For the magazine business, next year will be a year to watch — and not just because it could hold answers to lingering questions about the financial health of the industry.
Next year will be the first in a decade and a half that the four largest US magazine companies will all have new leaders, making it possible to judge whether the recent troubles in publishing can be addressed by changes in the executive suite. Or, if not, whether the problems run deeper than they now appear.
Over the summer, the magazine world’s own Velvet Revolution played out — a quick change of hands with relatively little discord: Ann Moore was out at Time Inc after eight years as chief executive, replaced by Jack Griffin, who was poached from his job leading Meredith’s magazine division. Meredith, the publishing giant responsible for Better Homes and Gardens and Family Circle, promoted one of Griffin’s deputies, Tom Harty.
At Conde Nast, Charles Townsend, who had held the dual role of chief executive and president since 2004, agreed to hand over the job of president to a protege, Robert Sauerberg. And David Carey, a longtime Conde Nast executive, departed to lead Hearst Magazines, displacing Cathleen Black, a publishing industry fixture for three decades and now the embattled choice of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to be the city’s schools chancellor.
Not since the mid-1990s have those jobs turned over in quick succession, and that time, the changes happened over two years. Strikingly, the economic picture then was similar to what is occurring today. The business had just begun to spring back from the devastating effects of a recession that drove away advertisers and forced publishers to close magazines.
The new cadre of executives at the time — Steven Florio at Conde Nast, Christopher Little at Meredith, Don Logan at Time Inc and Black at Hearst — would steer their companies through periods of expansion and prosperity through the rest of the decade and beyond, an era when successful publications like O: The Oprah Magazine, Teen Vogue and Real Simple were born.
Whether the rebound from the economic collapse of 2008 and last year will prove as robust is an unsettled — and, to many, an unsettling — question. However, there is little doubt that the next generation of magazine company executives is confronting a media landscape in which the margin for error is far smaller, while uncertainty about whether readers and advertisers will remain loyal is more palpable than ever.
“This is the changing of the guard from an older school to a newer school,” said Justin Smith, president of the Atlantic Media Co.
The changes, he said, were part of an inevitable evolution in publishing that was perhaps long overdue.
“It is quite remarkable that it took until 2010, 15 years after the arrival of the Internet, for a new generation of leaders to emerge,” Smith said.
Indeed, the new generation is certainly more youthful, by corporate standards at least. Harty, 47, is the youngest. Carey and Sauerberg are both 49 and Griffin is 50.
They have either followed unconventional paths to the top or come from outside the companies they now help lead. Griffin was wooed from his job leading Meredith’s national media group to come to Time Inc.
Carey left Conde Nast to head Hearst Magazines, a crosstown rival. Sauerberg rose through the ranks at Conde Nast not through the more traditional publisher’s path, but through the consumer marketing division.
Harty came to Meredith, which publishes female-oriented publications, from the Golf Digest Cos.
“You have to bring in someone who understands the magazine business, but you don’t want to bring in a virgin,” said Jack Kliger, the former chief executive of Hachette Filipacchi Media, publisher of magazines like Elle and Car and Driver (and which named a new chief executive itself in September). “I think the overwhelming message here is that these companies are looking for change agents.”
However, Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith and Time Inc differ considerably in their approach to change — and the degree to which they feel that change is necessary. The one certainty they all seem to embrace is a once-bitten-twice-shy caution about advertising revenue.
“Through the ‘90s when magazine advertising was growing at respectable rates year over year, the industry focused disproportionately on advertising,” Griffin, a hockey player and marathon runner who is known for an economical, to-the-point speaking style, said in a recent interview. “The laser focus on the consumer took a subsidiary seat for some period of time. What I’m doing at Time Inc is making it pre-eminent again.”
At Time, the world’s largest magazine publisher, Griffin said he wanted to reintroduce the concept of “charging a fair price and charging consumers who are interested in the product.”
In other words, consumers can expect to pay more.
“We spent a tremendous amount of money creating original content, original journalism, fact-checking, sending reporters overseas to cover wars,” he said. “You name it. What we’ve got to do as a business is get fair value for that.”
Supplementing that approach, Griffin said, will be new partnerships within Time Warner, Time Inc’s parent company, that allow magazines to take advantage of the vast film and visual resources at their disposal. One such partnership in the planning stages, he said, is a deal between a major cosmetics company and InStyle to broadcast from the red carpets of big Hollywood events like the Academy Awards and the Screen Actors Guild Awards.
These kinds of partnerships are central to Griffin’s vision, but some are not without impact on Time Inc’s staff. The company recently eliminated a small number of positions in its business operations after consolidating resources with Time Warner.
