Magazines Sticking to Paper

"Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry, all things easy. He that rises late must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night, while laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him."
Benjamin Franklin (American Statesman, Scientist, Philosopher, Printer, Writer and Inventor. 1706-1790)


Magazines Sticking to Paper
By Phil Rosenthal
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi- 0704210016apr23,1,5241653.column? ctrack=1&cset=true

NEW YORK -- Looking out the window at the scab of Ground Zero from the new offices of Fast Company magazine, which two weeks ago moved into the reconstructed 7 World Trade Center building, recently installed Editor Robert Safian reflected on the state of business magazines.

Some have written obituaries for the genre, expecting the pressure of competing for readers increasingly conditioned to expect and rely upon near-instant information and insight to crush the weeklies, biweeklies and monthlies into dust, not diamonds.

"I never believed that," said Safian, a transfer from Time Inc.'s Fortune now eight weeks into his new job, with one issue of Fast Company under his belt. "I just think business is too important a part of our culture, and too many people spend too much of their life obsessed with it. ... It's about finding the right way to present it."

Still, the circulation for major business magazines has been slipping of late, and Publishers Information Bureau reports ad pages in the first quarter of 2007 are down 13 percent at Fortune, 9 percent at Forbes and 3 percent at BusinessWeek.

Safian's monthly, under Chicago-based owner Joe Mansueto, is in the process of resurrecting itself, having soared and crashed under previous proprietors.

S.I. Newhouse's new business monthly, Conde Nast Portfolio, a glam, glossy and hefty tome literally in the mold of Conde Nast's Vanity Fair, is set to make its national debut Tuesday, after hitting newsstands in New York this week.

"We both have owners who are willing to invest heavily through choppy waters," Safian said, who said Morningstar founder Mansueto "sees the potential and promise in the print medium and believes that paper has advantages if you use it the right way, if you put the right things on it. That was refreshing to hear, certainly coming from Time Inc."

Digital is the buzzword of all media these days, and the measure of how forward thinking one's company is, is measured by the extent to which it embraces the Internet and other new technologies, often at the expense of the traditional product.

But the sizable investments of smart, shrewd folks such as Mansueto and Newhouse suggest that print is not entirely passe. They're not ignoring the Internet.

Harold Boling on Thursday was named head of Mansueto Digital, charged with growing digital platforms such as FastCompany.com. And Newhouse's Conde Nast is launching Portfolio.com in conjunction with the magazine. But these efforts are aimed at complementing the print presence.

"There is a visceral feel and visual experience of working with paper that is different in quality than reading online ... the lushness and enveloping feeling you get when you read a magazine," Safian said. "They're coming to [a magazine] for a break from the tumult of the daily information for some perspective."

Joanne Lipman, Portfolio's editor, had a similar take in a phone interview last week.

"You have your Web site and your CNBC or whatever keeps you up to date for the moment, and then the magazine is a completely different experience," she said. "It's that tactile experience of paging through something and enjoying it and wanting to become engaged in it.

"A lot of the print publications, including daily newspapers, are racing to keep up with the Web. So what's missing from that equation becomes the in- depth story that can put things in context, that can set an agenda, and that can tell the story in a really compelling way, with the great photography and the great design. ... Also, [Portfolio] is a monthly. It's not something that you have to consume instantly."

Heck, you couldn't if you tried.

Where Fast Company is punchy and, well, fast at 120 pages in its May issue, Portfolio's May debut runs 332 pages.

Among Portfolio's chief attractions, along with an impressive 185 pages of ads, as much a monument to capitalism as the magazine's content, is a 7,500- word essay on hedge funds that goes 366 words, a little less than half the length of this column, before the phrase "hedge fund" first appears.

Some things are meant to be savored. The trick is to not wind up under a pile on the nightstand or buried at the bottom of a briefcase in the meantime. One suspects targeted readers are more likely to be on the go from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. than the old 9-to-5. Their time is at a premium.

"We have to make it fun for you," Safian said. "A lot of the established business magazines are work. They're boring. ... They're about how you can make as much money as you possibly can this quarter, whether you're a company or an investor."

They target "the reader as a shareholder, or you the reader as an employee," said Lipman, who came to Portfolio after developing the Wall Street Journal's weekend edition.

"Business pervades every aspect of society and of our life, and we wanted to connect the dots [of] the impact that business has on the broader culture," Lipman said.

Fast Company also wants to think of itself as "trying to create an environment that makes it easier for you to be inspired by the things that you're seeing, so you can think differently about yourself and your business and your career," Safian said.

"We all say, 'Let's think out of the box,' but even those people who think they're thinking outside of the box aren't usually doing it," he said. "It's very hard to be creative and to be up, and there are a lot of challenges in business."