Mygazines starts to reveal its monetising strategy
No news on if the lawyers tracked them down. Meanwhile on the legal side of the fence…

Publishers to give away 50 million digital magazines
Zinio are behind this; a rather smart way for them to get the lead over their rivals, but will it get many readers? Speaking of digital, did “iPhone magazine” PMc ever launch? It’s fashion week, but it isn’t in the iTunes app store as promised yet…

Yet another version of that Obama cover
How come almost all the parodies are funnier than the original?

Wired gives a play-by-play on how they edit an article
I’ve suffered at the hands of their editors before

ITV becomes digital newsagent
That’s the leading UK commercial TV broadcaster, for non-Britishers. They also own Friends Reunited, which is what nostalgic stalkers in England used to use before Facebook; this diginewsstand adds one more random bullet to their scattergun web offering

Yet another new luxury fashion supplement
Washington Post arrives late to the party, hunts around for any uneaten vol au vents

Taschen publishes entire reprint of Arts and Architecture
Now there’s a trend that could get interesting/expensive. They should open up the choice of their next reprint to the audience (I’d probably vote for Nest)

Life magazine resurfaces yet again, as a social photo archive website
If we’ve seen less than 3% of what they have, there are going to be some amazing unseen images in there. I just wish they’d donate them to the nation / Library of Congress on a similar non-commercial clause that NASA uses. Set the archive free!

Main distributor of foreign magazines in Japan goes bust
Via Jean Snow

Esquire e-cover hacked. To death
My review of the full anniversary issue coming soon

The Creative Review blog reports that the UK design award people D&AD have put their annual online, with free access for the first month only.

So go while you can and enjoy the magazines that could, including our own humble Ling (wait for the irritating intro animation to end and it’ll take you right there; click Subcategories to see more). Werk and Carl’s Cars are personal favourites.

RIP David Foster Wallace, one of the few writers around who still knew how to fill 12,000 words in a magazine, and do it beautifully; he also did more for footnotes than anyone since Charles Kinbote. (See how the Atlantic Monthly designed around them here.)

The steady decline in long articles in print comes in the main from the rise of the internet, short attention spans and increased time pressures; but it also comes from a dearth of great writers who know how to fill so much space meaningfully. And now there’s one less of those.

Right now, McSweeney’s homepage is dedicated to people remembering DFW (including editors from Esquire and the New York Times magazine). With the pound strong and nothing to lose, I tried once to commission him. I had to write him a letter – this was in 2005, and his agent had told me he had no cellphone number for him, nor did DFW have email. I wrote the letter, but never received a reply.

I can still never watch Roger Federer without remembering this piece, nor hear talk radio or eat lobster in the same way again. Which is what great magazine journalism should do – glorify in the space that newspapers don’t have, look in-depth, take time, describe, change people’s worlds. Bonus link: his brilliant, short summary of what 9/11 should mean.

Set aside an hour or so, click those links, and enjoy some truly engaging and stylish magazine journalism by a writer who is already sorely missed.

UPDATE: Harper’s now has a page with all his articles on it.

Maghound finally launches with 240 magazines
Free 30 day trial for as many magazines as you can eat. Will try it and let you know

McCain critic gets chance to shoot magazine portrait
Now all political advisors will be paranoid of any strobe below shoulder height, and magazines will immediately change their rights / usage contracts to stop this happening again. Some of it was rather vicious, others more thought out; visit her webpage daily for a new version. UPDATE: likely due to legal action, she’s taken down all the McCain pics from her website, and is now being represented by someone else. So it goes

Revista Unica in Portugal gets a facelift
Courtesy of Juan Antonio Giner’s team. Seems to manage being both playful and formal – tough combo to pull off, even tougher one to sustain

Bitch needs $40,000
They ask fans to help the wiener dog grow. Video includes recently-deceased niche magazines. Well, it worked for Arthur. UPDATE: They did it, and in only three days. You can only pull this trick once; let’s hope it helps stabilise them for the forseeable. Right now, they seem unsure how best to use the money

iDN loves infographics, creates info font
Looking forward to this one

It’s been a significant few days for magazines in the States. Latest addition to my pile appeared over the weekend: WSJ., the Wall Street Journal‘s new magazine.

The reaction so far seems indifferent, but they seem confident that it’s a BMW 7 series. So how does it drive?

