The medium is the WhuSsuJ (dot)

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?