Et Tu, Tina? The doyenne of print explains her move to the Web
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By Amber Sandoval-Griffin fter three decades editing magazines and a brief stint in television, Tina Brown moved her talents online when she launched the website The Daily Beast in October 2008. The celebrated editor started her career at the Tatler in the United Kingdom, then came to the United States to take over as editor of Vanity Fair. She revived its readership, nearly quadrupling sales, before moving on to—and transforming—The New Yorker. Following her resignation from The New Yorker in 1998, Brown created Talk magazine. After that magazine died in 2002, she produced a series of specials for CNBC and a newspaper column that appeared in The Washington Post and The New York Sun. When the media entrepreneur Barry Diller first approached Brown with the idea of co-founding The Daily Beast, she declined in order to focus on the book she was writing, The Diana Chronicles. When that project was finished, she was ready to accept his offer. Now that she has had time to get acclimated to the online world, we want to hear what she has to say about it, and how it compares with the print magazine world she left behind. What follows here is a condensed and edited version of a lengthy interview. The questions are not necessarily in the order I asked them, but, after hearing her responses, this seemed to be the most logical way to present her thoughts on her transition from long-form, print journalism. The website, subtitled “Read this, skip that,” has a top story that can change by the minute. The Daily Beast is organized like a billboard, with a featured stories section that has rotating headlines and photos; a video section; a “Best of the Beast” section that highlights the top stories; and a “Cheat Sheet” that provides links to stories compiled from a variety of media outlets. Sitting in her office on a Tuesday afternoon, Brown was clad in all black, and she was all business. During our interview, she continued to multitask, answering my questions in between e-mails—although she politely held off answering her telephone calls, even one from her son. Q: What aspects of your work have changed the most? What are the different skill sets required for running a monthly like Vanity Fair, a weekly like The New Yorker, and a website like The Daily Beast? A: I think that the editing skills have something in common. Someone who’s edited a newspaper could very easily be just as good online. It’s really all about having a sense of quality, a lively response to the news, and an ability to think imaginatively about how to approach it. One thing that really has been great about doing the site is that I’ve had so many dealings with writers over the years—so many trials and errors with pieces and authors—I know exactly where to 48
get the stuff I’m looking for. So that if something breaks on Israel, for instance, I know and have in my Rolodex exactly the right writer that I can go to. Q: How else has the print magazine experience prepared you for overseeing a website like The Daily Beast? A: That experience has been helpful in determining the mix of stories. I wanted to do a website that was driven by point of view. It was not going to just be an aggregated site that listed a thousand and one stories. I wanted to plow a real point of view through the news. That magazine experience was really helpful because it meant that I was used to saying, “OK, this is the way I am going to go—I’m going to choose these 10 stories which happen to line up with my sensibility.” That was a very good background for the kind of site that I’m doing. Q: What are the challenges on the Web that you didn’t have to face in print? A: Moving from a monthly [Vanity Fair] to a weekly [The New Yorker] caused me to really speed up so that I was going from that monthly metabolism to being what I thought was far quicker—to generate stories and close them and try to achieve quality very quickly. What also then helped to speed me up was to have two years in TV. That also quickened my metabolism, so that by the time I got to The Daily Beast, I had really mastered the art of responding quickly. And writing a newspaper column accelerated my ability to organize my thoughts quickly. Q: What is the greatest difference between what you are doing now and what you were doing in 2001 at Talk or even before that at The New Yorker and Vanity Fair? A: It’s about the speed of response. You have to recognize that the right piece at the right time is the name of the game. You don’t want to have the right piece at the wrong time, when nobody’s interested. It’s all about being able to understand which are the stories that people are going to be intrigued by, and immediately going and finding writers to match them. Q: I know that you take a lot of pride in being able to set a filter for what goes up on The Daily Beast every day, to distinguish yourself from other websites. How do you determine that filter? A: It’s about taste. It’s just about: Do we like it, or don’t we? Do we think it’s a good thing to publish? Do we think it’s got something provocative to say? We’re not looking just to fill space. We’re not looking just to stick stuff up there and it sits like chopped liver. It’s got to be adding something, or breaking some news, or entertaining somebody, or beautifully written. One of those many things it has to be. That’s what we spend all day doing. Q: A magazine like The New Yorker has set a standard for impeccable fact checking. How do you maintain that standard on a daily basis? A: We do shorter pieces, but one of the things I was determined to do was to hire a brilliant editorial team who really had that same rigor. Edward Rosenthal was a prominent editor at The Wall Street Journal; he was raised in a journalistic tradition which, as it were, had rigor as its middle name, and he brought it with him. These are people who are
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Tina Brown speaks at the Columbia J-School’s Delacorte Lecture series
highly trained journalists who know what they are looking for. We have a copy editor, and if we make a mistake, we immediately post [a correction]. Q: How many fact checkers do you have and how many copy editors? A: I don’t have any fact checkers. Writers have to do their own fact checking. With the Web as easy as it is, you should be able to do your own fact checking, really. It’s a great luxury for The New Yorker writers to still have fact checking departments, but in this era of so much information available at your fingertips, it should be possible to come up with accurate pieces. It’s part of a reporter’s training to get the facts right. Q: Do you think it would be fair to say that magazines like Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, which have greater lead times and the ability to provide more complete issues, have an advantage over sites like Slate, The Huffington Post, and The Daily Beast, which mainly deal with more transient developments? Or, is that too simplistic? A: I think we’re different animals completely. Vanity Fair can have a writer spend six to eight weeks researching a piece, and it’s a great, wonderful thing for them to do that. It’s not a credible sort of comparison. If you compare us to something that’s a slightly smallerframe literary weekly, I think you’ll find that we’re right up there in terms of rigor. I must say there are times where I miss narrative journalism of that kind. But I also always wanted to edit a journal of opinion, and in a way The Daily Beast is a combination of a journal of opinion and a sort of high-low culture scene that responds to the news from both angles. Q: How much time do you actually spend at the computer in your office editing? A: I spend a lot of my day at my computer, but sometimes I’m on my BlackBerry. Often, I’m in transit. I’ve been having to do a lot of TV and speaking, so very often I’m standing there in the green room, looking at my BlackBerry, and e-mailing Edward to say, “Shall we do this?” or “Won’t we do this?” Q: What is your editing process like and how does it differ from your work in print? A: We’re reading all day long. We really are. Things come in. Like this morning I was delighted that Tony Blair sent me a piece over e-mail and said, “I’d love you to put this up”—a very interesting piece about climate control, a very smart editorial. I was thrilled that he chose The Daily Beast. You know, I was sitting there blowing out my hair to go on Morning Joe, and on my BlackBerry arrives a piece from Tony Blair. Q: What are the most important things that you can do online that print magazines can’t do? A: Oh, a lot of things. First off, video, which I’m now in love with. We’ve tremendously escalated our video coverage in the last couple of Photograph by Ben Chapman