The first thing to say is that I didn’t find it inside or even alongside a copy of the Wall Street Journal; instead my local shop had mistakenly placed it on the magazine rack, separate from the newspapers. As it has no price and no bar code, I’m not sure how people are picking it up, if at all – at last visit, the magazine was still there, even though last weekend’s newspaper is long gone. There’s a distributor problem there that needs sorting out (and the cover of the magazine doesn’t help – no “Only to be sold with the Wall Street Journal” anywhere on it), not helped by the fact that the newspaper doesn’t trail the magazine anywhere inside it, as not every reader / area will get one. Connecting the two as a retailer or a customer is not as obvious a move as they might think. (And this isn’t the only distribution cock-up they’ve suffered.) Anyway, once I’d returned the two lost souls back to their rightful marriage, I took them home and this is what I found.

The magazine was one of Uncle Rupert’s flagship promises during the battle to wrest the Journal from the cold dying hands of the previous owners. He transferred the editor of The Times UK’s luxury magazine LUXX, Tina Gaudoin, over to head up the operation. Following on the heels of Monocle, Intelligent Life and various others, the high-end glossies seem to be the current spot where the smart media investor pans for gold.

I had heard from an insider that most of the staff working on the magazine are reassigned people from the main newspaper. This didn’t bode well; though the Journal is one of the better designed serious American newspapers, the skills aren’t always as transferable as they should be. Thankfully, there’s not much sign of that in what I can see. Instead, it’s a well put-together magazine that feels, at first glance, like a decent enough supplement. Closer inspection, however, shows that first impressions can be misleading.

Up close:

• The cover is understated, with a cute fashion nod to the parent company – it doesn’t scream “open me”, and the low-key, concise cover lines don’t so much either. The one thing I find curious is that this special dress is only mentioned in the smaller print inside, on the cover credit and in one photo caption in a hotch-potch interview with the designer. We don’t at any point get to see the whole dress, or learn about how it was made. All of this is pushed onto the website; the question is, how many people will bother to make the move online? The stunt falls a little flat.

• The one magazine I didn’t mention above is How to Spend It, the highly successful Financial Times magazine. There’s a cheeky nod to it in the Tina Gaudoin’s intro letter – “At WSJ. we believe luxury is not about how you spend – it’s the way you live that counts.” There’s no doubt that they admire HTSI, however – they hired its former art director, Tomaso Capuano, to design this mag.

• Advertising is present and most of the big names are there with luxury brand ads; the total ad count is more supplement than magazine, however. Contrast Interview‘s 76 pages before any content, to WSJ.‘s 13. There are apparently 51 advertisers in this launch issue.

• The only design nod to daddy newspaper is the Contributors page, using the same black and white faux-pencil headshot style as the grown-up paper. The rest is standard colour-photo fare, reproduced well enough.

• This one’s for the geeks: it seems to be a five-column grid sans serif for news/agenda pages, and a four column grid with serifs for small articles, with big features being two wide text columns. There are 100 + 4 pages, gloss varnished like a newspaper supplement. It’s an inch or so wider and taller than most American newsstand magazines, and glue bound, so the silver cover appears a little warped.

• The front section is cutely divided into Hunter and Gatherer. Within each are very carefully plotted typical regular features: Rebel yell; Great Vintage; Icon; Most stylish; The Way We Wear; Lust after; The nose; The Specialist; How much is it worth?. The focus is very much on products, labels, names, exclusivity. It’s all very advertiser-friendly, and reminds me as much of The Sunday Times Style magazine of a few years ago as LUXX. A man moisturises. Kate Moss and Philip Green talk about Topshop. A few glamourous names are shoehorned in (Faye Dunaway, profiled because she is born in the same year as an expensive bottle of wine). Also, they got very lucky with the short feature on the jogging habits of obscure Alaskan governor Sarah Palin, though couldn’t change the intro in time to mention recent events. All product details seem to be tucked away in Sources, a small-print page at the back. And yet the call is to go to “Source”, without saying its page number – not very helpful to the reader.

• Then we get the ‘feature well’ – again, carefully plotted out with “Regulars”: The Big Interview. Phenomenon. Big Trip. Fashion (a fashion shoot, in this instance a pretty dull series of breezy models walking / running through gloomy New York). The Competition. A House and Garden. The Face (in this case, an expensive watch). They aren’t taking any chances, and are making very sure that the advertisers will know what peg fits in which slot.

