at Google] having these conversations. If you look at the ABC list, there are over a thousand some-odd titles, so we just had to take a staggered approach to the conversations. But our goal is total comprehensiveness, so we would never exclude a title.”

Google’s scope is still limited by the number of publishers who are willing to hand over their archives. There are plenty of magazines for which Google’s offer doesn’t seem to make business sense. Among those are small magazines with rich histories, like The

Nation, founded in 1865, and Harper’s, founded in 1850, which hope to generate revenue from their particularly extensive archives. Teresa Stack, president of the Nation Company said: “We struggle to get by, and this is our legacy. Our value is this content going back to 1865. It has to be worth something to keep us going.” Her magazine currently has a deal with the reference-database company EBSCO to sell the content to research institutions and online databases. Even if the content were digitized at no cost to The Nation, Stack wouldn’t want it to be free through Google or anyone else. “It makes me nervous,” she said.

Rick MacArthur, the president and publisher of Harper’s, also emphasized the cost and value of content: “The whole ethos of not paying for content, if it continues, is going to destroy the magazine/ newspaper business, or help destroy it. Writing and editing is hard work—it’s worth money. People should pay for it.” He continued: “We’re training a whole generation of people to think it’s worthless.

And Google, to the extent that they aid and abet that, is doing a lot of damage to the written word and to writing in general.” The Harper’s archive is behind the same pay wall as current content, to which only paying subscribers have online access. Thus, the archive becomes, in effect, a premium to induce readers to subscribe. When I asked why Harper’s doesn’t charge a separate fee for its archives, MacArthur said: “I don’t think it would work. I don’t think people would subscribe to the Harper’s archive itself.”

That’s the point, or at least it was for Johnson Publishing. Like Harper’s, Johnson keeps current issues of Ebony and Jet behind a pay wall through a common online subscription service called Zinio. They wouldn’t consider giving that new content away for free because, as Easter put it, “No one’s in a rush not to make money.” In other words, they don’t want their websites to compete with their own print counterparts by drawing away otherwise-paying readers. So their free websites don’t include magazine content. As for the older content, Easter said: “Historically, I’ve found that you don’t get many people subscribing to the archives. That hasn’t been an effective revenuegenerating model.” When Sports Illustrated’s “Vault” came out from behind its pay wall in March 2008, The New York Times did a story on the greatest value an archive can provide: Web traffic.

While The Nation and Harper’s use (in theory) a subscribersupported model for their archives, Time, a more popular title with no less historic value, has tried to make its archives ad-supported, through Web traffic. The hope for traditional publishers like Time, who have plunged themselves into the world of online advertising, is that eyeballs (traffic) translate into money.

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to all users, whether or not they subscribe to the print edition. In an e-mail exchange, I asked Josh Tyrangiel, the editor of Time.com, why that was the case. “It’s rich content that helps draw users to the site,” he wrote. In theory, more users on the site means more clicking on ads, which means more revenue. “It also helps with our page rank,” Tyrangiel added. The page rank refers to the order in which Google will list Time.com in its main search results for any given query (and, for anyone out there still wondering, Google’s PageRank is based on a complicated, proprietary algorithm that prioritizes more popular and, supposedly, trustworthy websites). For Time.com, a better rank on Google again means more users finding the site and clicking ads.

Time’s archives didn’t affect traffic after all. “As for revenue,” Tyrangiel wrote, “there are definitely advertisers interested in building programs around the older content, but I wouldn’t call it a honeypot.” The reality of online advertising is that it hasn’t produced much money for the majority of traditional publishers.

The argument over whether or not to charge for archives becomes moot if, as MacArthur said, free archival content devalues all other content.

And if MacArthur is right, Harper’s had devalued its own magazine before offering subscribers the archives premium. By the time the monthly embarked on its own digitization efforts a few years ago, Cornell University had digitized the issues of Harper’s from 1850 to 1895. Those issues are still available to view for free on the Library of Congress’s website. However, if you try to access one of those same issues through Harper’s website, you’ll get a webpage that says: “Sorry—that full-sized image of the page is only available to Harper’s Magazine subscribers. Subscribe today for as little as $16.97 per year!”

Another quirk of the Harper’s model is that they’ll never know if digitizing the remaining years of its archives was worth the laborious effort that went into it. Associate Editor Paul Ford physically scanned the pages of the magazine and then used optimal character recognition (OCR) software to make the pages searchable. It took Ford and his Fujitsu scanner about 16 months to scan a quarter million pages.

Even after countless 18-hour work days, a stretch during which Ford often slept on the floor of his office, he said he sees nothing wrong in Google’s offering free content. “More good magazine content in the world is great,” he said. “I think that’s wonderful. I don’t have anything against Google—on this front, they’re trying to do good work, and they’re accomplishing a tremendous amount.”

Surprisingly, Harper’s seems to be happy with its archival situation, in spite of the fact that, like many magazines, it can’t quantify the revenue it may or not be making.