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months. I’m new to video, and I’m finding it enormously exciting to be able to extend the creativity of the site with video clips and mashes and creative ways of cutting video, and so on. We have a very clever team of young people doing that. Q: Tell me something that you don’t look forward to in a workday at The Daily Beast. What is your least favorite part of the job? A: The beast always has to be fed, you know. There are days when you don’t really have any news and you know full well if you don’t find some, then you won’t really have any traffic. It’s the most reactive audience that I can think of other than a standup comedian’s audience. You know if it’s working because people respond, or they don’t. They come on, or they don’t come on. You have some days when it’s just slow, and you realize you don’t have the thing that makes them excited. That means that both Edward and I are trying to figure out how to get that thing on the site that will goose up the traffic. Q: How do you do that? A: We’ll come in and say, “It’s a slow day, what do we do?” So, I’ll look at the news and say, for example, “Let’s call Paul Begala and see if he has anything to say about Bobby Jindal.” And what’s amazing is that he will—or somebody will. It’s very exciting that way. Q: In a talk you gave at Columbia, you mentioned trying to find a way to incorporate longer pieces into the Web. Have you found a way yet? Is anything in the works? A: I’d like to do some narrative journalism. I would love to figure out a way to make it work. But I don’t want to rush at that. It’ll evolve in its own way. We’ll figure out how to do that. Right now, I’m trying to grow the site in terms of the talent we have on it and the traffic. You know, we’re doing incredibly well today. Today, for the first time, we got on the home pages of Yahoo and MSN and AOL. All on the same day. So we’re going to have an intense traffic day. Q: Which media platform do you find most stimulating these days? A: Right now, I would not want to be in anything except what I’m doing. It’s a very tough time to be in print. I think print will survive, but it’s not a happy place to be right now because there’s so much contraction and restructuring. That means that people spend their time talking about cost cutting and about doing more for less, and that can be very demoralizing. What we love here is that we are in a new thriving thing that seems to be catching on, where we feel everything is in play and we’re not about dismantling, which is a very painful process for a lot of people right now. We’re updating all day long. It’s absolutely amazing. I never thought that I would enjoy it as much as I do.
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Are Green magazines Sustainable? The evidence is not encouraging
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By CyruS moulTon t seemed like the golden age for environmental media. For the past few years, every April and May, magazine stands turned “green” and offered environmental advice for fashionistas (Elle), sports fans (Sports Illustrated), entrepreneurs (Fortune), country homeowners (Town and Country and Country Home), outdoor adventurers (Outside), Delta Airlines fliers (Sky360°), Amtrak passengers (Arrive), music fans (Billboard), and even new parents (Pregnancy & Newborn). But if you aren’t the target audience of these magazines, not to worry— general interest magazines such as Time, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair, among many others, had green issues as well. It appeared to be the moment that environmentalists had been waiting for: Green had entered the mainstream. Well, maybe not. Plenty, a magazine of environmental news and commentary, folded in January 2009 after losing its primary financial backer. The Green Guide, a consumer guide to environmentally friendly products, ceased publication in December 2008, just a year after being acquired by National Geographic. Verdant, a magazine for stylish, environmentally friendly living, folded after a preview and a premier issue. The problem started well before the current economic meltdown. Organic Style stopped printing in 2006. According to Samir Husni, the chair of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi and self-proclaimed “Mr. Magazine,” the number of environmental magazines has actually been declining since the 1980s. “The Observatory,” a blog on science and environmental journalism on The Columbia Journalism Review’s website, reported recently that the number of newspapers with weekly science sections had decreased from 95 to only 34 between 1989 and 2005. Furthermore, two-thirds of the remaining special sections were devoted exclusively to health. Despite society’s raised eco-consciousness, green magazines seem to suffer not only from the problems facing the magazine industry in general, but also from their own set of problems. First, the term “green”—which is applied to everything from compact fluorescent lightbulbs to pristine rainforests—is too general to provide so-called green magazines with the traditional benefits of niche publishing. Second, the environmental movement’s legacy of sanctimony and fear-mongering too often dominates the editorial voice and alienates potential readers. Third, as publications supported by—or even serving as the house organs of—nonprofits, green magazines are often pressured to promote the parent organization’s agenda rather than report the news. Fourth, green advertising is limited. Finally, green magazines can become victims of their own values by using expensive recycled paper. 50
1. It’s too easy being green. The most pressing challenge for environmental magazines seems to be the vague definition of “green.” If Elle, Sports Illustrated, Country Home, and Wired can all apply the green label to their coverage, has green lost its meaning and, in magazine terms, the advantage of niche publishing? “When a word becomes so popular you begin hearing it everywhere, in all sorts of marginally related or even unrelated contexts, it means one of two things,” wrote Michael D. Lemonick in the Scientific American Earth 3.0 March 2009 edition. “Either the word has devolved into a meaningless cliché, or it has real conceptual heft. ‘green’ (or, even worse, ‘going green’) falls squarely into the first category.” Lemonick prefers the term “sustainability.” While he noted that there is a fair amount of overlap between the terms, he defined green as referring to “natural,” while sustainable includes electric cars and wind turbines that are “the antithesis of natural.” But whatever term one uses, its definition and appropriateness are constantly evolving. Biofuels are natural. They were touted as a “green” alternative to fossil fuels. But scientists recently determined that most biofuels aren’t sustainable: The amount of carbon saved by using biofuel is less than the carbon that is released by clearing the land necessary to produce crops for biofuel. Unfortunately for serious green magazines, the raised ecoconsciousness expanded the definition of green much more than it expanded the green audience. “There is really a narrow band of people who are dedicated to being green and see themselves as being green,” said Seth Bauer, a former editor at The Green Guide. “There is a huge swath of people who are interested in doing the right thing. It’s easy to mistake one for the other. That’s where Plenty, for example, got into trouble. They thought mass interest would match the green lifestyle.” To prevent further dilution of the term “green,” magazines need to clarify their mission. If they are going to promote sustainability, they need to recognize that this is different from “green” or “natural.” They also need to address the changing definitions of the environmental movement and urge that environmental terms be standardized. With its focus on green jobs, the new administration in Washington will have the opportunity to standardize these terms. Magazines should adopt the same standards. 2. The Voice of Reason? A second problem facing environmental magazines is the challenge of finding an appropriate editorial voice. Environmental magazines and the environmental movement have been criticized for using scare tactics, for being overly sanctimonious, and for exploiting customers’ “eco-guilt.”
