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of the new Redbook
Ellen Kunes adding her touches to revitalized title
By Jeff Bercovici
Over the last few years, Redbook has pulled off a daring feat, trading in its tuna casserole image for its younger, sexier persona.
As a strategy, it was not without risks, but it seems to have worked. Redbook is smaller now but healthier, attracting the younger working moms that advertisers crave.
As executive editor of Redbook for four years in the late '90s, Ellen Kunes had a large hand in the magazine's reinvention.
Now she's back and ready to add her own twist to the title's evolution as editor in chief. She succeeds Lesley Jane Seymour, who in July was reassigned to Marie Claire, another Hearst title.
First at Redbook, then as launch editor of O: The Oprah Magazine, Kunes has been as close as anybody to the seismic shift that has taken place in women's magazines over the last five years or so.
As the readerships of traditional service magazines have gotten steadily older, a new generation of titles has emerged to capture the dollars and eyeballs of working mothers in their 30s and 40s. Unlike the Seven Sisters of old, these new magazines share no common formula, just high-quality art design and a belief that women are busier than ever nowadays.
Kunes says that the reinvented Redbook and its fellow "New Sisters" cater to a magazine consumer who didn't exist just a few years ago.
"What I know is that there's a younger reader out there who is more visually sophisticated than perhaps readers were in the past, and is more demanding that way," says Kunes.
"I give a lot of credit initially to Martha Stewart because I think that magazine shows you can have a mass audience that really appreciates and buys a magazine that's beautiful and celebrates things that previously would've been considered too sophisticated. It opened up a different way of thinking for a lot of us."
It was this "democratization of style," says Kunes, that, among other things, paved the way for O: The Oprah Magazine.
"That was very much the thinking with O: that you could have mass with class. That’s not to say that the Seven Sisters did not have amazing journalism and good photography, but it was definitely done on a different template."
Celebrities have played a major role in the rise of the New Sisters, with Rosie O'Donnell following Stewart and Winfrey with her own magazine, launched earlier this year.
The value of having a celebrity attached, says Kunes, lies not merely in name recognition but in having someone on board who can use her clout to scrap the formula and try new ideas.
"A wonderful experience for me at O was that we had a lot of freedom to do different things, things that traditional magazines might not have wanted to attempt," she says. "When you have someone like Oprah saying, 'Hey, try this,' it helps."
At Redbook, Kunes says her job is to continue redefining the process that began a decade ago under Ellen Levine, now editor of Good Housekeeping.
Toward that end, she's working on a redesign that will be unveiled late next spring or next summer.
"Redbook was in great shape when I came in," says Kunes. "Leslie Seymour had made the magazine look and feel younger, sexier, more energetic.
"I'm going to be working to strengthen the magazine visually. What's also important is to drive home what makes Redbook different. It's a magazine for a woman who has a very full life. It helps her to make that incredibly full life work and helps her to enjoy it as much as she always dreamed she could."
Among other things, Kunes wants to create more pages and columns with what she calls "a signature feeling," and to break down what she considers some artificial barriers between areas such as health, beauty and fashion.
"I believe lifestyle means cross-pollinating different areas," she says. Citing a story in the upcoming December issue, "The 30-Minute Relax Plan," she says, "It’s not just the usual 'Here's the perfect bubble bath.' We also show the CD to listen to, the slippers to put on, the candle to light. To me that's really what lifestyle is about: first an idea, then creating a strategy that encompasses all the different parts of your life."
Redbook’s total paid circulation fell by 1.7 percent in the first half of the year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, and single-copy sales slipped 9.7 percent, although Kunes says newsstand sales have been up since June.
Ad pages in Redbook were down 10.6 percent year-to-date through September, and ad revenue was off 3.9 percent to $85 million, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.
October 19, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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