Peter Osnos, the founder of Public Affairs Books and a member of The Century Foundation, is an outspoken critic of Google and its ilk. He said the important issue should not be whether or not a user pays for content but whether someone pays for content. “If, in a specific agreement,” Osnos said, “Johnson Publishing is going to share in the revenue, that’s great. That’s what happened in book publishing.” He said Johnson should feel free to repurpose its own

archives in any way it wants. “I don’t think if, at the end, the material is free, that it automatically means that it’s been devalued,” Osnos explained in a later conversation. “Let’s say there’s great content on PBS. I get it for free, but I have the option of paying for it if I choose to be a member. So there are all these different variants, and the real danger is people who say it’s got to be one way or another.”

Osnos is satisfied as long as there is compensation, in some form, for content creators, as is the case with Google Book Search.

Yet it’s not clear with the Google deal just how much money actually would be derived. “We’re very careful to set what I think are realistic expectations about the amount of revenue that you could expect from this type of project,” said Madden of Google.

“We think there are a lot of compelling reasons to undertake this project with us. Revenue is one of them, but we want to be realistic about the amount of revenue that this generates.”

Neither Google nor Johnson would reveal the specifics of their agreement, but the deal looked something like this: Johnson Publishing would ship archival issues to the Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Google would scan the magazines and make the content searchable and browseable at no cost to Johnson. Relevant pages of the magazines would appear in Google Book Search results, which, when clicked, would lead to another Google site showing the content. (For example, typing “Flip Wilson” into Google Book Search yields 1,272 results, as of March 2009, the 17th of which is an issue of Ebony from April 1968 with the article “All Flip over Flip.”)

Eventually, all of the digitized content would also appear on webpages that Johnson Publishing owned. Regardless of where a user saw the content and clicked on a contextual ad— whether it was on Books.google.com or Ebony.com—Google and Johnson would share the revenue. For those of us staring at our computers, viewing the content in full would be free.

The minimum period for Google’s contracts with publishers was two years, so in 2010, if Johnson Publishing wants out, it could tell Google to stop showing its content. Google would be contractually obligated to “turn off the switch,” as they say. If Johnson wanted to use the same digital files, it would have the option of buying them back from Google. Either way, Google would always retain a copy of the files on its servers.

When I asked what the revenue breakdown was between Google and Johnson, neither side would say. But Madden said, “I can say it’s a very decent revenue share, and I think all the publishers have been pleased with it.”

In a deal with a company such as EBSCO, whose business includes selling digital versions of magazines to libraries and universities, it would be more common for the publisher to have a smaller percentage of the revenue. So in a hypothetical deal between Ebony and EBSCO (which, confusingly, is an actual deal on which Lisa Butler of Johnson’s licensing division said she couldn’t comment), the company getting more than 50 percent would be EBSCO. In the Google deal, however, the revenue breakdown actually comes out in Johnson’s favor.

Google is technically EBSCO’s competitor, but EBSCO doesn’t

Google has always said-and I believe themthat they want to democratize the world’s information by making it universally accessible.

JJJ

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New York Review of Books, Mumbai Division How NYRB ships its scruples overseas

By Rob Fishman Writing in The New York Review of Books in June 2007, Pankaj Mishra argued that the Democrats’ 2006 midterm victory in which they took control of Congress revealed “widespread disquiet over inequality in America,” the result of, among other things, “increased outsourcing of jobs—including to India—by American companies looking for cheap labor and high profits.” One year earlier, in the same periodical, Andrew Hacker bemoaned the “victims of outsourcing.” And a year before that, Jeff Madrick, again in The NYRB, predicted that outsourcing “will add to the pressure on workers to passively accept lower wages and more onerous conditions.”

Yet when the time came to digitize its archives, as magazines these days are wont to do, The NYRB didn’t buy American; it outsourced the task to India.

In fact, magazines of all stripes have railed against outsourcing. Writing in The New Yorker a few years ago, John Cassidy observed: “Today, largely thanks to digitization and the Internet, the service sector, which employs fully four-fifths of the labor force, is increasingly affected. Many white-collar industries that once provided safe, well-paid employment, such as telecommunications, insurance, and stockbroking, are no longer immune from the temptation to outsource.”

In Vanity Fair the same year, Michael Wolff summarized: “The fate of the corporation (merged, acquired, I.P.O.’d, downsized, outsourced), the direction of the economy, the fad and theories of business—these have become the greatest variables of social happiness.” But in some cases, magazines did not practice what they preached.

There are many reasons for American companies to outsource work to India. Because poverty is endemic there, wages are much lower.

With a labor force of 523.5 million, India’s gross domestic product per capita is only $2,800—6 percent of what it is in the United States, according to the CIA World Factbook. And India has a largely English-speaking and tech-savvy workforce. Its outsourcing industry grew from $500 million in 2000 to over $3.5 billion in 2005, the Hay Group has reported. “Services outsourcing,” said the report, “has been amongst the best of India’s recent successes.”

And as the Oscar-winning movie Slumdog Millionaire demonstrated this year, some

of India’s advantages are a matter of global position: while American workers are sleeping, India’s laborers are up for a day’s work.

For these reasons and others, magazines, like other US-based entities, turned to India for work. “We did not have the capacity to digitize 35 years of issues,” said Rea Hederman, the publisher of The NYRB. “We print on newsprint, which yellows and cracks. And in the early years, type was set with linotype machines, which provide broken type in many cases. For these reasons the issues could not be scanned—they had to be typeset word by word.” Faced with a demand for back issues, and the revenue stream they can provide, The NYRB looked for options.

