BoSacks Speaks Out: Why Esquire Mag is your Future?

BoSacks Speaks Out: Why Esquire Mag is your Future?

BoSacks Speaks Out: Please, let's not all get crazy at the same time. So many people are over-reacting to the announcement that Esquire is using e-ink on their cover that I almost don't know where to begin. But almost isn't don't know.

First and foremost, this is a clever magazine cover gimmick for a 75th anniversary cover. Period, end of story, except for all the brouhaha. They deserve to do something special. And e-ink is going to be something special. In this case it is underutilizing the power and the possibilities of e-ink, but what the heck? You have to start somewhere. And this year our industry starts here on the cover of Esquire with a flexible, magazine-bindable production of e-ink.

We as an industry have been inserting and on-serting for generations. Believe me I know, as I was partly responsible for the AOL onslaught of on-serting and inserting first fragile plastic diskettes and then CD's into magazines. The computer and music sectors have been doing this for years. The women's service groups have inserted hundreds of items including such nutty ideas as shampoo samples which in the course of palatalizing squished and squeezed the samples all over the printer's bindery floor. So ease off on the condemnation that gimmicks are something new or distasteful.

And the same thing is true for the carbon footprint. Why is Esquire being singled out?
I'm the first to admit that we have been reckless as an industry when it comes to carbon foot-printing and inefficiencies, but to single out a single publisher . . . . pure and absolute rubbish. Anyone who is starting to condemn a single gimmick in a single magazine doesn't know the industry, the history, nor the true story of magazine sales and magazine production.

E-ink or e-paper is special, in fact it is very special, and it is an integral part of the future of the magazine business. If we are going to have a big future at all, it is going to be digital. We will combine the ease of use of digital editions of magazines with the portability of brilliantly colored WiFi connected epaper, with a drastically lower carbon footprint than today and dramatically reduced manufacturing costs. What's not to like? What part don't we understand?
Publishers sell words and thoughts, not paper and printing? For those who need to hear me say it again, printing ink on paper is not going to go away; it is also not going to be the dominant distribution vehicle of information.
BoSacks
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Esquire's Granger: Magazine Medium 'So Compelling We All Should Do More with It'
Editor responds to news of flashing anniversary cover.
Jason Fell
www.FolioMag.com

Since the report last week about Esquire's flashy e-paper October anniversary cover-and our follow-up on the technology behind it-I've been hearing/reading a lot of negative opinions about it.

One Web site called it obnoxious. Rex Hammock said it was "the worst use of technology by a magazine." Fast Company, in a blog post, estimated that the manufacturing process increases the issue's carbon footprint by 16 percent over other typical print publications. But, if you ask Esquire editor-in-chief David Granger, the technology could help revolutionize the way we read magazines, beyond the printed page and online.

"When I talk to groups I sometimes speak about the days I had when I'd get the new issue of Esquire and go through it and think to myself, 'Fuck, it's still a magazine,'" Granger said in a recent interview with FOLIO:. "What I mean is that the medium is so compelling that I and we should all be able to do more with it. The magazine experience is one of the last remaining opportunities to enter a hermetically-sealed world, an edited experience of our culture created by someone else. And, more importantly, it's an experience that encourages you to stay in it rather than constantly bounce in and out of it.

"We have an amazing medium, print, and if we can enhance the experience of it by putting new technology to use, then all the better," he said.

Bob Sacks, an industry consultant and frequent proponent of technology, says that Esquire's flashy cover may be a small step overall but offers a glimpse of what's to come in the next few years.

"It's not a representation of what e-paper was designed for, but doing the cover is the right thing to do," Sacks says. "It will be a demonstration of what it can be used for. In the near future we all will have flexible e-paper readers in our pocket and will be able to access all the magazine and books you want."

Right now, the technology is expensive and, if you believe Fast Company, not very green. Granger says that, with time, he hopes the technology will become cheaper. Maybe, after some refining, the application will become more realistic and environmentally-friendly, too.

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The Real Cost of E-Ink
posted by Anya Kamenetz
http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/anya-kamenetz/green-friday/real-cost-e-ink


An article in the New York Times earlier this week described an effort by the legendary print magazine Esquire to make "a nod to the digital age" by using something called E Ink on its cover. That's pretty much what it sounds like: electronic ink, so the cover can blink like a Times Square billboard, as opposed to a staid old highway billboard.