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“Proselytizing and making readers feel guilty is not effective,” said Curtis Brainard, the editor of “The Observatory” column. “You have to have some hope.” Since 1997, Gallup has annually asked Americans whether the media exaggerated, accurately reported, or underestimated global warming. As recently as 2006, 38 percent of Americans responded that the media underestimated global warming, compared with 30 percent who felt that the media exaggerated global warming. In 2009, a record-high 41 percent of surveyed Americans thought that the media exaggerated global warming, compared with 28 percent who thought the media underestimated global warming. Gallup’s conclusion: “Most Americans do not view the issue in the same dire terms as the many prominent leaders advancing global warming as an issue.” Furthermore, scare tactics can lead to unnecessary or harmful controversy. In 1989, the Natural Resources Defense Council hired a public relations expert, David Fenton, to publicize the release of a report called “Intolerable Risk.” The report examined the potential effects on children of a pesticide called Alar that was sprayed on apples. Fenton offered an exclusive to CBS’s 60 Minutes, and the program catalyzed a consumer panic that resulted in supermarkets’ removing apples from their shelves and dumping apple juice. Agribusinesses filed a product disparagement lawsuit against the nRDC and CBS, claiming $250 million in damages to the industry. It also ran a million-dollar ad campaign contending that children would need to eat 800 apples a day to be harmed by Alar. The consumer panic was an overreaction; nobody was in danger of getting cancer from eating a few apples. Still, Alar is a carcinogenic toxin, and repeated long-term exposure to the product was deemed sufficiently dangerous for the Environmental Protection Agency to ban it in 1989. The lawsuit against the NRDC and CBS was dismissed. Nevertheless, the agribusiness advertising campaign was so successful that the press repeatedly referred to the event as a prime example of environmentalist overreaction. The lesson here is simple: Fear mongering doesn’t work. Brainard pointed out the change in tone of Time’s “Green Issue” over the years. In 2006, the cover of Time’s special edition on global warming warned, “Be Worried, Be Very Worried.” In 2008, Time’s “Green Issue” cover featured a re-creation of the image of American gIs raising the flag on Iwo Jima, along with the upbeat advice “how To Win the War on Global Warming.” Other publications have similarly changed from warning to inspiring readers. Audubon’s former editor Lisa Gosselier said that the magazine struggled to coordinate the interests of its audience of birders with the magazine’s focus on broader environmental issues. “[Audubon] became very militant,” she said. “We were doing stuff on coal mining and Chernobyl, and not birding.” So the magazine decided to refocus on its audience. “We wanted to get them excited about nature,” said gosselier. “We wanted our audience to appreciate, understand, and conserve nature. We offered empowerment rather than guilt.” 3. Reporting on Yourself Another common problem related to the editorial voice of environmental magazines is the role of the parent organizations. nonprofits, many of which are advocacy organizations, fund and support some of the most popular environmental magazines. The
Natural Resources Defense Council’s On Earth goes to 450,000 members. The Sierra Club reaches more than one million readers with its eponymous magazine. Audubon claims a readership of more than 1,600,000 and distributes copies to members of the Audubon Society and other interested readers. According to Mindy Pennybacker, who worked at Amicus Journal during the Alar incident before becoming an editor at The Green Guide, it was sometimes hard to separate independent journalism from selfpromotion at Amicus. “Amicus made me miserable,” she said. “It always wanted to promote the [nRDC] agenda.” Pennybacker protested that the self-promotion was an unnecessary risk. “[Self-promotion] can easily be discredited as bias, whether [that criticism] is fair or not.” But to be relevant, environmental nonprofits have to engage with and participate in the core environmental issues. The trick is to advocate without propagandizing: to sound the alarm but not a false alarm. It’s a fine line. Roger Cohn, a former editor at Audubon and the current editor of e360, an online environmental magazine affiliated with the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, said that it was inevitable that publications reflected the opinions of their organizations. “Any organization has a right to have a publication to accomplish the goals that it’s set out to do,” said Cohen. “As long as those goals are presented to the reader, that’s fine.” Columbia Journalism Review’s Brainard agreed. “Propaganda is distorting the truth—there’s an element of deceit,” he said. “So long as [environmental magazines] are being honest, that’s not propaganda.” 4. Getting Green Advertising for Green But even if the magazine finds a voice, there is still the question of how to pay for it. In a business largely dependent on advertising, finding ads appropriate for an environmental magazine is difficult. The biggest general-interest magazine advertisers are car companies. Women’s magazines depend on cosmetic advertising. Neither of these industries is very green. Furthermore, some of the biggest green companies—the ones that are likely to have advertising budgets and marketing strategies, such as general Electric—focus on business-to-business advertising. “It’s a little tricky,” said hank Stewart, vice president of Greenteam Advertising, a New York environmental advertising firm. “how many readers of Plenty are looking to buy a [gE] locomotive engine?” Furthermore, most companies aren’t perfectly green, and environmentalists, particularly those who would purchase an environmental magazine, are highly dubious about industry claims to be green. “It’s a tough crowd,” said Stewart. According to a Consumers International Report in 2007, only 20 percent of United States and United Kingdom consumers trusted businesses’ environmental claims. And as more companies have embraced green ad campaigns, environmentalists have become increasingly skeptical. In 2006, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in the UK received 117 complaints about environmental claims in 83 advertisements. In 2007, the volume rose to 561 complaints about 410 ads. The ASA investigated claims against, and eventually admonished, such major advertisers as Shell and Lexus. Environmentalists have even criticized green advertising campaigns by companies with legitimate green credentials. Toyota produces the best-selling hybrid car, the Prius. But when the company joined domestic automakers in opposing stricter fuel-mileage standards, environmentalists soured on its 2007 $40 million green “Why not” ad NYRM