According to Hederman, it would have required dozens and dozens of new hires to digitize the old issues, which “we could not have afforded.”

After a search for qualified firms, Hederman said they settled on an Indian company. “There may have been other companies here and there, but this was the only one we found.”

That company was LaserWords. Today, it is a truly cosmopolitan operation. With 1,300 employees in India, based in Chennai, and an additional 95 workers in the US, LaserWords espouses a transcontinental approach to efficient business. There are even offices in Maine and Wisconsin, and a publishing service in New York City.

But LaserWords wasn’t always as global.

At the time it was employed by The NYRB, it was a purely Indian company, which was taking over work that had traditionally been done by American outfits. “Essentially, the way it worked with us,” said Sandeep Sridharan, an account manager at LaserWords, “is there’s a certain level of complexity which you can handle pretty well in India, and there are some things that are a little too complex or that require a certain kind of approach which they haven’t acquired there yet.”

In this way, Sridharan said, LaserWords demonstrated the potential for synergy between Indian and American companies, and warded off the specter of lost jobs from outsourcing.

“Ironically,” he said, “there’s a superficial level of outsourcing—and at some level that does happen, there’s no denying that—but at another level, it can also be a source of stability for companies over here.”

If the specter of outsourcing haunted the Western world in the last decade, then today there has been a tempered reversal. It has often

been little more than a tepid acceptance of the trend, like sticking one’s foot into the cold end of a pool, but as BusinessWeek wrote, describing the evolution of an American paper company in early 2006, “Hope is coming from an unusual source.” After redirecting 160 jobs to Chennai, India, where the paper company hoped to have “US and Indian designers collaborate 24/7,” the chief executive said he might be able to keep production in Green Bay, Wis., where his original factory was located. “We can compete and create great American jobs,” said the CEO, “but not without offshoring.”

Outsourcing, once seen as a pernicious trend, today is an integral component of the “flat” world. India is not the competition, but an ally.

At the same time, an entire cottage industry has grown up around magazines looking for overseas labor. Ironically, there are even online magazines about outsourcing. Among SourcingMag.com’s online entries are: “How to make your India site visit more effective”; “How to set up an offshore development center in India”; and “Offshore Outsourcing Models.” Another service, KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd., with offices in Mumbai and Chennai, provides similar content-management needs as LaserWords— copyediting, composition, and Extensible Markup Language (XML). KGL is a subsidiary of a global giant, Cadmus Communications.

As for The NYRB, once the initial outsourcing was completed, digitization returned stateside.

“Once the back issues were digitized,” said Hederman, “we were able to digitize [new issues] in-house on an ongoing basis.” He said that this had been the plan from the beginning, and that while the Indian firm was preparing older issues, The NYRB was itself preparing more current issues for the Web. “So I see our digitization as being one process, not one plan changed at some point,” said Hederman.

In an ideal world, magazines would avoid the hypocrisy of inveighing against a business practice while adopting it itself. Yet, as The NYRB demonstrates, magazines—especially today, imperiled as they are by the faltering economy, declining revenues, and dwindling interest— may not have the budget to avoid outsourcing work. And as the evolution of LaserWords demonstrates, outsourcing can be a two-way street. Labor sent to India may boomerang back to the US. Now if only magazines could pull off the same trick with the Internet.

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seem too concerned. First, no one outside of the public relations department was “interested in talking” to me about this topic. Second, Kathleen McEvoy, the public relations manager, said that Google has 48 titles and EBSCO has tens of thousands. They don’t seem to view Google as a serious competitor in their field; what EBSCO offers is different. (But then, AOL probably wasn’t worried either, in 1998, when two graduate students at Stanford launched a search engine with a funny name. By 2008, AOL’s market share for search had shrunk to one percent, while Google’s was over 70, according to Compete.com. The bottom line is that Google is an incredibly smart company that doesn’t mess around.)

Maybe EBSCO has no need to worry. No one knows how much money Johnson will make, but online advertising brings in a few cents or a couple of dollars per click, whereas companies who enter deals with EBSCO are doing so to make tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Google knows that. Said Madden: “By all means, revenue is part of this equation, but it’s not a silver bullet. This is not going to have a transformational effect on a publisher’s bottom line, and we want to be very clear with the publishers about that but give them a broader sense of overall value. And I think it’s resonated—I think publishers get that.”

A company like Johnson, which has more to gain than revenue from ad clicks, did get that. Easter hopes to leverage the archives in a way that would raise brand awareness for Jet and Ebony and, in doing so, drive traffic to their website or even increase their subscription base. He might develop widgets (in Internet lingo, any object on a computer screen) around some of the older magazine covers, or perhaps create an iPhone application for photos of Jet Beauties, the centerfolds. Easter also mentioned the possibility of launching subject-specific websites on topics like health care and fashion, providing new perspectives on old content. Additionally, the company is saving time, money, and energy by not having to consult a librarian when it wants to know what’s in its own archive.

