Tips on Tape
Cassette magazines arrive
The advantages are obvious. No staples, no paper. The merry mailman cannot mangle the thing in your letter slot and twist it into some kind of soft-cover Calder. There may be other benefits as well. Fast information. Ease of illustration. Graphic impact. "Video is the new printing press," Publishing Entrepreneur Nicolas Charney likes to say, but it is not necessary to bury Gutenberg to appreciate the possibilities of magazines on video and to spot, in five new entries, the beginnings of what seems to be a trend.
"It always struck me as crazy that the TV industry did not use its own medium as a trade informational source," says Tom Madden, a former NBC vice president who launched Video Newscasting Network last year. Madden's 200 subscribers--most of them general managers of local television stations--pay an annual subscription fee of $330 (for broadcasters) or $495 (for non-broadcasters). They receive a biweekly tape running approximately 40 minutes, containing the scoop on everything from the latest electronic equipment and last week's big trade convention to tips on new shows and interviews with movers and shakers.
Because of the cost and the comparative scarcity of the playback equipment, general-interest magazines on tape are a prospect for the future. But trade magazines, aimed at a specialized audience, can be justified both as a business expense and as an efficient way to get across what may essentially be visual information. A new camera will look much better going through its paces on tape than being described and diagrammed on a page.
"You see a visual product as it was designed to be seen, visually, with action and sound," says Madden, who shows up as a sort of visual product himself, neatly suited out and playing host on the show like an anchorman cut loose from his moorings. He remains unflappable, unfazed in the face of a blitzkrieg lecture on the ratings by a house expert ("Gimme a Break's sort of a joke, Taxi's O.K., fair, Devlin hasn't occurred yet, the long range is good for ABC . . .") and commendably noncommittal when the president of Showtime drops in to plug Romance, a spicy soap opera featuring dialogue ("I'm an actress, not a hooker") that could use a little less seasoning.
If Madden's enterprise is oriented toward broadcasters, then VideoJournal aims to reach the industrial market. Founded just seven months ago by a Philadelphia outfit called Media Concepts, VideoJournal has some 200 subscribers (at $35 to $45 an issue) who tune in to such topics as "Trends" and "Production Hints." Supermarket Insights (227 subscribers, $8,500 a year for monthly installments), despite its substantial price tag, looks like the lowest-budget effort of the lot. All stills, voice-over and grade-school graphics, it is the videotape equivalent of a sales manager's audiovisual presentation. Supermarket Insights does not do full justice to material that is ripe with promise. One recent issue documented the adventures of the Safeway chain in branching, out into "an upscale gourmet food store" (complete with a grand opening at which members of the San Francisco Symphony played chamber music) and scrutinized an enterprising New York retailer who launched an "all-kosher superstore" for Passover. Supermarket Insights Co-Founder Paul Reuter reports such success that his company has already fielded a new video magazine, Health and Beauty Aids Insights. It will be strictly nuts-and-bolts stuff, however. Charney's Videofashion Monthly, with lots of quick clips of swirling models, distracted designers and discofied fashion shows, has already cornered the glitz.
"It's really Vogue on video," says Charney, who appears to be hankering after a more general readership--or, perhaps, viewership. For a yearly subscription fee of $1,500, clients--mostly retailers and cosmetic companies--get the lowdown on Halston and hear all about hair care. Charney is negotiating with CBS Cable to carry an even slicker, consumer-oriented spinoff. "When we started," Charney says, "there wasn't even Betamax. There weren't any satellites. Now everything is coming together. Video is the place where TV, newspapers and books and photography and movies really meet." Charney's vid mag, the zippiest of the small field, suggests some piquant possibilities for reaching a wider audience. If snappy visuals can make the rag trade look exciting, consider what video could do with show biz. Variety on video could be the Ed Sullivan Show of the 1980s.
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