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campaign—the largest campaign in Toyota’s history—which featured a car being transformed from a pile of sticks. It seems that the only companies whose advertisements are appropriate for green magazines are small, niche businesses producing natural or organic products. Unfortunately, this type of business rarely has an advertising budget or a national marketing strategy. Shane Steele, the former director of online advertising at Coca-Cola and now a vice president of marketing at the video ad network Tremor Media Company, suggested that small companies producing environmentally friendly products should pool their resources to advertise. According to Steele, agencies routinely package advertisements for products that target a similar audience. She recommended that environmental companies also adopt this strategy. “Green is a prize demographic,” she said. “Coke wants the green audience.” But since the green audience might not want Coke, Stewart from Greenteam suggested that a regulatory standard be developed for “green” claims. This could either be done by the government—echoing the advice of experts who want a more concise definition of “green” for magazines—or by an independent third party. 5. Do as I say, not as I do? Even worse than the advertising shortage is the inherent contradiction in magazines creating a product that violates the values it supports editorially. “Essentially we are all greenwashers,” said Bauer, of The Green Guide. “Anybody who produces anything physical is producing materials; there’s no perfectly green producer of anything—it’s physically impossible.” To compensate, environmentalists urge magazines to adopt sustainable standards, particularly by using recycled paper. Unfortunately, recycled paper is prohibitively expensive. According to Conservatree, a nonprofit environmental consulting firm, recycled paper costs on average 7-to-10 percent more than virgin paper. An average eight-ounce magazine (Conservatree uses an issue of Newsweek as an example) costs about 4 cents extra per copy to produce on recycled paper. That is a cost that many companies cannot afford. “If any company could be busted for not walking the walk, it would be Rodale,” admitted Steven Murphy, CEO of Rodale Inc., at the Columbia Journalism School’s Delacorte Lecture Series. Despite the publishing company’s slogan, “Where Health Meets Green,” Murphy said that with normal paper costs rising 10 percent, postage rising 4-to5 percent, advertising down 20 percent, and newsstand sales down 15 percent, “recycled paper as a solution just doesn’t work.” In that case, Bauer said, whether you are using recycled paper or not is a secondary question. “The question to ask is: Are you adopting the best practices in your industry, and how quickly are you adopting new practices as you go along? For some [the best practice] is recycled paper. But the next best practice may be sustainably harvested virgin paper.” Several environmental organizations believe that the “best practice” is the Internet. e360, for example, was never conceived as a print publication because of two factors. The first was cost. Second, the Internet gives the magazine a broader reach into the global science community. 52
Another Web entity, E&E (Environment and Energy) Publishing, Company has a different model: online newsletters. E&E bills itself as “a high-tech company with an old-school approach to journalism.” The firm produces several daily publications, including Greenwire and Climatewire, that focus on the policy debates over specific environmental issues. E&E has a dedicated, paying readership. Its editor-in-chief, Kevin Braun, is aware that with so much news available for free, the media must provide an additional service to readers. For him, it means focusing on high-quality reporting to deliver news that is absolutely essential to E&E’s audience of environmental policymakers. “People found our copy compelling and useful and weren’t able to perform their job without it,” he said. By distributing via the Internet, a much higher percentage of subscription revenue can be used for reporting. Web publishing certainly has its uses, but it is no panacea for what is ailing the green sector of the magazine industry. It is no solution for those who, like me, still enjoy holding a physical magazine in their hands. I prefer a complete “issue” with a beginning, a middle, and an end, all unified by a single editorial eye. Also, not all Audubon or Sierra readers can download articles to their iPhones so they can catch up on their reading while on the subway. Existing environmental print publications—or new ones with expansive journalistic ambitions—are unlikely to be able adopt the advantages built into the E&E model. E&E is strictly a news source and rarely prints long-form analysis. It bases its identity solely on the value of its product. “The [newsletters] don’t have a voice,” says Braun. E&E also doesn’t have to worry about advertising, a nagging reality for most print magazines. But environmentalism is confusing and analysis is necessary. Monthly magazines, lacking the ability to deliver timely, breaking news, need a unique voice to establish the authority of their analysis. For existing publications, the necessity for analysis and advertising revenues compound the problems of defining green. Third-party certification appears to be the most logical way to determine standards for “green” in both labeling and advertising. Third-party regulation has worked for defining sustainability for timber harvesting through the Forest Stewardship Council. It has also worked for energy-efficient appliances and building standards through the Energy Star label and Leadership in Energy Efficient Design (LEED). Of course, there will always be errors. Just as the environmental friendliness of biofuels changed, new products or companies will be praised as “green” or “sustainable” but may be castigated as new information is revealed. Similarly, there will always be instances when reporting becomes self-promotion for nonprofit affiliated magazines. However, the best way for magazines to maintain their credibility is by being upfront about these issues and clearly stating their intentions. Doing otherwise disrespects their readers’ intelligence. Despite the many meanings of “green,” the word is certainly no longer a synonym for naïve. Magazines have also found it’s not a synonym for success. For the first time in three years, Vanity Fair didn’t print a special “green” issue this spring. Publisher Condé Nast said that because “green” had gone so mainstream, the magazine would cover environmental topics in every issue rather than just once a year. Elle also adjusted its environmental coverage, dedicating its annual environmental issue to focus on water, and they have dubbed it the “blue” issue. Is blue the new green?