For a publisher like Johnson, one of the biggest advantages of appearing in Google Book Search’s index is that people who’ve never heard of Ebony or Jet might come across one of those titles in a random search. These magazines, which were previously seen primarily in African-American communities, could potentially reach millions of Internet users of all races. And these titles are becoming mainstream at just the right time, when the first African-American family occupies the White House.

EBSCO contracts include a confidentiality clause, so there’s no telling what kind of deal Johnson Publishing had or has with them and how Johnson was able simultaneously to strike a deal with Google.

What is clear, though, based on the Internet databases available through Columbia University’s library, is that, before Google came along, no issues of Ebony prior to 1986 were available online. Google scanned all issues dating back to December 1959, and they’re willing to digitize earlier issues whenever Johnson can provide copies.

Google also doesn’t require an exclusive contract.

So what’s in it for Google? Anyone familiar with Google’s philosophy (which I am, as a former employee—on the Gmail Operations team in Mountain View from 2007 to 2008) knows that Google’s stated mission is to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful (and its credo is “Don’t be evil”).

The addition of magazines to Google’s repertoire shouldn’t have blindsided anyone: “All the world’s information” means all the world’s information. Book Search was a seed germinating in the fertile minds of Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page back when they were students at Stanford.

Others (who, unlike me, didn’t drink the Kool-Aid at Google— meaning partake of the Vitamin Water, Naked Juice, smoothies, and cappuccinos, not to mention the gourmet food, gym, trip to Disneyland, etc.) perhaps rightly overlook Google’s mission and focus on its profit motives. Critics seem to have the attitude that Google isn’t fooling anyone. Paul Aitken, the executive director of the Authors Guild, speaking from a book perspective, said: “The value to Google is really obvious, but a big part of it is that the [Book] Search results come up with their search engine. And the main way of monetizing, I’m sure, is not when people click and look on the actual pages of magazines; it’s people staying longer on Google.com, and doing more searches there. It’s that main search page that drives almost all of Google’s [ad] revenue, and getting an extra point in market share makes all this stuff well worth it to them.”

Google agrees, and it doesn’t see anything wrong with its stance, or think it’s trying to fool anyone. “I certainly don’t mean to suggest that we’re doing this out of the goodness of our hearts,” explained Madden. “[Digitizing information] is core to our mission, and it’s nice that that mission has a way of benefiting us and, we think, a lot of publishers.

“But by all means, our investment in this helps to make Google unique,” he added. “We think there is a competitive advantage there. There’s nothing to keep someone from going from one search engine to another and entering their query somewhere else, so the onus is on us to really try to create the most useful and meaningful experience for Google users. So I think that’s an important part of this project.”

What they’re providing is a screen reader, which is easy to use to search or browse a magazine, and maybe even bookmark a favorite page. For an academic like Owen Gutfreund, an associate professor of history at Barnard and the director of the joint Barnard-Columbia urban studies program, Google’s offering is less significant. “For academic scholars, this won’t make much of a difference,” Gutfreund predicted, after testing out the Google Book Search experience.

Scholars are more likely to want a version of the document that they could download to their own computer or print out for their files.

Plus, academics automatically have access to their university’s online databases, so the fact that Google is free is irrelevant.

For nonacademic researchers like Daniel Okrent, a writer and editor (and the first public editor of The New York Times), free content also doesn’t carry much import. “I write popular history,” Okrent said. “I use archives online constantly, and if I had to pay for them, I would pay for them. It’s certainly a lot easier than sitting down at the library and going through microform.” He also said: “I happen now to have a university’s library privileges, so I can get them free. Before I had those, I absolutely paid for them whenever I needed them.”

The users who are likely to benefit from Google’s initiative are those who would not have otherwise paid for archival content, or necessarily even known they were looking for it. And writers who aren’t as established as Okrent, or who might not be in a position to pay a separate fee for a resource like Ebony or New York, can now conduct independent research.

Google has always said—and I believe them—that they want to democratize the world’s information by making it universally accessible. Readers shouldn’t have to be affiliated with well-endowed research institutions or have lucrative publishing contracts to learn more about their nation’s history. And as long as Google is doing all of this within copyright law and in conjunction with the publishers, which they are, I’m happy not to trek down to the New York Public Library any time I want to see an archival issue of Ebony.

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Paris Hilton Saved The Economy …and other things I learned about the recession from celebrity magazines

By Mirjam Donath

A

lot of people say that celebrity and gossip magazines are safe havens from reality. I resent that. During the last few months, I restricted myself to reading just these magazines: People, US Weekly, Star Weekly, OK! and E!, plus an occasional celebrity website, and you’ll see that I learned a lot about the economic crisis—housing foreclosures, layoffs, Bernie Madoff, the stimulus package, and all that—without turning to The Economist or BusinessWeek. Along the way, I also learned a lot more (than anyone needed to know) about the backstory of Clay Aiken’s coming out, Courtney Love’s historic country home, and Paris Hilton’s Australian shopping spree.