Conde Nast, long the king of the US$1-an-issue subscription, has also come to embrace a fair-value philosophy under Sauerberg. In an interview, Sauerberg said he and his staff had been working on creating what he called “12-course content meals” — package deals that would include access to multiple Conde Nast magazines delivered in multiple ways, like print, tablet, mobile and Internet, as well as invitations to magazine-sponsored events.
“Think about our magazines as, let’s say, a good content meal,” said Sauerberg, a man with a laconic demeanor who speaks in a soft, gravely tone. “What would a great meal be? What would a 12-course unbelievable meal be? Would it be a magazine? What’s the mobile experience? What kind of event does this person want to come to? What personal advice do I need to hear about something that’s really important to me?”
Higher prices seem to be an inevitable part of that package.
“We have a group of people who are so committed to our brands that I could easily see them wanting to commit to a bigger monthly commitment for lots of things they get because they’re such junkies,” Sauerberg said.
At Hearst and Meredith, which were already fairly lean companies and were less affected than Time Inc and Conde Nast when the advertising market collapsed, changes have been considered with less urgency.
One notable change Carey made quietly at Hearst this fall was to dissolve the longstanding divide that kept online sales operations separate from the magazines themselves. (Conde Nast made a similar move late last month.)
“It felt largely siloed between print and digital,” said Carey, who has a gentle, pensive affect and an eye for fashionable suits. “I think we felt the need to give publishers permission and give them the sense that they could bring ever-more complex print and digital packages to their clients.”
He has now added the title “chief revenue officer” to the nameplate of every publisher.
“The way people perceive them, the way they are introduced to clients, the way they are written about in the press,” he said, should convey “a broad mandate to generate revenue.”
As for new business initiatives, Carey said Hearst was planning more joint ventures along the lines of its existing deals with Harpo, Oprah Winfrey’s production company, which publishes O with Hearst, and Food Network, which teamed up with Hearst to publish the Food Network Magazine.
“Stay tuned for more announcements on the partnership front,” he said, declining to elaborate.
Meredith, which of the four publishers is arguably the most diversified with its successful television and book publishing businesses and was the least affected by the recession, sees no need for wholesale change.
“We don’t have to do these dramatic reorganizations or take drastic measures to get people in line,” Harty said. “We don’t have to tear down silos.”
However, one thing Harty said the company was examining: expanding its licensed products. The company already pulls in more than US$1 billion a year selling products with a Better Homes and Gardens license at Walmart stores. It is now planning to sell plants and bulbs with the magazine’s imprimatur directly to consumers.
“We have relationships with all these consumers,” Harty said. “How can we figure out how to sell them goods and services? We believe that’s a key.”
Harty, burly in build and quick with a self-deprecating joke, laughed when asked about any overarching strategy and remarked: “What I’ve attempted to do is not screw up what’s been going very well.”
I came to Taiwan to pursue my degree thinking that Taiwanese are “friendly,” but I was welcomed by Taiwanese classmates laughing at my friend’s name, Maria (瑪莉亞). At the time, I could not understand why they were mocking the name of Jesus’ mother. Later, I learned that “Maria” had become a stereotype — a shorthand for Filipino migrant workers. That was because many Filipino women in Taiwan, especially those who became house helpers, happen to have that name. With the rapidly increasing number of foreigners coming to Taiwan to work or study, more Taiwanese are interacting, socializing and forming relationships with
Chinese social media influencer “Yaya in Taiwan” (亞亞在台灣), whose real name is Liu Zhenya (劉振亞), made statements advocating for “reunifying Taiwan [with China] through military force.” After verifying that Liu did indeed make such statements, the National Immigration Agency revoked her dependency-based residency permit. She must now either leave the country voluntarily or be deported. Operating your own page and becoming an influencer require a certain amount of support and user traffic. You must successfully gain approval for your views and attract an audience. Although Liu must leave the country, I cannot help but wonder how many more “Yayas” are still
Earlier signs suggest that US President Donald Trump’s policy on Taiwan is set to move in a more resolute direction, as his administration begins to take a tougher approach toward America’s main challenger at the global level, China. Despite its deepening economic woes, China continues to flex its muscles, including conducting provocative military drills off Taiwan, Australia and Vietnam recently. A recent Trump-signed memorandum on America’s investment policy was more about the China threat than about anything else. Singling out the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a foreign adversary directing investments in American companies to obtain cutting-edge technologies, it said
The recent termination of Tibetan-language broadcasts by Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA) is a significant setback for Tibetans both in Tibet and across the global diaspora. The broadcasts have long served as a vital lifeline, providing uncensored news, cultural preservation and a sense of connection for a community often isolated by geopolitical realities. For Tibetans living under Chinese rule, access to independent information is severely restricted. The Chinese government tightly controls media and censors content that challenges its narrative. VOA and RFA broadcasts have been among the few sources of uncensored news available to Tibetans, offering insights
RSS