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Minority Report: What’s black, white, brown, and read all over? America’s expanding ethnic press By Smriti Rao
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he year 2050 may seem too far off to pencil into your calendar, but if demographers are to be believed, it will be the year that multicultural America will become minority-majority. But despite the bubbling of the American melting pot, the media, particularly the magazine industry, remains largely dominated by whites—a landscape the ethnic media hopes to alter. “The reality is that America is browning,” observed Leonard Burnett, the co-founder of Uptown, a magazine for affluent African-Americans, in his profile on the Magazine Publishers of America’s microsite “Masthead Mosaic.” “Whether it’s magazines, networks, or radio, we must learn how to entertain, value and speak to this new culture that is more diverse. And we require diverse people to do that.” For almost two centuries, the ethnic media within America has stepped up to meet that challenge. Ethnic media has existed in the United States from the first black, Spanish-language, and Native American newspapers of the 19th century to the European-language periodicals published during the wave of immigration in the early 20th century. The current explosion in this genre is directly linked to the huge influx of immigrants into America over the last 40 years. And as immigrants move away from their home countries, many of them draw closer to their cultures. What else can explain my inexplicable plunge into Indian cooking, when all I can create in the kitchen are some minor fires? As I scour ethnic magazines for quick-fix food ideas, I also use them as a sort of proxy for news of other Indians in America and as a tool to help me assimilate into American life. Ethnic publications have highlighted issues that are often ignored in the mainstream media. With Barack Obama’s presidency, the jubilation within the ethnic media was palpable. “Ninety-five percent of ethnic newspapers were thrilled that a person of color, a biracial, will finally be responsible to them,” says Juana Ponce De Leon, of the New York Community Media Alliance, an association of ethnic and community publications. The ethnic press was brought into the White House loop when the first interview given by Obama after taking office was to Black Enterprise magazine. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel continued the courting. “We should have a conscious strategy of communicating through Hispanic media,” says Emanuel in an interview with The Washington Post. “It’s one of the fastest-growing groups in the country.” Just as the ethnic media was being brought into the mainstream, and genuine diversity within the magazine industry began to look like a real possibility, the recession suddenly revised the agenda and many ethnic publications struggled to keep their heads above water. I decided to take a look at three periodicals, each representing a different ethnic group, to see how they were faring in this downturn. KoreAm Journal is a monthly for Korean-Americans, Urban Latino caters to a large Hispanic community, and Siliconeer targets South Asian readers on the West Coast. Each of them has tried different strategies to stay afloat in this downturn.
For the kimchi crowd! KoreAm Journal’s holler for help! The last six months have been nothing short of hellish for KoreAm Journal. Late last year, the monthly was forced to snap into full survival mode, as the downturn caused nervous local advertisers to pull out. “Our publisher announced one day, ‘This is serious, we need to do something,’” says Managing Editor Michelle Woo. KoreAm immediately implemented a 20 percent salary cut across the board and reduced the number of pages from 100 to 84. It also wrote an open letter to the Korean-American community, asking members to throw it a lifeline. Set up as a local newspaper in 1990, KoreAm went national in 1997 with a new journal format. In February 1999, it emerged as a magazine available at select newsstands and bookstores across North America and Korea. The glossy, full color magazine writes about upand-coming Korean-Americans such as rap singers, artists, young politicos, and stars like Margaret Cho and Hines Ward, helping whet the second generation’s “bi-cultural appetite for burgers and Kimchi,” as the publishers put it. A recent issue includes a guide to the Year of the Ox along with a cheerful explanation of why the revered ox would be a mouth watering addition to the dinner menu; a piece on “The culture of food bullying” (Fourth round of dumplings? Err . . . I’ll pass!); and a preview of actor Justin Chon’s upcoming movie, Crossing Over, described as a “Crashesque racial drama that weaves together the stories of immigrants trying to attain legal status.” KoreAm also offers unique cultural insights like a “Guide to ear picking instruments.” KoreAm’s readers are part of a growing Asian-American community that is set to rise from the current 5 percent to constitute 8 percent of the United States population by 2050. President Obama’s choice of three Asian-Americans in his cabinet marked a Washington paradigm shift. Recognizing the relevance of these changing political attitudes toward immigrant communities, KoreAm Journal, for the first time in its history, featured a non-Korean on the cover of its magazine: Barack Hussein Obama. The Obama cover story was titled “A New Day.” “What will Obama’s America look like?” the piece mused, and answered, “Something more like us.” KoreAm Journal, however, has had little time to revel in the new political multiculturalism. Economic exigencies prompted it to write an open letter to its community of 40,000 readers: “We ask those of you who believe in our magazine and have the means to do so to make an investment in our future with a financial contribution in any amount that feels right to you.” Ngoc Nguyen, an editor with New America Media, a website that aggregates content from almost 700 ethnic media outlets, says, “It was a compelling example of an ethnic publication reaching out to their community, saying if you value what we do for you, please help us.” “I think it showed people we were hit hard,” says Woo, KoreAm’s NYRM
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managing editor. “Everyone talks about print media dying, and the ethnic media just gets lost in that conversation. We wanted to be part of that conversation.” While the “Save KoreAm Campaign” did not increase the number of subscriptions dramatically, it did draw in a handful of $100 contributions and plenty of support from the community. “Things aren’t that bad now,” says Woo. “We are OK, at least for now.”