Here’s my biggest problem with WSJ. (apart from the grammatical strain of that full stop): the content just isn’t very good. For a magazine supposedly aimed at a “well-read, discerning about what you consume… multi-faceted, multi-talented group with a sense of humor” (according to the intro letter) some of the content feels too obvious for a discerning, knowledgeable crowd, and they all read as uncritical fluff in a way that the main paper would never allow. (Disclosure: I’ve written for the Wall Street Journal Europe a few times, and they were fastidious about getting multiple sides to any story, in a way that this magazine repeatedly refuses to).

First, the too-obvious luxury namedrops: mentions of a Stradivarius; Virgin Galactic; Hollywood actors buying islands; the Louvre in Abu Dhabi; a new bar in the Peninsular Hotel in Hong Kong; a classic Magnum photo (completely wasted in context. Make it bigger, put it side on please); Kate Moss; The America’s Cup. Exceptions were Lulu Wang’s car collection, the best safety videos on airlines, and a collection of wallets combined with a Dürer illustration. Those were good, but the rest made me yawn.

And then there’s the features. The sub editors have done a great job in writing the intros in a way that makes you want to read them, doing the old “But is it? Read on to find out” trick on each one. “Our skin needs moisturizer to look and feel good. So why do cosmetics companies make such a fuss?”… “They call her the Helena Rubinstein of India. Now Shahnaz Husain thinks she can take on the world’s beauty conglomerates. But does she have what it takes?”… “Poochi Gucci. What does it say about us that we spend so much on them?”… “The cruise industry is vested to the tune of $22 billion in returning the once chic vacation to its former glory. But will the credit crunch sink its ambitions?”

But I don’t know why cosmetics companies make such a fuss, whether Shahnaz has what it takes, what expensive pets say about us, or if the credit crunch will sink cruising ambitions – because the articles don’t tell us. They sell us the company line, they make it look good, and they don’t analyse, report, provide counter arguments or show any desire to use their critical faculties. The intros are good, but untruthful. All we get is fluff. The only exception, the only story with any conflict at all, and so the most compelling read, is the America’s Cup story – though it’s a page too short, as it lacks any explanation of some of the Cup’s archaic rule systems, to give the reader any context. But at least it’s a good story, well told, about rich pursuits and clashing personalities. There’s even an update to the story on wsj.com/magazine (though it’s written in a “Wow! I’m a blogger!” style that is totally inappropriate). In the main paper that day was a great story about Damien Hirst and his upcoming art auction. It would have been a perfect magazine story for this audience, except that the lead time for WSJ. was several months. And I don’t know if WSJ. would have reported it half as well.

The heyday of supplements is generally recognised to have been David King and Harold Evans’ time at the Sunday Times Magazine in the UK in the 1970s-80s (though The New York Times’ T carries some pretty special visuals on a weekly basis). The Sunday Times allowed Evans and King to create a supplement that was worth buying the paper for (and a budget to match). But these are different times, with very different agendas. WSJ. really falls down most in comparison with Intelligent Life. Though I’m no fan of its look and feel, IL is a magazine that somehow feels more genuinely in tune with the superwealthy, by identifying stories and angles might you’d never find otherwise, written by insiders who live their chosen topic. Instead, WSJ. feels like yet another product roundup by people with an internet connection, some press releases and Sothebys.com, Portfolio.com and Vogue.com in their bookmark list. The magazine just doesn’t stick in the memory, or stand out in the reading. Its audience deserves more.

There’s nothing fundamentally bad about what’s in place right now. WSJ. has a solid structure, a supplement-y feel that goes well enough with the main paper, and an inoffensively tidy design that feels a little out of date, but not objectionably so. It has the foundations to create something interesting. But looking through issue one, it’s lacking a well-connected, in-the-know visionary to find the stories, and then an editor with the gumption to make the writers tell things as they are, rather than just take things on face value in a way that must horrify the newsprint crew. It also cries out for the injection of a few more smiles in tone, design or content for that “multi-talented group with a sense of humor”. And a few “wow” images wouldn’t do any harm either. The Wall Street Journal‘s informed, well-read audience will thank them for all that, even if the occasional advertiser may get queasy. It’ll make everything better.

I hear the budget is pretty tiny for this, but that’s not the reader’s problem – and I’m sure that much more can be done with it, especially with the power of the brand name behind them. The next issue is in December, so there’s plenty of time to sort all this out by then. But will they?

