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| Magazines | |
Simpson bares (nearly) all Cartoon mom appears on the cover of Playboy Oct 13, 2009
Now here's the latest, and some might say most outrageous, attempt to persuade 25-year-old men to spend money on something they can get for free online. Playboy is putting Marge Simpson, the matriarch on the long-running Fox TV show "The Simpsons," on the cover of its November newsstand issue, hoping to lure men in their 20s to buy the magazine their fathers once hid under their beds, long before the days of the internet. Subscribers will see a different woman on the front, a traditional flesh-and-blood Playmate. On the newsstand cover, Simpson sits provocatively on a chair with the Playboy Bunny logo strategically covering her parts. She bares some, if not all, on the pages inside, including the centerfold. The newsstand edition is being positioned as a collector's issue by the publisher, which notes that Marge's pose mimics that of the first black woman ever to appear on the cover back in the '70s. Even 7-Eleven has agreed to carry the issue in all 1,200 of its corporate-owned stores for just the second time in the past two decades. The "Simpsons" tie-in just goes to show how desperate magazines are for readers these days, and it's not only Playboy, whose circulation has plunged by 17 percent over the past three years, to 2.5 million. Other publications have been playing around with new ways to entice readers, especially the younger ones who've grown up in the internet age and have little use for print, be it magazines or newspapers. Parenting magazine split into two publications, one aimed at moms of young children and the other at elementary age, last year. Magazines have been adding Facebook and iPhone apps by the dozens over recent months, and More magazine even launched an online series starring Jennie Garth earlier this fall. *** In addition to Playboy's cartoon fetish, here are some other stories Media Life is following this week: * Men love new media: According to a new study from agency Targetcast tcm, men are more likely to abandon old media for new, which may explain even more of the Marge Simpson strategy. Says the report, which focused on people ages 18-64, "Men are more likely than women to indicate that printed news is a less relevant source of news and information." It also found that both men and women 18-34 ranked the internet as the most important medium overall, ahead of TV. * WSJ tops USA Today: There may be a new No. 1 newspaper in America when Audit Bureau of Circulation numbers come out in two weeks. USA Today sustained a huge hit for the six months ending Sept. 30, according to data obtained by Editor & Publisher and widely circulated over the weekend. USA Today lost roughly 390,000 copies, or 17 percent of its circ, taking it to 1.88 million. That means the Wall Street Journal likely will become the country's highest-circulation newspaper, two years after Rupert Murdoch acquired it. USA Today's declines came mostly in the single-copy category; the paper said that it has taken a hit from its hotel program as room occupancy declined during the recession. Newsstand also accounted for some of the declines after the paper jacked up its price to $1 per issue.
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