Going Viral: Urban Latino
If you want to trace the arc of Latino stars like Ugly Betty’s America Ferrera, just click through the slideshow on Urban Latino magazine’s MySpace page. Start off with 1994, which featured actor John Leguizamo, and move through Ricky Martin, Jennifer Lopez, Marc Antony, and Salma Hayek. The magazine’s current issue includes pieces about new musical styles from the Hispanic community, like “Latin Pop & B,” which is a combination of Latino beats, pop, and R&B; the Puerto Rican actress Melonie Diaz, who was in the movie Be Kind Rewind; and Alberto “Korda” Diaz Gutierrez, the photographer who shot the 1960s picture of Che Guevara, staring coldly into the distance, an image that helped Che live on via millions of T-shirts and coffee mugs across the globe. “We have always had a sandwich approach,” says Jorge Cano-Moreno, the founder of Urban Latino, which is aimed at a readership of 18-to34-year-olds. “Our bread is lifestyle, the meat is politics. We try to get close up with lots of entertainment.” That approach has helped Urban Latino grow from its initial investment of $1500 in 1994 to currently generating more than a million dollars in annual revenue. That might seem substantial compared with other smaller ethnic publications, but Urban Latino isn’t in the ring with Latino heavyweights like Latina and People en Español. Last November, as the downturn deepened, so too did the sense of crisis within Urban Latino. “No auto company signed up to advertise this year,” recalls Cano-Moreno. “That’s a 100 percent drop in any one category, and everyone was questioning, ‘Is this system broke and can we fix it, or is it completely ruined?’’’ As ad revenue dips, Cano-Moreno’s approach to fighting the recession has been to reach out to younger readers by bolstering Urban Latino’s online presence. “If you’re a reader in your 30s, then your affiliation is with the magazine,” says Cano-Moreno, “but if you are younger, then you grew up online.” Obama’s use of blogs and social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace during the presidential campaign to connect with followers and organize meetings didn’t go unnoticed by this publisher. “The use of viral marketing in the campaign,” CanoMoreno says admiringly, “just shows how they can turn elections and bring businesses along.” Urban Latino hopes to follow this model to create a tightly knit community at its website, UrbanLatino.com, drawing in second- and third-generation Latinos. The magazine plans to market the site aggressively through promotions, sponsorships of events, and its own digital radio station, Urban Latino Radio. For a publication that comes out just eight times a year and has a readership of about 62,000, the website is an important platform for keeping readers’ interest sustained and generating advertising revenue at a time when ad pages in the magazine are down 25 percent. Urban Latino’s website still has a long way to go to match the digital fireworks that its competitors, People en Español and Latina, create with their sites, which are heavy on multimedia, featuring sleek graphics and videos. Still, Cano-Moreno is confident that despite the slow take-off of the website, he will be able to corner a piece of the Latino market by tailoring content for different ethnicities within the audience. “Numbers say one thing—45 million Hispanics,” he says. “But there 54
are 11 or 12 different countries, with different heritages—like the Asian market.”
Place your faith in Barry: Siliconeer
Recognizing and catering to the differences in that Asian market, Siliconeer is a monthly publication catering to the West Coast’s affluent, well-educated South Asian community, including Indians and Pakistanis. You know that its readers aren’t exactly slumming in this economy when the publication still carries ads from jewelers advertising Rolex watches, testimony to the power of not just having a niche publication but also a controlled circulation. Siliconeer is dependent on that advertising because it is distributed free of cost in 300 restaurants and stores on the West Coast. It is stuffed with ads from local businesses. A full page ad that tells you where to “get married Maharaja style in India” is followed by one showing a bearded man peddling a seven-day yoga program (“Inner engineering— technologies for inner well being”), presumably targeting the techies swarming Silicon Valley. The 80-page magazine looks untouched by the recession, but its founder and managing editor, Amardeep Gupta, reports that advertising revenue is down more than 30 percent compared with last year. “Advertisers who have been with us for 10 years have pulled out,” groans Gupta. “The reason? Bad economy!” Launched in 2000, Siliconeer started off with content written “for the IT guys,” according to Gupta. The main feature in the February 2000 issue was “The Aftermath of Y2K: What it means for programmers,” and the “Career” section carried an article on “the exciting world of software testing.” As coverage of Indian politics, Pakistani affairs, and events in Silicon Valley expanded, so did readership, which went from 20,000 to more than 100,000, including online readership. Obama’s nomination offered a unique chance for the publication to throw its weight behind the first minority presidential candidate. In July 2008, Siliconeer carried a cover story about the future president, urging South Asians to “get on the bandwagon.” Author Partha Banerjee wrote, “We hope that South Asians, Chinese, Koreans, Latinos, FarEast Asians, Africans and other nationalities living in the US would all come out of their long-held, meaningless prejudices against AfricanAmericans, and be a part of this newly shaping history.” Gupta recalls the elation the community felt when Obama was finally elected: “The policies, the ideas he had floated, the positive outlook about everything.” But as the euphoria subsided and the distressed economy took center stage, Siliconeer urged its community of Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi readers to engage constructively with the government as it deals with the recession. “There have to be harsh decisions to fix this mess,” says Gupta. He is sure that his publication will ride out the storm because of the kind of magazine it is. With its advertisements telling readers where they can procure lentils and spices locally, combined with chatty pieces about the latest Bollywood entertainment, he believes that Siliconeer is well positioned to retain its loyal readership despite taking a hit from its advertisers.
I will survive
For many immigrants, surviving and thriving in another country is a test of their skills, and for the magazines that serve these communities it is no different. “They are used to surviving on a shoestring budget,” says Nguyen of New America Media, “and they are used to riding out economic storms.” A strong sense of community, coupled with optimism about the Obama administration’s attitude toward immigrants, is helping the ethnic media seek out the brighter side of the downturn. “It’s just a phase; we can’t be dramatic,” thunders Gupta of Siliconeer. “Hang in there.”
