Magazines
High in the mountains, the elusive rich
By Susan Catto
Apr 29, 2008 - 1:06:22 AM

The great thing about rich people, of course, is that they have money. They also spend even in hard times such as these, as Don Welsh notes, which is great for high-end magazine advertisers.

The trick is reaching them, rich folks being rather expert at covering their trails through life.

Then one day Welsh was at a newsstand in Telluride and it came to him.

It was last winter and he was on a three-month vacation at the Colorado resort. He had been struck by the town’s extreme wealth and also its insular culture. He was just one of six people to order the New York Times every day, the newsstand owner told him one day.

Yet Welsh noticed that everyone read the local paper.

Here's the idea that came to Welsh: a magazine aimed at America's affluent and delivered to them at their second homes or their favorite resort areas, and by way of the local paper, as an insert.

Thus was born ForbesLife MountainTime, or the idea for it. That was at Christmastime.

Welsh, the longtime magazine entrepreneur (Outside, Budget Travel, Budget Living), returned to New York and shopped the idea to Forbes, which saw it as the perfect extension of ForbesLife, the high-end lifestyle bimonthly that's sent to all Forbes subscribers.

"We've been thinking of line extension at Forbes for a long time but this was sort of pre-packaged and looking for a home," recalls James Berrien, Forbes magazine group president and publisher.

ForbesLife MountainTime launches on July 4 as a biweekly and will be distributed in 18 local newspapers across the Rocky Mountain and Sierra Mountain region, targeting affluent vacationers and second-home owners in resort communities such as Vail, Aspen, Lake Tahoe and Telluride, with a total circulation of 150,000. It will aim to bring in luxury advertisers.

ForbesLife MountainTime will carry service-heavy features on beautiful houses and such topics as how to cook a trout you’ve just caught out of the stream and what wine to drink with it, as Welsh explains it. Each edition will carry two pages of local events and personalities for that resort area.

Philip Armour, a former Outside editor, will be its editor and Welsh its publisher.

The newspapers were enticed in part by an ad arrangement that allows them to sell two pages of ads in the section of each issue dedicated to local content. Says Welsh: "They’ll make money by carrying us." In turn, ForbesLife MountainTime will not carry real estate ads, which are a major source of ad revenue for local papers.

If ForbesLife MountainTime catches with readers and advertisers, editions will roll out to other resort regions where the affluent spend their time.

But therein lays the challenge.

In these tough times, any new magazine faces doubts and doubters, and one area for ForbesLife MountainTime is the distribution model. Things that come as inserts in newspapers have a way of falling out and into the trash. Time Inc.'s revived Life magazine closed last year after three years, never really catching with readers who got it with their Friday papers.

And the last thing one expects as a newspaper insert is a high-end magazine. Will people actually read it if it's delivered in the local paper? Berrien obviously thinks so, arguing, as Welsh does, that resort folks do read the local papers far more avidly.

"Anybody who is visiting town for a vacation or because they have a second home gets the newspaper because that's the only way you can find out what's going on in that town," he says.

It's also more cost efficient than other means of distribution, which Berrien says will allow the magazine to keep ad rates competitive. "To the degree which we can localize it and keep out-of-pocket low for advertisers to reach who they want to reach, that's a strategy that makes sense."

Rather, says Berrien, the challenge facing ForbesLife MountainTime will be the one that faces all magazines these days, regardless of how they arrive at the home: getting advertising. "It's not raining ad pages these days."