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to your doorstep
Lifestyle title distributed to select neighborhoods
By Jeff Bercovici
On the last Friday of February, more than a million people will find a new magazine on their doorsteps, one they didn't subscribe to or pay for.
Called Fine Living, it will be a lifestyle magazine targeted to the needs and tastes of affluent suburbanites and, to a lesser extent, city dwellers.
The magazine's premiere is timed to debut with the launch of a new cable channel and web site of the same name, both owned by Scripps Networks, which holds a 49 percent stake in the magazine.
If you get Fine Living it will be because you subscribe to one of 70 newspapers around the country and live along a delivery route identified as having a median household income of at least $75,000. The magazine will arrive inserted into the paper on the fourth Friday of each month.
With the effectiveness of direct-mail declining even as the number of titles on the newsstand has shot up, Fine Living's distribution scheme looks like an innovative way of reaching a mass audience while maintaining a certain degree of demographic purity.
But it must be asked whether, in skirting one pitfall, Fine Living isn't running headlong into several others.
Aside from The New York Times Magazine, newspaper inserts are generally grainy, low-budget affairs--the epitome of mass, not class. Can the people behind Fine Living create something that readers--and advertisers--will accept as a legitimate editorial product?
And can a magazine launching in tandem with a new cable network avoid the appearance of being little more than a souped-up one-channel programming guide?
As to the first question, Fine Living magazine president Peter Hagen says solid editorial execution is the key to ensuring recipients of the magazine don’t toss it out with the Sears catalogs and supermarket circulars.
"We’re very interested in making it as attractive as possible so that people feel obligated to open it if out of nothing other than curiosity," says Hagen.
"We want to insinuate ourselves into people’s lives. If we’re doing that right, we’ll get the readership."
Originally called Cachet, the magazine published an issue last fall and another in January. For a magazine that purported to reach upscale sophisticates, it was a decidedly pedestrian-looking publication.
After being put on hiatus, the magazine got a new editorial staff, headed by editor Maggie Simmons, a former editor in chief of Travel Holiday, and art director Lou DiLorenzo, previously art director of Expedia Travels and Food & Wine.
Hagen says the plan from the start was to work out the magazine's design only after the test issues had validated the distribution model.
"Having established that we were addressing the right audience, then we went back and really decided to put money into the magazine."
Fine Living will have a somewhat broader appeal then did Cachet, he says.
"We were originally going after strictly suburbia. Now we will be going after anybody in the country that has the right mindset, although most of them do happen to live in the suburbs."
Fine Living will differ from existing high-end magazines such as Departures and the Robb Report both in its intended audience -- it's for the comfortable, not the super-rich and--and in its focus on lifestyle rather than spending, says Hagen.
"We're not Robin Leach. This is not a consumer guide. This is more about how do you enjoy your life."
Nor will Fine Living be overly cozy, editorially speaking, with the cable channel, promises Hagen.
"It will be in general sync with the other properties but it won’t be parroting what’s on the channel. We don’t want to be so blatant as to say, ‘Go see more on the network,’ although we’ll tell people, ‘There’s an expanded version of this article on the internet.’"
Fine Living’s first issue will be delivered to 1.275 million households on Feb. 22, 2002. The Fine Living Network is owned by Scripps Networks, whose other properties include the Food Network, Home & Garden Television and the Do-It-Yourself Network.
November 29, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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