Entertainment Weekly also participated in a special section that ran in five magazines published by the Time Inc division of Time Warner — Time, Entertainment Weekly, Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated — in their issues late last month. Opening with a page labeled “Promotion,” the section said: “Time Inc presents the 3-D Explosion.”
What followed was a mix of editorial content and advertising. Entertainment Weekly and Time included editorial photos and coverage of the DreamWorks Animation movie Monsters vs. Aliens, mixed with ads from Hewlett-Packard, McDonald’s, Intel and RealD.
The advertisers were all Monsters vs. Aliens sponsors, and some of their ads included the same movie characters that were shown in the editorial material. Time, Entertainment Weekly and People ran cover lines promoting the section. The ads and some editorial content were produced in 3-D.
David Granger, the editor in chief of Esquire, a Hearst magazine, included advertisers in cover compositions he produced for February and next month, which the magazine society said it did not object to. The February issue had an image of US President Barack Obama with a peel-back window featuring an advertiser, the Discovery Channel. And next month’s shows “mix and match” covers — readers can put Obama’s chin with George Clooney’s nose and Justin Timberlake’s eyes — with the flip side of the images showing History Channel ads.
When he and his publisher began working on the projects, Granger said, “we came to an agreement on certain principles, and one was that there had to be real, viable reader benefit to any of the things we did.”
He said that other cover treatments, like ESPN’s and Entertainment Weekly’s, “are pure advertising iterations.”
“They don’t really do anything to enhance the editorial,” he said.
If the board of ASME decides a magazine has violated its standards, the next step is for the society to write a letter.
“They’re not severe consequences,” said Peggy Northrop, a board member of the magazine society and the editor in chief of Reader’s Digest. “We are not a regulatory body. What we can do is, we have the bully pulpit and we have the ability to withhold” a National Magazine Award.
But that rarely occurs.
“Most people respond quickly and agree that they may have made a mistake or that it was an oversight, whatever — and they agree and don’t do it again,” Holt said.
“If there are repeated and willful violations, a magazine can be barred from participating in the National Magazine Awards,” he said, and an editor’s membership in the society can be suspended.
“That happens, I will admit, very rarely, because things don’t get to that point,” he said.
Asked whether that was an effective deterrent, Holt said that the magazine society was somewhat limited in its power.
“What am I supposed to do, go down there and drag the editor on the street like Sonny Corleone and beat him up on the streets of Broadway?” he said. “We work in a collegial business, and we’re not the advertising police.”
For publishers and editors, the allure of advertising revenue may outweigh the threat of a strongly worded letter.
“If you focus on not being able to get an award, ultimately I think that doesn’t have teeth anymore,” Lyne said. “I think that what does have teeth is thinking about whether this is a short-term solution that is going to end up damaging the long-term viability of your publication. And that’s really what ASME should be reminding people of.”
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