The Well-Tailored Magazine

By Thomas Griffith

The public may only grudgingly accept what it gets on television, but television does get the crowd vote. So if you want to appeal to tastes that are more individual than mass, go to magazines. This is familiar Madison Avenue doctrine, but nowadays at long last it's working to the advantage of magazines, and with some peculiar results.

New magazines--about 300 a year--are popping out all over the place, and many of the old ones are getting face lifts. Business is good for them now that network advertising costs so much, is seen amidst a clutter of other ads, and intersperses so much junk viewing. This doesn't mean that print is always loftier--one of the new publishing successes is Soap Opera Digest.

Computers and sophisticated mailing lists now make it possible to tailor-make magazines that home in unerringly on the most specialized of interests, occupations, skills, pleasures. The result is a clutter of publications, and the way they seek to define themselves, and to separate themselves from the ruck, combines high-mindedness and hustle:

Quest set out to be the only magazine that "dared" to be optimistic about the world; hardly a high-risk audacity, but it's doing well. Whereas Politicks ("At last there's a magazine for people who make waves") is already sinking without a trace. Perhaps Today's Jogger will prove healthier; but after exhausting such subjects as jogging and diet, jogging and sex, jogging and meditation, what will there be left to say in Vol. III, No. 6? McCall's has started Your Place for young adults who don't have children yet. Rolling Stone puts out Outside "for people who are committed to live in the cities with a second home outdoors." Self (women's self-improvement) is yet to come; so is Savvy (for women executives), but already there are Kosher Home and, for doctors' wives, Medical/ Mrs. ("A Steak that Holds at Rare for Three Hours"). Then there is the newsweekly Seven Days ("the magazine which is on your side") and the environment-minded Mother Jones ("for the rest of us"). In trying to reach freespending 18-to 34-year-olds, the New York Times (imagine this, Adolph Ochs!) ballyhoos Us, an imitation of People, as "journalism a new way--their way; lots of pictures, lots of fun, quick and easy for this brought-up-on-TV generation." Clay Felker, whose innovative but now languishing New York magazine produced so many imitators, is trying to rehabilitate Esquire. Where once, in the words of a previous editor, Esquire sought to be "smartass," it now respectfully pursues "The American Man and the New Success." Perhaps he's the same young moneymaking male in whom Playboy naturally discerns a "lust for life." Its promotion speaks unctuously of this reader as a healthy radical in the '60s who has joined a "new, but better Establishment." Penthouse sometimes sneaks in an expose of the CIA among its sex manuals, and smirkily calls itself the magazine that "uncovers" things. Its sexy sister Viva proclaims: "The Viva woman leads the life the Cosmo girl reads about."

All this jostling soon becomes self-parodying. But it's good that there is more to choose from, and more voices to be heard. That amplitude of choice, however, is now costing the reader more. Buffeted by the ups and downs of advertising, magazine publishers prefer to extract more of their revenue from the reader by raising prices. (Leftist critics deplore the advertisers' presumed influence on the press, but to an independent editor, an advertiser's overwhelming presence is less threatening than his indifferent absence).

Few publishers are apt to go as far in making the reader pay the freight as McGraw-Hill. It still publishes 29 ad-carrying magazines, but hasn't launched a new one in more than two years. Instead, McGraw-Hill finds it more profitable to put out newsletters--cheap to print, and carrying no advertising--whenever it discovers a "niche" where someone will pay well for specialized information. The company already publishes 27 newsletters, and is starting four or five a year more. Its prize niche must be Fuel Price Analysis, which charges subscribers $1,200 a year. At prices like these, McGraw-Hill can tell advertisers to go sell their Toyotas somewhere else.

With all the advantages that selectivity in magazines brings, there are drawbacks. Magazines that cater exclusively to game hunters or to environmentalists, to women's libbers, Legionnaires, CB freaks or stockbrokers, tend to reinforce the prejudices of their readers, rather than to challenge them. In this way they may, without intending to, add to that segmenting of the community that makes these United States seem less a community and more a fragmented cluster of self-absorbed interests. Still, this is preferable to the sterile affluence of the three television networks, whose pursuit of the bottom line has inexorably led to programming directed at the lowest common denominator.

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