SEPTEMBER After reading about Clay Aiken’s coming out on People’s website, I discover on Evilbeet.com (below the Aiken story) that apparently there’s an economic crisis “that isn’t just having an impact on Wall Street. It’s affecting the celebrity magazine world, too.” The proof? “Exclusive photos of Clay and his son, Parker, went for an underwhelming [$500,000] compared to the multi-million dollar price tags” previously paid to top stars like Jennifer Lopez and Angelina Jolie-Pitt. Why? “Because of the [economic] crisis, People had little competition for the photos and in turn no one to drive the price up.” If you don’t believe me, read the headline: “ECONOMIC CRISIS NOW MEASURED IN TERMS OF CLAY AIKEN’S HOMOSEXUALITY.” So much for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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NOVEMBER People reported back in 2005 that, “A 100 year-old home in a historic area near Olympia, Washington, that was purchased

by Courtney Love some eight years ago is about to slip through that troubled performer’s fingers.” Now websites like InformedTrades.com publish long lists of celebrity foreclosures. Following in Love’s footsteps, Michael Jackson, Michael Madsen, and Whitney Houston are facing the ignominy of losing their mansions and summer homes. “CELEBRITIES YOU SHOULDN’T BE TAKING ADVICE FROM,” screams the headline, while the article goes on to proclaim, “They’ve managed to get themselves into a situation where they are amongst the millions of others who are having their homes foreclosed.”

“Economic Crisis Now Measured In Terms of Clay Aiken’s Homosexuality.”

So much for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Later in the month, it’s Janet Jackson canceling a tour in Japan “due to the impact of the economic crisis,” according to Us magazine. It’s sad, even though she is not the most reliable economic indicator since, according to Us, in the fall of 2008 alone she “cancelled seven performances in the US because she was suffering from migraines.” What with her malfunctioning wardrobe, she may be eligible for a grant from TARP. FEBRUARY

I’m planning to buy a T-shirt created by a celebrity (I am torn between LL Cool J’s line for Sears, Ashley Judd’s collection for Goody’s, and a budgetminded fashion line by my favorite celebrity, Sarah Jessica Parker). I’m surfing the Net for tips and am shocked to read that, “THE ECONOMY TAKES DOWN CELEBRITY FASHION LINES,” according to New York magazine. It starts by quoting Ad Age on how LL Cool J’s line for Sears is reportedly “hanging by a thread” and then goes on to note that rights to Ashley Judd’s collection are up for auction because Goody’s has gone bankrupt. I stop reading and decide that instead of that T-shirt, I will use the money to subscribe to my favorite celebrity gossip magazine, which tells me more about the economy than The Wall Street Journal.

I realize that I am, more and more, going online for my news, where I can get it for free. WalletPop.com reports that I am following a trend: During the economic crisis more people read news online.

The site cites the Audit Bureau of Circulations: “Sales of gossip and celebrity magazines at the newsstand fell 11% year over year in the last six months of 2008 ... people don’t even have enough cash to buy a magazine at the grocery store to help them forget their troubles.”

Maybe Secretary Geithner should consider a gossip bailout.

JJJ

DECEMBER Star Magazine tells me that, “Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick are the latest people to have lost cashola in the Bernard Madoff investment scandal.” I rush to check out this Madoff character, who is suddenly an übercelebrity, more notorious than O.J. Simpson and better covered than Britney Spears! He must be a villain to swindle sweet Kevin and Kyra. People says, “As for reports that the couple lost everything except for their checking accounts and the land they own, [Bacon’s rep, Allen] Eichorn said, ‘Please, let’s not speculate or rely on hearsay.’” In a harder-hitting report in OK!, Eichorn says, “Unfortunately your report is true. I can confirm that they had investments with Mr. Madoff.” And Us trots out in-depth reporting that informs me, “Bacon and Sedgwick aren’t the only celebs who lost money thanks to Madoff ... Steven Spielberg’s Wunderkinder Foundation was affected, and producer Jeffrey Katzenberg may have lost ‘millions.’”

Although I’ve gathered that the economic crisis is global, I feel I am in for a happy New Year as I read online in Tabloid Edition’s Broadsheet that, “PARIS HILTON SHOPS TO SAVE US ALL.” Here’s the scoop: “Poor Paris Hilton! ... Paris is in Sydney [Australia] to host a New Year’s eve party ... So Paris decided to go shopping and spent $3,488 in a 40-minute shopping spree. This caused uproar with local charities accusing Paris of callous excess ... Paris defended her splurge saying, ‘I’m in Australia. I think it’s important to help out, you know, the economy out here, everywhere around the world.’” I’m with Paris, especially when she adds: “And what’s wrong with doing a little shopping? It’s New Year’s, I need a New Year’s dress.” Poor Paris is, like, totally right. Even when she selflessly stimulates the economy, they snipe at her.

MARCH The gossip crisis is getting worse! MediaBistro.com reports a “distribution standoff in the midst of a financial crisis that’s threatening to sink the industry.” It seems that Time, Inc., American Media, and Bauer Publishing have pulled their magazines from Wal-Mart, which will leave me without copies of my favorite three: People, Life and Style, and Star. Us Weekly and OK! remain. “There will be some Band-Aids and some blood, but it will all probably calm down in a month. That said, a month is a lifetime in this economy,” continued the MediaBistro.com article.

Good to know.

