|
|
major U.S. newsweekly
Brit takes aim at Time, Newsweek, U.S. News
By Jeff Bercovici
If you thought those guys over at Dennis Publishing had chutzpah before, just wait till April.
That’s when the company, publisher of men’s magazines Maxim and Stuff here in the U.S., will launch The Week, a 40-page weekly rundown of the news as reported by America’s newspapers and magazines.
The Week will challenge, in audience if not exactly in format, powerhouse newsweeklies Time and Newsweek, as well as the ailing but still formidable U.S. News & World Report.
The move is, to say the least, counterintuitive.
Newsweeklies are widely considered to be something of an anachronism as 24-hour cable news channels, news web sites and online news groups threaten to render them obsolete.
Time magazine has taken the lead in reinventing the newsmagazine over recent years as a more feature-driven vehicle—exactly the opposite of The Week’s strategy, which calls for unbylined articles of 200 words or fewer.
But then people said that the mass-market general interest men’s magazine was dead before Maxim stormed onto the scene in 1997, overtaking twin fixtures GQ and Esquire in the blink of an eye.
Maxim’s rate base is now 2.25 million, second among men’s magazines only to Playboy, and the magazine claims more ad revenue than any of its competitors.
Dennis president Stephen Colvin says it’s precisely the shift on the part of Time and its brethren to a softer-news format that has left room for a magazine like The Week.
"Newsweeklies aren’t really newsweeklies anymore—they’re lifestyle magazines that come out on a weekly basis," says Colvin. "Their role, which is to help people deal with information overload, is not being fulfilled."
Dennis already publishes The Week in the U.K., where it says the magazine has a waiting list for advertisers.
In its format, the magazine hearkens back to the original Time magazine of the 1920s. Rather than featuring original reporting of its own, The Week will serve as a digest of the best reporting from publications across the country, attributing to sources where necessary. In this regard it will be more akin to another British newsmagazine, the Economist, than to Time, Newsweek & U.S. News, all of which rely increasingly on their special reports packages for newsstand sales.
To realize the launch, Dennis has assembled a team of top editorial talent. Harold Evans, formerly editorial director of U.S. News and the New York Daily News, will serve as a consulting editor. Evans was also president of Random House Trade Group from 1990 to 1997.
Former Men’s Health editor in chief Michael Lafavore has been named general manager of The Week, and William B. Falk, previously deputy managing editor of suburban New York paper The Journal News, has been named editor in chief.
The magazine will launch with an initial circulation of 150,000, with subscriptions selling for the relatively high price of $75. Each issue will carry only six pages of ads--a number Colvin says will be held constant as the circulation grows.
"This is a publishing model that depends much more heavily on the subscription side," he says.
Dennis expects to spend $17 million on the launch, a figure considered by some to be preposterously wishful.
In comparison, Wenner Media has already spent a reported $30 million since it relaunched Us magazine as a weekly last March.
But Colvin says the figure of $17 million is quite realistic, noting that the largest costs of publishing a magazine, paper and printing, will be minimized by The Week’s 40-page length.
"Maxim cost significantly less than [$17 million]. It can be done," he says.
This is the second bomb Dennis has dropped this year.
Earlier this week the company announced it would be launching a music magazine in April to compete against Rolling Stone and Spin.
Blender will publish four times in 2001, with an initial distribution of 400,000.
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
Printer-Friendly
Version | Send
to a Friend
Cover Page | Contact
Us
© 2001 Media Life