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America’s Next Top Magazine The magazines-influencing-televisioninfluencing-magazines chain shows no sign of stopping
W By Anne-Ryan Heatwole
ith a pipe in his hand and a busty young blonde at his side, Hugh Hefner hosted the short-lived television show Playboy’s Penthouse looking like the embodiment of his glossy pin-up mag. Launched in 1959, only six years after the debut of Playboy magazine, the show was a supplement to the Playboy brand. An episode looked like an issue of Playboy come to life (albeit with more musical guests and no centerfolds), with men in elegant smoking jackets lounging on mod furniture, while women in cleavage-baring dresses brought new meaning to the phrase “boob tube.” While Playboy’s Penthouse lasted only one season (as did its follow-up, Playboy After Dark, which ran from 1969 to 1970), these days magazines are ubiquitous on the air. From Teen Vogue to Seventeen, Elle to Marie Claire, and back to Playboy, glossies are popping up all over the small screen. But there’s a big difference between then and now. Back then, Hefner was using television to publicize his lifestyle and magazine; now, when magazines use television shows to promote themselves, television is just as likely to influence the pages of the magazines—and not always for the better. With the rise of reality television, the relationship between magazines and celebrities is becoming less symbiotic and more incestuous, with ripple effects that reach everything from cover subjects to content to mastheads. When The Hills premiered on MTV in 2006, the reality series purported to show the life of a wealthy, yet normal, California girl as she worked to break into the Los Angeles fashion industry. In an early episode, the series’ star, Lauren Conrad, nervously waited by the phone to hear back from Teen Vogue about a coveted fashion internship for which she had interviewed. This moment was less suspenseful for the viewer, since Conrad just happened to be on the cover of Teen Vogue the month this episode aired. Not surprising to anyone (including Conrad, judging by her acting), she got the job. Teen Vogue isn’t the only magazine to have been lured to the small screen by the siren song of reality TV. Seventeen has contracted with America’s Next Top Model as part of the show’s prize package. In each installment, young women compete in a number of often absurd
photo challenges; many of the situations seem designed to produce good TV rather than good models. In the end, the winner gets a high-priced contract with Cover Girl cosmetics, representation by a modeling agency, and a cover and photo spread in Seventeen. The host, Tyra Banks, oh-so-fiercely reminds the hopeful models (and the audience) each week that the cover of Seventeen is part of the prize package, driving the magazine’s name into the viewers’ consciousnesses. Further reinforcing the brand’s attachment to the show is the presence of Seventeen editor Ann Shoket as a frequent guest judge. It doesn’t stop with covers as prizes; television also has inspired lavish magazine spreads in a manner that blurs the lines between who’s influencing whom. In March 2006, Elle ran a two-page photo spread called “Model Ambition.” The only text offering any explanation for the shot read, “21-year-old beauty Naima Mora—first made famous on America’s Next Top Model—emerges as one of fashion’s newest faces.” March 2006 also happened to be the month of the premiere of Cycle 6 of America’s Next Top Model, the last cycle in which the winner received a photo spread in Elle as part of her prize package (as they had in Cycles 3 through 6). At the end of Cycle 6, Seventeen took over the role as the show’s magazine liaison. The relationship with America’s Next Top Model wasn’t Elle’s first (or last) encounter with reality television. In December 2004, Elle fashion director Nina Garcia began appearing as a judge on the new Bravo channel show Project Runway. The show, which revolved around fashion designers competing in weekly challenges to create original garments, gathered high audience numbers for Bravo and wider brand recognition for Elle. The winners of that first season of Project Runway received $100,000 to start their own clothing line, a mentorship at Banana Republic, and the opportunity to showcase their fashions in a special Project Runway photo spread in—guess where—the pages of Elle. Past reality show contestants popped up in other places too; in addition to the fashion-spread prize, Elle also occasionally used past contestants in other magazine features. In the October 2006 issue of Elle, an article titled “The Dress (Shirt, Boots, Jacket, Jewels…) That Changed My Life” featured 25 writers, designers, actors, and other creative professionals. While most spoke of specific items (a special shirt bought while studying abroad or a necklace that reminded the author of NYRM
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family), Kara Saun, the runner-up in Project Runway’s first season, wrote: “My Project Runway collection changed my life. I was able to find an investor, and I’m starting my own line.” The finale of Season 3 of Project Runway aired in October 2006. Project Runway seems like an endless source for TV/magazine tie-ins. The July 2008 issue of Elle featured an interview with Season 4 winner Christian Siriano. The article mainly dealt with Siriano’s experience on the show and his adjustment to life post-Project Runway. At one point the author reported: “And when [Siriano] won the final challenge, instead of celebrating with his fellow castmates, Siriano snuck off to his hotel for a quiet night alone, where he ate a box of Yodels and read an issue of Elle. ‘I know it sounds weird,’ he says, ‘but all I wanted to do was look at fashion.’” But it’s not all fun with chocolate cream cakes and gratuitous namedropping; the overlap between magazines and TV has become so twisted it’s sometimes hard to sort out which side is in charge. One of the places the celebrification of magazines is most insidious is in the effects TV can have on magazine staffs. Playboy returned to television screens in August 2007, but the new manifestation of the magazine was markedly different from Hefner’s two previous ventures. On the E! channel, The Girls Next Door chronicled the lives of three of Hefner’s girlfriends (Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt, and Kendra Wilkinson), who lived in the Playboy mansion. The show broke record viewing numbers for E!, and the women have graced the cover of Playboy three times so far during the run of the show. But the show did more than just give America more images of blondes rolling around in black satin sheets. In Season 3, 27-year-old Madison became an intern in the Playboy photo department. By Season 4, Madison had the title of assistant photo/Playmate editor and was in charge of photo shoots (or so it appeared on The Girls Next Door). This really puts the whole idea of sleeping with the boss to climb the corporate ladder in a modern light—the new trick is to make a TV show about sleeping with the boss, then parlay that success into a job. It’s just that simple! Or, maybe not. Madison resigned from her magazine job in February 2009 after she and Hefner broke up. Other magazine staffs have felt the fallout from television exposure, too. Nina Garcia became a recognizable face thanks to her appearances on Project Runway, but she later left Elle for Marie Claire in a reportedly acrimonious split. Jealousy among coworkers over Garcia’s fame as a TV personality is supposedly part of the reason for her abrupt departure from Elle in April 2008. After the loss of Garcia, Elle quickly moved on to a new reality show: Stylista, in which young people competed for an internship in the Elle fashion department. This time Anne Slowey, who replaced Garcia as Elle’s fashion director, was at the helm. While the show was entertaining—and certainly fulfilled my quota for schadenfreude during the time it aired— choosing the staff of a magazine based, not on talent and experience, but, in part, through a contestant’s ability to look good on television and create entertaining drama, creates a worrisome precedent for journalists. But the magazines-influencing-television-influencing-magazines chain shows no signs of stopping. Project Runway has already filmed its sixth season. The Girls Next Door will continue for a sixth season as well, despite the breakup between Hefner and all three girlfriends. In March, Marie Claire launched a new reality show on the Style Network called Running in Heels, which follows the lives of Marie Claire fashion interns—the promos show the requisite gossiping, fighting, and crying (hooray!)—in the magazine’s New York offices. America’s Next Top Model started casting for Cycle 13 in March. All of this raises the question of what impact the telivisionification of magazines will have on the future of both industries. Are journalists destined to start adding headshots and video confessional skills to their résumés? Will magazine covers become little more than self-referential parodies? Will magazine content be dependent on the capricious nature of TV viewers? Tune in next month and find out. 56