JANUARY

APRIL

Here’s another scoop, this one from the New York Post’s magazine. While Paris is saving Australia, “KATIE HOMES SAVES NYC.” It turns out that Katie has pumped more than $14 million into the local economy, and with hubby Tom Cruise has purchased three lofts (14.4 million), child care (nearly $14,000), and gym equipment (more than $7,000). On Jan. 5, The Money Trail’s headline called it “THE KATIE HOLMES STIMULUS PACKAGE.” Paris and Katie rule!

Hooray! The celebrity recession may be bottoming out! Good news from WalletPop.com: “MADONNA SAVES MANHATTAN” is the headline on the story that reports: “Sensing a decline in New York real estate Madonna buys a $40 million townhouse on the Upper East Side. Happy days are here again.” Great! Madonna’s solved the housing crisis. Well, hers at least.

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Is time running out for soap opera magazines?

Days of our M a

I

BY Ashton lattimore

n the world of soap operas, nothing is forever. A character can perish in a boat explosion and return from the dead nearly 15 years later. A woman can pledge her undying love to a man in holy matrimony, only to turn around and take up with his brother before going on to marry five or six other people. Such scandalous and outrageous plot twists abound on these afternoon television shows, but the next shocker may take place off screen: Is the tragic demise of daytime drama series themselves imminent?

And will they take soap opera magazines down with them? Tune in next paragraph for the shocking conclusion of AMERICAN SOAP OPERA JOURNALISM. Primarily considered a housewife’s guilty pleasure, soap operas have nonetheless attracted millions of viewers since they first appeared on television in the 1940s. The reasons for the attraction are various. In the past, soap operas not only entertained viewers, they informed. The shows tackled issues like AIDS, breast cancer, homosexuality, and abortion.

And, of course, watching the glamorous and romantic lives of the characters provided a welcome escape from mundane daily life, with the constant upheaval and drama offering the opportunity for more than a little bit of good old-fashioned schadenfreude. Yet while the American public has just as much appetite for romance and reveling in others’ misfortunes as ever (see: Lohan, Lindsay), soap operas have been losing viewers for years. As a result, the magazine niche that soaps spawned finds itself in serious peril.

I should know.

You see, there’s something I have to get off my chest before we go any further, reader. I just can’t keep this secret any longer. (Camera zooms in my face, frozen in an intense expression of shame. The music swells.)

Voice-over: Next, the reporter makes a shocking confession! After these messages.

[Dove soap commercial] (Close-up of the same pained expression from before.) I don’t know how to say this (dramatic pause)—I’ve been watching soap operas for more than a decade, but I don’t read the soap opera magazines.

You won’t find issues of Soap Opera Weekly or Soaps in Depth in my bag�not anymore. But if you were to perform the ultimate act of betrayal—apart from faking your own death to marry my evil twin sister, of course—and peruse my Web browsing history, you’d find SoapCentral.com, SoapZone.com, and several-times-daily visits to GeneralHospitalHappenings.com, all websites offering the same upcoming plot information (so-called “spoilers”), casting news, and critiques as the magazines.

And here’s the even more shocking confession: The person who

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M agazines told me about these websites is my mother. This is the same woman, who hurried home from classes in college to join 29,999,999 others in watching Luke Spencer marry Laura Webber Baldwin on General Hospital in 1981, who used to head to the local convenience store every Friday after work because they were always the first to carry the new issue of Soap Opera Weekly, whose mom hooked her on soaps and who, in turn, did the same to me.

“I haven’t bought those magazines since I don’t know when,” says my mom. “There’s no point. I can just as easily get the same information, and more, on the Internet. The Internet gives me so much information that I don’t even need to watch anymore.”

All the same scoops, without the week of waiting. Sounds like a great deal—unless you’re a magazine.

The soap operas these magazines cover are an American institution, having begun on the radio in the 1930s, making the jump to television in the 1940s, and beginning to carve out a niche in the magazine industry in the 1970s. They once counted more than 10 million Americans among their devoted fans. But the shows are circling the drain, and it appears the magazines that cover them have nowhere to go but down the tubes with them. Thanks to the nose-diving economy and the broader crisis in print journalism, the outlook is bleak for magazines like Soap Opera Digest and Soap Opera Weekly. But can there be a miraculous return from the dead?

The Museum of Broadcast Communications recognizes the impact soaps have had throughout their more than 70-year run: “Derided by critics and disdained by social commentators from the 1930s to the 1990s, the soap opera is nevertheless the most effective

and enduring broadcast advertising vehicle ever devised. It is also the most popular genre of television drama in the world today and probably in the history of world broadcasting: no other form of television fiction has attracted more viewers in more countries over a longer period of time.”

Eventually, those in the magazine business realized that all those viewers were just readers waiting for a publication. Soap Opera Digest, one of the earliest soap magazines, started publishing in 1975. But the real boom occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Soap Opera Weekly, Soap Opera Magazine, and Soap Opera Update made their debuts, providing hungry fans with casting news, interviews with the stars, criticism, and scoops on what would happen next on their favorite shows. Over the last 40 years, soaps fans have also had publications like Soaps in Depth, Soap Opera Illustrated, ABC Episodes, NBC Daydreams, Daytime TV, and Afternoon TV to keep them in the loop.