One problem: Did anyone stop to consider the environmental implications? Check out this description of the process, from the Times article:


The batteries and the display case are manufactured and put together in China. They are shipped to Texas and on to Mexico, where the device is inserted by hand into each magazine. The issues will then be shipped via trucks, which will be refrigerated to preserve the batteries, to the magazine's distributor in Glazer, Ky.
Editor David Granger described it as "a 21st-century technology" combined with "a 19th-century manufacturing process." Can't argue with the second part, at least. The article goes on to note that this process is expensive, and hence requires sponsorship from a Ford SUV (not exactly a 21st-century technology itself). But what about the other cost . . . the carbon one? Some back-of-the-envelope calculations show it's not small, and Ford's not picking up the tab.


Let's start at the beginning. According to the article, "The batteries and the display case are manufactured and put together in China." The manufacturing phase is the biggest question mark in the life cycle of any product. According to life cycle analysis by Nokia, the manufacturing phase, alone, of another battery-powered electronic device, their 3G phones, is responsible for 12.3 KG of CO2 equivalent per unit. Granted, the E Ink display is a lot simpler and uses much less material than a cell phone, so let's say the carbon footprint is one-tenth as much-1.2 KG per user. That would be 135 tons of CO2 for the entire run of 100,000 devices.
Next, the devices will be shipped to Texas. According to E-Ink, a comparable prototype device weighs about 150 grams (5.3 ounces). According to the calculator on ShipGreen.net, shipping 100,000 of those overseas from Shanghai to Houston is worth another 2.6 tons -189 tons if they for some reason chose air freight.

From there, the little magic doohickeys will make their way to a Mexican maquiladora (where the work conditions are certain to be just lovely-ditto the Chinese factory) to be inserted by hand into the magazine covers (1.28 tons from Houston to Monterrey, Mexico), and from there, the completed issues, about one-third heavier than normal, will travel about 1,400 miles to the magazine's distribution center in Kentucky (11 more tons). Oh, and because of the delicacy of the electronics, they'll have to travel in refrigerated trucks. Certain kinds of refrigeration units can consume a half gallon of fuel per operating hour - that's an additional 10 gallons for that 20 hour trip-per truck. So for 5 trucks (let's say), the refrigeration adds about another half a ton. Then the blinking magazines go to their final destinations.

So . . . the total outlay in greenhouse gas emissions for this little experiment-again, this is based on loose estimates-comes to 150 tons of CO2 equivalent, similar to the output of 15 Hummers or 20 average Americans for an entire year, and a 16% increase over the carbon footprint of a typical print publication (based on calculations by Discover Magazine, Time, and In Style). The potential environmental impact of the E Ink covers increases even more when you consider that the units are designed to be disposable after one use and they'll make it more difficult or impossible to recycle the paper portion of the magazines.
Maybe Esquire should go back to the drawing board for a truly forward-looking concept of the possibilities of print. Fast Company would be glad to advise them on where to go to get printed on 100% recycled paper

Cover Story: The King of Visceral Design

BoSacks Speaks Out: This article made me nostalgic for the era of great covers. That comment may anger a few of my friends, but I think there is an overall lack of great covers. There some good ones out there today and even from time to time some great ones, but they seem so far and few between. Do you agree or am I just in an oddly reflective mood.

Norman Rockwell, George Lois produced some really great work. If you ever get the chance to pass my way up here in the Berkshires, there is the Norman Rockwell Museum outside of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. It is a magazine person's dream experience. The art is fantastic and they were all covers of magazines. I'm like a kid in candy shop every time I go in there. Everybody who is in this business must get there at least once a career.

"I learned to draw everything except glamorous women. No matter how much I tried to make them look sexy, they always ended up looking silly... or like somebody's mother."
Norman Rockwell