Time Out New York isn’t in trouble
Ish. The freelancers and vendors aren’t happy though

The Economist beats Berlusconi in Italian courts
That can’t have happened much. They celebrate by taking to the streets

Agent Provocateur creates alluring print insert
Posters, riddles hidden in images, online interaction to complete the story. Titillating

Videos from Stanford publishing course for mag professionals
Big names from Wired, Glamour and more reveal their insights on the mag world. Surprisingly engaging in parts

Universal News on demand!
Magazines from around the world delivered within two hours in NYC. Blimey

Magazine publisher uses its ad selling know-how online
Creates a network of popular sites to offer to existing and new clients. Good synergy of skills there

Beautiful Zaha Hadid die-cuts on the newsstand
Tony Chambers continues to make Wallpaper* groundbreaking in a non-blinking e-paper kind of way. Can’t wait

If this is the future, where’s my jetpack?

Some news from the biennial thinkfest, actfest and lovefest for independent magazines (of which I’m a co-curator):

The Flash Pass is now available – granting you free entry to all events/workshops/exhibitions/cocktails, and a free copy of our NEW book (more on that soon). You’ll never spend a better 90 euros (45 euros for students, not including the book). Prices may rise in the future, so book now.

The exclusive online social network is live. Only for Flash Passers, participants and a few invited special guests.

For magazine makers – be part of our new book! Answer the short survey here.

And… this time we’re taking over the entire city of Luxembourg. See the 12 main venues here, with more info to come… It’ll be a magcity extravaganza. Many, many more secrets to be revealed verrrry soon.

You’ll be there, right?

Ever since it was announced in January, the relaunch of Andy Warhol’s Interview has been eagerly anticipated.

So what’s it like?

First, a bit of background. The duo now in charge – writer Glenn O’Brien and art director Fabian Baron, both credited as “Editorial Directors” – have been here before. In 1990, they worked together on the exact same publication, charged by new owners Brant Publications with relaunching the mag.

After a couple of years, Baron was poached by Harper’s Bazaar and O’Brien (who had been appointed as editor-in-chief aged 24) went off to a lucrative career in journalism for GQ and Vanity Fair among others.

Now they’re back, and this time O’Brien and Baron are part-owners of the magazine (along with Peter Brant, the ex-husband of the woman who owned it before), and they’ve invested heavily in a far wider distribution network, new paper stock (sorry Woz, though at least it’s still matt), a new format and a new approach.

Some observations:

- First, the cover: the rejig of the logo is incredibly subtle but it’s there – still handbrushed, a bit spikier than before. The cover is, apparently, the first ever published in America with a metallic cover (really?), which means that the smoothly colour red background looks lovely, and shimmers in a strange way on newsstands with good lighting. The subtle silver added to Kate Moss’s cat mask works well too, though the bar code in the corner spoils some of the understated effect. The serifed font with the (rather good) cover line gets a little lost, its high contrast meaning the thinner areas are a little too thin at distance. Still, I like it. Somewhat curiously, the spine does the celeb sell where the cover doesn’t: “It’s New Pussycat! Kate Moss Talks”. Though Moss isn’t known for being particularly silent. (Update: how they made the cover is documented here.)

- Page count: 264 + 4

- Trim size: 10 inches by 13 inches. The special cover is a little smaller than the trim and has gatefold ads on front and back, which are glued in the top corner to stop them flapping open when you pick it up.

- A lot of advertisers seemed to buy into the relaunch hype. The first page of editorial is on page 76, and there is only one right-hand page that isn’t an ad until page 161 (and that one has a left-hand ad). Pity the poor designers, as it’s very difficult to get much of a sense of flow for the first half of the mag. This issue was hyped as “The Fashion Issue”, though there’s no overt acknowledgement of that in the mag itself. There are some fashion articles, including one on “The Non-conformists” – a piece that uses a single quote from different designers to count as “interviews”. It’s a good excuse to show their outfits, though.

- Everything is an interview apart from the letters page, the Agenda/news pages and a rather odd Society page at the end. The formats vary a little, but mostly the design doesn’t change at all to indicate a shift in pace or theme. For the first half of the magazine, you have to look at the straplines in the top corner to have any idea what you’re looking at, and how it’s different from what went before / comes afterwards.