But the magazines’ bread and butter, the old standbys that your grandmother used to watch—General Hospital, The Bold and the Beautiful, Days of Our Lives, and the rest—have been in a slide toward extinction since 2000. The genre, which provides a daily dose of romance, crisis, glamour, and revenge to its viewers, reached its peak in the early Eighties, with 30 million viewers tuning in to General Hospital to watch the wedding of Luke and Laura, and 11 million watching GH regularly. The same show now commands a rather paltry audience of 2.6 million, a million less than the lowest rated soap of the 1980 to 1981 season.The rest of the shows—those that are still around anyway—have suffered similarly precipitous drops in ratings. In the good old days, there were more than 16 daytime NYRM 31

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serials. Today? Eight, but only until the recently canceled Guiding Light goes dark in September.

Those remaining are pretty much on deathwatch, with major advertisers like the Big Three auto companies significantly reducing their ad time, budget cuts forcing the firing of major stars, and their own networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS) and SOAPnet declining to broadcast the Daytime Emmys this year.

And as Mimi Torchin, the founding editor of Soap Opera Weekly, explains of the soap magazine industry: “As the ratings go, so go your sales.”

Torchin was at the helm of Weekly from its launch in 1989 up to 2000, and in the early days, shows’ ratings were still high. At the start of the Nineties, the magazine often sold close to 600,000 copies a week. Torchin attributes this to the built-in fan base and the publication’s unique premise. While Digest and other earlier soap magazines had focused primarily on show recaps, or interviews and photos of actors, Weekly was the first to introduce the concept of soap opera news: teasers for upcoming storylines and cast comings and goings, as well as opinion columns about the shows.

“We had a product like no one had ever seen before,” Torchin says. “We’d get letters from fans saying things like, ‘Where have you been all my life?’”

But as the genre has declined, the once-crowded field of soap opera magazines has shrunk. Only three remain: Soap Opera Digest, Soap Opera Weekly, and Soaps in Depth, which publishes two editions every two weeks, one covering the ABC daytime shows, the other CBS. (Since NBC only has one daytime drama (Days of Our Lives) left, the NBC edition folded years ago.

The surviving magazines aren’t faring well. Just last summer, one of Digest’s top and most visible editors, Carolyn Hinsey, was unceremoniously fired due to “budget cuts.” In the fall, Weekly received the dubious honor of being named the magazine with the least affluent audience, with median reader household income at $32,163. Digest didn’t fare much better at $39,153. In perhaps the most telling bit of grim news, Digest lost a staggering 48 percent of its ad revenue between the fourth quarters of 1999 and 2008. And in 2003, Soap Opera Digest slashed its one million rate base in half, while fellow Primedia publication Soap Opera Weekly dropped its rate base by a quarter, from 300,000 to 225,000—a far cry from the more than half a million copies sold in the early glory days.

The soap magazines that are still around are hard to miss with their cover lines screaming at you in the supermarket checkout line.

“SHOCKING ARREST!” cries the March 17 Soap Opera Weekly. If you can pry your eyes away, CBS’s Soaps in Depth will tell you, “AFTER RICK AND STEFFY MAKE LOVE, IT’S MURDER!” on The Bold and the Beautiful. Things are even more fun inside the magazines, as recaps and show previews tell you all about “AMANDA’S DESPERATE PLAN” on All My Children and give you the details on how VIENNA IS INSEMINATED (yes, you read that correctly) on As the World Turns. Much like others throughout the magazine industry, covers of soap magazines took a turn for the sensational as sales slumped. Could it all be part of PRINT’S DESPERATE PLAN

to survive in the face of the threat from the evil Internet?

Connie Hayman, a former columnist at Weekly (who was known to readers under the pen name Marlena De Lacroix), has since moved her soap critiques to the Web. She recognizes that magazines are facing stiff online competition for readers’ affections: “They want the immediacy, they don’t want to wait a week and half until the magazine comes out. People really want that immediacy, because soap viewing is so intimate, it’s just you and the TV.” She adds, “I think spoilers have a lot to do with it. . . .

People live for them.”

Back when Soap Opera Weekly was new, however, detailed advanced plot scoops weren’t part of the equation. “Soap operas played it very close to the vest,” Torchin says. “They didn’t let out spoilers. I don’t even think the word existed at the time.

In retrospect, I think they were right.”

Now that all the juicy twists and turns are served up online, soap fans have less reason to tune in or buy the magazines.

But it might not just be the Internet that’s luring readers away from the soap magazines. Some real-life, behind-thescenes drama that changed the culture of soap coverage may also be the culprit.

Hayman is a veteran when it comes to covering soaps, having begun her career at the now defunct Afternoon TV in 1980.

She was at Soap Opera Weekly from 1989, the year it was launched, until 2001, and speaks highly of the magazine. “We were really trying hard to be real journalists,” she says, “to criticize the shows and not go along with the company line.”

Torchin agrees: “If you’re going to be taken seriously as an art form, you have to accept criticism. And we were, to the best of our ability, going to make people respect soaps.” Though Weekly did encounter some pushback from the shows—Days of Our Lives twice cut off the magazine’s access to its stars and writers after less than fawning coverage—it pressed onward.