Cover Story: The King of Visceral Design
By CHARLES McGRATH
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/arts/design/27mcgr.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin
GEORGE LOIS, one of the most influential admen of his generation, is the sort of person who has a dozen brainstorms an hour, at least half of them good and only a few really harebrained. Among the better ones were the early Xerox commercials showing a chimpanzee deftly operating a photocopier, the "Think small" ads for Volkswagen and the "I want my MTV" campaign. He also dreamed up Lean Cuisine and the "I want my Maypo" slogan.
But among certain groups of people - magazine collectors, veterans of the 1960s, admirers of brilliant design - Mr. Lois is best known for the covers he created for Esquire from 1962 to 1972. There were 92 in all, including one that never ran: an antiwar cover intended for the December 1962 issue, which was dropped because the State Department was insisting that American troops would be out of Vietnam by Christmas. Thirty-one of them are part of an exhibition that opened at the Museum of Modern Art on Friday.
The show looks a little like a tidied-up version of a great many college dorm rooms back in the '60s. There on the wall, neatly mounted instead of just torn out and stuck up with tape, are Tricky Dick having lipstick applied, L.B.J. holding a Hubert Humphrey dummy, Andy Warhol drowning in a Campbell's soup can, Muhammad Ali posing as St. Sebastian and a grinning Lt. William Calley, the leader of the massacre at My Lai, with four Vietnamese children. There's also the image Mr. Lois created for the December 1963 issue, in response to a plea from Harold Hayes, Esquire's editor, for something "Christmassy." It shows Sonny Liston wearing a Santa hat - probably the last person white Americans hoped to see coming down the chimney in those days.
Many of Mr. Lois's covers were controversial, not so say irreverent or deliberately provocative. The Liston cover cost the magazine $750,000 in dropped advertising. But they were immensely successful at drawing attention, on the newsstand especially.
"The covers weren't the only thing going on in those days," Byron Dobell, Esquire's managing editor during many of the Lois years, recalled recently. "We thought there was some pretty great stuff inside as well. But the covers proved to be a very effective way of advertising our kind of journalism. They were way out there."

What was remarkable then - and seems even more so now, when virtually every magazine cover is a thicket of text lines running behind or on top of one celebrity or another - is that the Lois covers were virtually textless. They achieved their effect by communicating a single idea through an image. Some were untouched photographs, but, in an era before Photoshop, some were created by the primitive technique of cutting and pasting, using photographs, clip art and sometimes hand-drawn elements.
"I remember when we were doing the Warhol cover," Mr. Lois recalled. "I explained to Andy what I had in mind, and he said, 'Oh, will you have to build a very big can?' "
There is a whole generation of current or recent magazine editors who are Lois admirers, including David Remnick, Graydon Carter and Tina Brown. "George was there during a great age," said Mr. Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair. "You didn't have to put low-grade movie stars on the cover then to move magazines. You could put ideas there."
He added: "George used people like Sonny Liston and Muhammad Ali, so you could say he was using the celebrities of the day. And it was probably a little easier then, because everybody had the same frame of reference. They all read and watched the same things. But George was as good as it got."

Few editors, though, have the nerve to try to imitate what Mr. Lois did. Esquire's May cover this year, of a woman shaving her face, is a sort of homage to the 1965 Lois cover of Virna Lisi doing the same thing, except that in the background there's a lot of busy type needlessly explaining, "We Shot This Image to Catch Your Eye."
Mr. Lois is 76 now, and not quite the hunk he used to be in the days when he was known in the ad business as the Golden Greek. "People see pictures of me back then and ask, 'What happened?' " he said recently. "I'll tell you what happened. Fifty years is what happened." But he still plays full-court basketball - against much younger guys, he's quick to point out - and gets by on four hours of sleep a night.

Mr. Lois grew up in a Greek-speaking household in the Bronx, where his father ran a flower shop, and he is still a bit of a neighborhood guy. He is funny, profane and opinionated, and not shy about poking you in the shoulder or the knee to make sure you're following his point. He talks very fast, in a rumbling New York voice, but his brain works even faster, so that sometimes there's a little lag while the words catch up.

Over a long morning interview - monologue really - that stretched into lunch, prepared by Rosemary, his wife of 56 years, Mr. Lois recalled that Martin Scorsese, a huge admirer of the Esquire covers, seemed crushed when he learned that his idol had spent most of his life in advertising. But Mr. Lois said he didn't see much difference between ads and covers.
"I've always been about the big idea, the big idea," he explained. "I never had any trouble going into a new area. It's all a matter of creativity. I even made a music video once for Bob Dylan, using 5,000 years of the history of art."