“Mommy, By Laura Slot
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t may have seemed a little odd for a small child to be making drawings of gas masks. But I had just turned six and was growing up in a small town in the Netherlands when the first Gulf War broke out. I closely followed the news on television. I wasn’t particularly precocious as a child—my friends had the same amount of information that I had. If we understood who Saddam Hussein was back in 1990, and what gas masks were, why do we assume that today’s six-year-olds don’t? Especially since more than 90 percent of American kids now have a home computer with Internet access? And yet one could go through almost all 83 children’s magazines that exist in the United States today and find countless stories about elephants, piggy banks, the Grand Canyon, or farmers tilling their fields, but hardly any stories about current events. National Geographic Kids, Ranger Rick, Highlights for Children, and Cricket are all filled with puzzles, poems, recipes, animal stories, and folk tales that describe a child’s world. With only one exception, Time For Kids, it is difficult to find articles that cover the news, not to mention controversial figures like Hussein or troubling subjects like war. Even weekly magazines like Scholastic News or Weekly Reader, whose business it is to bring timely information to kids (especially those in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades), seem inclined to steer clear of hard news. For example, Scholastic, the most widely read weekly magazine for preadolescents, which is currently used in 65 percent of the classrooms across the country, wouldn’t consider running a story on Arabs and Jews in the Middle East, or on whether waterboarding is torture. Rather, it runs pieces like “Valuable Lessons,” the January 2009 cover story about how to save money. In its edition for fourth-graders, you can find pieces about the Chinese New Year, special tourist spots in America, and kids volunteering. A recent edition for fifth- and sixthgraders covered the coal waste spill in Tennessee but had no other timely or controversial stories. All classroom magazines pay considerable attention to key dates and holidays. In March, Weekly Reader acknowledged Women’s History Month with a cover story headlined “Super Women,” listing accomplished females like Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama. Women’s History Month is
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What’s a Genocide?” Time For Kids shows kids what’s really going on in the world
not exactly breaking news—it happens every year—and the rest of the magazine’s pages were filled with stories about elephants, the center of the earth, and a boy returning a wallet. Time Inc.’s Time For Kids changed this pattern. Founded in 1995 by Claudia Wallis, a veteran writer and editor for Time, it has three editions—for kindergarten and first grade, for grades two and three, and for grades four to six—with a combined circulation of almost four million, about half that of Scholastic News. Wallis, whose children were aged nine, seven, and two when she founded the magazine, wanted to bring more serious news to kids and enable them to develop a lifelong interest in world events. “We thought kids in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade were capable of understanding the issues of today, even like welfare and gun control,” she said in an interview. “At the time, the dominant classroom magazines were kind of old-fashioned. They tended to cover very light, fluffy subjects—lots of stories about animals, stories about school—very children’s-world kinds of stories.” A lot has changed since Time For Kids was launched. “In today’s world,” said Wallis, “where kids are on the Internet, they know what’s going on in the world. If you pretend that they don’t, you’re giving them the wrong idea.” The light content of most children’s magazines stems from a desire to avoid controversy, largely resulting from the fact that they must cater to three audiences: children, teachers, and parents. Photograph by Laura Slot
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A seemingly harmless story about dinosaurs could lead to a discussion on evolution. For an election story, when one candidate is portrayed on a cover, a small text balloon needs to be inserted to mention that his opponent will be on the cover of the next issue. The importance of adding news to children’s magazines increased during the past few years, as many American newspapers closed their children’s sections or moved them online. But, according to Arun Narayan Toké, the founder and executive editor of the multicultural children’s magazine Skipping Stones, editors had to be more selective about the news delivered to kids in the period after 9/11; the terrorist attacks caused the children’s magazine culture to become more protective. The deputy managing editor at Time For Kids, Nellie Gonzalez, acknowledged that although it was impossible to completely shield youngsters from the negativity and grief after 9/11, parents asked for limited coverage in children’s publications. In addition, space for real news in children’s magazines came under increasing pressure after the introduction of the No Child Left Behind Act. When former President George W. Bush introduced the new law after taking office in January 2001, American schools were suddenly required to test their pupils annually on mathematics and reading skills. Teachers started to spend more hours teaching math and reading while devoting less time to social studies. World events, history, and news received less attention in the classroom— and in classroom magazines. It’s not just a matter of how much news to offer. It is also about whether to trust children to be able to handle bad news alongside good news, and to understand its meaning. Gonzalez said that a photo of a soldier with a gun is usually acceptable when it’s not pointed at something or someone. And a story on a famine in Africa could be possible, but only if it includes a reference to an aid charity. When she flipped through the latest issue of Time For Kids while sitting in her office during a recent interview, she pointed to a story on Sudan. “We were feeling kind of guilty that we hadn’t done a Sudan story,” she said. When President Omar al-Bashir threw all aid groups out of the country, the editors decided to run the story. Some topics, however, remain off limits. The first cover of Time For Kids from September 1995 hangs framed on the wall above Gonzalez’s desk. It is a close-up of a crying boy looking over his shoulder during the Bosnian War, next to the headline “He Has Only Known War.” “We wouldn’t do that anymore,” Gonzalez said. The reaction to that cover told them that the story was too gruesome for their readers. Such judgments about what children should be exposed to need to be made with care. Nevertheless, democracy depends on an informed citizenry capable of understanding and debating the issues of the day. Introducing world affairs, politics, and timely news to children will help them become more involved in and familiar with the world around them, and prepare them to be a truly informed generation tomorrow.
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