But in 2000, Soap Opera Digest’s owner, Primedia, took over Weekly, and, according to Hayman, it wasn’t long before they started making some changes, starting with firing Torchin. “They were not interested in the same kind of journalism,” Hayman says. “Digest was really on the side of the shows, and they weren’t on the side of the fans.”

She and others at the magazine felt that since the late Nineties, networks had been dumbing down soap operas in an attempt to compete with cable—focusing too heavily on plots that were overly gimmicky or violent—and lacked the depth of earlier storylines. A few examples: In 1995, General Hospital told the story of a teenage girl learning to live with HIV and watching her boyfriend die of AIDS. In contrast, by 2001, one of the show’s major storylines was about a woman who gained psychic abilities after being hit by a car, and thus was able to reveal that the matriarch of the town’s evil family had brought back her cryogenically frozen and psychotic son from the dead.

On All My Children in 1973, just a few months after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, a major character chose to terminate a pregnancy, the first legal abortion depicted on daytime television.

“We had a product like no one had ever seen before,” founding editor of Soap Opera Weekly Torchin said.

“We’d get letters from fans saying things like, ‘Where have you been all my life?’”

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General Hospital’s Spinelli fantasizes about sweeping his dream girl off her feet

By 2005, the abortion story was effectively “undone,” when it was revealed that the doctor who performed the procedure implanted the aborted fetus in his own wife, and that the child had grown up, moved to his biological mother’s town, and begun working with her.

Most of the shows have also shifted heavily toward attempting to attract younger viewers, going so far as letting go veteran actors, or bumping them down to “recurring” status, and placing teen storylines front and center. Torchin is convinced this strategy has also contributed to the decline in ratings. “They started to alienate their older viewers. The mature viewers felt disenfranchised, disrespected, so they lost interest and went to do other things. They didn’t feel compelled to watch a show filled with teenagers they didn’t care about.”

In Hayman’s view, Weekly no longer holds the networks accountable for creating good, dramatic television. Indeed, the magazine has changed considerably. Gone are the three-page interviews with actors, the abundant critical columns, and other opinion features.

Stories have become much shorter, with a few lines of criticism thrown in here and there.

Apart from changes in the shows’ content, differences in the lifestyle of American women certainly account for viewer attrition.

Women are in the workplace in greater numbers, so they aren’t at home during the day to catch the shows. And people are, on the whole, simply busier.

“Five days a week is an awful lot to expect of someone who lives the kind of lives we live today,” Torchin says. If people are too busy to watch, it’s unlikely they’ll spend the time and money to read about the shows in magazines—especially given the state of the economy, which has created a dire situation for media across the board.

Since the leadership change, Weekly has also been more prone to dilute its focus on daytime dramas and write about shows that could

be defined as “soaps” only loosely, at best.

A 2001 cover told readers to pick up the magazine for “AMERICAN IDOL GOSSIP: IT’S LIKE A SOAP!” while the March 24 cover for this year touted a “BACHELOR EXCLUSIVE: THE TRUTH BEHIND ‘IMMATURE’ JASON’S CHANGE OF HEART, AND WHAT REALLY MADE MELISSA MAD.” With the networks signaling a lack of investment in shows and even SOAPnet—literally a channel that claims to exist entirely for soap fans— suddenly broadcasting old episodes of One Tree Hill and Beverly Hills 90210, could the magazines be joining what looks like an industry-wide pivot away from traditional soaps?

If so, Torchin understands the impulse. “You have to try to compete in the world you’re in, not the world you want to be in,” she says. “I don’t blame them for trying to survive by reaching out to a bigger audience, because they’re not going to do it with just soap viewers.”

But if the magazines themselves made it their mission to restore soaps to their former glory, why couldn’t the entire industry be rescued? Though the shows may have been dumbed down, the magazines need not follow them into the toilet. Rather than twisting themselves into knots to appeal to new demographics as the number of soap viewers approaches zero, Soap Opera Weekly and Soap Opera Digest could recommit to offering real criticism of soap operas.

They could call for more respectful treatment of veteran actors and veteran watchers and push for a higher proportion of storylines of real consequence, rather than focus on inane things like mobsters and endless cases of mistaken paternity. The magazines could take a stand and, in doing so, help to improve the shows, lure back alienated fans, and ultimately increase their own chances for survival. But so far, there’s no indication that they plan to do any such thing. Editors at both magazines didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Looking ahead, Torchin believes that soap operas may ultimately find a home online or perhaps on cable, but she thinks it’s unlikely they’ll continue on the networks in their current form. Even if soaps do manage to stave off death, she says of their associated magazines, “I don’t know that they’re all going to make it.”

Hayman’s outlook is similarly bleak: “The magazines’ future is tied to the medium [of soap operas], and the whole medium is going down the tubes. I don’t see a rosy future for soap operas, and one can’t exist without the other.”

But soaps are always good for a surprise ending. So will the shows and their magazines stage a miraculous recovery? Can they scramble back from the brink of death, shocking the naysayers, and delighting viewers and readers? Don’t touch that dial.

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