The Esquire connection came about, he recalled, in June 1962, when Harold Hayes - a courtly, soft-spoken Southerner who favored white suits even before Tom Wolfe - called looking for advice about covers. When Mr. Lois learned that Esquire covers were conceived and assigned by an editorial committee, he likened the process to gang rape and said to Mr. Hayes: "Is that what you do when you assign a story to Talese or to Mailer - you have a group grope? You need to get one guy who understands the culture, who likes comic strips, goes to the ballet, visits the Metropolitan Museum."

According to Mr. Lois, Mr. Hayes replied, "Hey, pal, could you do me a favor? Could you do just do me one cover - to show me what the hell you're talking about?"
The cover Mr. Lois did - for the October issue, which came out a few days before the Floyd Patterson-Sonny Liston fight that year - showed a Patterson look-alike sprawled, possibly dead, in an empty boxing ring. This was a huge gamble, because most experts had picked Patterson to win. "But I knew," Mr. Lois said. "I just knew that Liston was going to wade through him." Mr. Lois also got lucky when, after a coin flip, he predicted that Patterson would be wearing white trunks.

The cover was a hit, and Mr. Lois had a job, which he kept until Mr. Hayes stepped down in 1972. There were no committees, no group gropes. Mr. Lois dealt solely with the editor , and he likes to say now that Mr. Hayes was one of the few at Esquire who really liked the covers, though people who were there at the time disagree.
Lee Eisenberg, an editorial assistant in the early '70s who eventually became editor of Esquire, said: "The Lois covers were one of the key reasons I and a lot of people there were drawn to Esquire in the first place. We loved them. They set a visual tone that complemented the distinctiveness of the rest of the magazine.

"The only real controversy that I recall was about the Calley cover. There was a lot of argument and bitterness over that, and it was the one time that the privacy of the relationship between Harold and George became an issue. There was an alternative version - the exact same cover but with Calley not smiling - and Harold didn't show that to anyone."
Mr. Lois recalled: "Harold used to say that we were doing was 'pictorial Zolas' - you know, 'J'accuse.' " He added: "People ask me, 'Did you know when you were doing this that you were making an important statement?' Yeah, I knew. I'm a designer. I know what I'm doing. I have designs on things."

Jeremy Langmead on the Esquire relaunch

Jeremy Langmead on the Esquire relaunch
By Colin Crummy


Esquire relaunched this week armed with a starry line-up of literary columnists and a promise of "no B-list floozies", as the title bids to set itself apart as a grown-up alternative to the other men's monthlies.


Contributors include Man Booker nominees Colm Toibin, Andrew O'Hagan plus poet Nick Laird. The title has downsized to American A4 and resurrected the original Esquire cartoon mascot, Esky, in a nod to the brand's 70-year heritage.

Editor Jeremy Langmead, who joined from Wallpaper* four months ago, said the changes were to create a point of difference on the newsstand, but added that the title, which currently has an ABC figure of 52,468 (down 3.8 per cent year-on-year), would focus resources on increasing subscription sales. The subscription edition of Esquire has no coverlines.

Langmead said: "It has become increasingly dangerous to rely solely on newsstand sales."

He said the title was now on target to increase circulation "incrementally" but said Esquire was a niche, luxury publication and not mass market.

"If we wanted to be mass circulation, we would be a different magazine," he said. "We want the right readers, not lots of wrong ones."

At its peak, Esquire sold more than 100,000 copies. On the newsstand, it currently faces fierce competition from Condé Nast's GQ, which showed a 1 per cent year on year rise to 127,505 in the most recent ABCs.



At the same time as Natmags appointed Langmead, Emap recruited Sunday Times interviewer Giles Hattersley to edit its flagging men's monthly, Arena. 27-year-old Hattersley is expected to bring a fashion focus to the title.



Both he and Langmead come from fashion backgrounds, having studied fashion journalism at Central St Martins College of Art and Design in London. Hattersley began his career at The Sunday Times style section, where Langmead was editor in the Nineties.

On the current newsstand opposition, Langmead said: "There are some magazines that you flick through and you feel that everything is chucked at you. It can be slightly intimidating. You don't know where to start with them. A magazine should be a pleasure.


"I thought what was missing on the newsstand was a magazine for intelligent and sophisticated men - which is what I tried to do. When I was doing research for this, I looked and there was not a magazine I wanted to buy that was both entertaining and informative."



A new website is likely to be launched by the end of the year as part of a multiplatform strategy, but Langmead said the magazine relaunch was part of a thinking that the most luxurious and niche publications would remain the strongest, despite competition from other media.