- Longer interviews still start with one-paragraph biographical summaries, followed by He said. She Said. Doesn’t make for much creativity in the writing – though that allows for fewer problems in using non-professional interviewers (see below).

- Andy Warhol’s shadow hangs long. He’s mentioned in three articles and two advertisements.







- There are a few additions but they don’t feel very innovative – cellphone camera photos; “Discovery” (for model-alike people who have real jobs); back page of a previous interview from the archives (just a reprint of the photograph, in this case of Christy Turlington, that doesn’t reveal much apart from “she was famous then too, but looked younger”.)

- The interviewers themselves are very much downplayed, with the sole exceptions of Mike Myers and the Joseph Kosuth studio. You have to hunt down the small print at the end of each article to find who these people are – which is a real wasted opportunity. One of my favourite parts of Interview was that these weren’t just another bunch of hacks – the interviewers had real relationships with the people featured, and often weren’t journalists at all. Hiding their names and connections away means overlooking one of the key features that makes the mag stand out. Just a glance at the Contributing Editor list confirms this: Marc Jacobs, Camille Paglia, Sean Penn, Edward Norton… So why hide it?

- According to the credits, there seem to be about 20 people working in the Interview office, and 27 interns.

- There are lots of medium-format photos that feature the border of the print, as if to say “We Don’t Use Digital Very Much”.

- Big articles end at the back of the magazine, in typical American style. Sometimes that’s unnecessarily irritating; could the Spike Lee interview really not have been edited to fit the final two paragraphs into its layout, rather than having to flick to the back to find them?

- It doesn’t read very well. This is a bit surprising, given that O’Brien is a very good writer (his Kate Moss interview is the best in the book, though it doesn’t reveal very much). The text, the intros, the selections… none feel particularly exciting, unusual or gripping, with the exception of the Maison Martin / Kosuth Studio piece (which is at least a neat idea, even though it turned out a bit dull).

- It’s very, very monochromatic. This does make the James Nares piece feel more shocking and relieving for its splash of colour – but it also means the rest of the magazine can feel rather flat at times.

And the rest of the design… it feels a little familiar. Here’s a very brief look at some of Baron’s work on French Vogue:

Vogue 2005






Vogue 2006






Vogue 2007



Here’s some spreads from the new edition of Interview:

It almost feels like going back to Vogue 2005, with 2006′s heavy black lines scattered throughout (as they are, especially in the first half of the magazine). It’s certainly missing the M/M-style playfulness with the large typography that came in 2007. Over at Harper’s Bazaar, Baron showed why people compared him with the master of pre/post war elegance Brodovitch, with designs like this one:





Consciously nodding to Brodovitch, but in a way that still felt up to date. In Interview, however, the design refuses to play. It’s straight, it’s formal, it doesn’t play or smile or change. No matter who the subject, this is how they are treated. The photography is stylish and, in the main, unthreatening.

The new Interview is intended, according to its Chairman, to be more “elegant”. It certainly is that. It is also, however, lacking any humour, colour, flair that the magazine desperately needs to be enjoyable. In feel, it’s similar to a lot of Dutch editorial design, albeit with a serifed copy font: heavy black lines, monochrome, lots of text, little humour and no details to engage or reward the close reader. And it starts to feel very same-y very quickly.

The only humour in the whole magazine seems to be Baron’s own photoshoot of models in crash helmets that eerily echo their outfits. The rest feels very earnest, very serious, very elegant and poised and fashionable – and very dull. Although ostensibly a fashion/movie/music/art magazine, really it’s now a fashion magazine that treats all other subjects as if they’re catwalk figures. It’ll probably play well to the advertisers and to a certain crowd – but it won’t have broad appeal.

Merely through its status and brand, Interview will get some big names to talk. It has a few good ideas (and some not so good ones); but overall the magazine just doesn’t flow. A combination of over-saturation with advertisements and indistinct sections means it feels more like a ragbag selection of celebrity-obsessed overheard conversations, presented in a distancing, “better-dressed than you” manner, than a carefully curated whole.

In truth, Interview was probably always thus, more or less; but the new broom has done little to address these problems, and has merely served to highlight them even more. At its height, Interview at least felt relevant, which this doesn’t. Perhaps it’s just the fashion issue; of course it’s still early days for the team and the new format to settle. But this is the big relaunch they’ve been hyping the house on, and I’m underwhelmed.