With fall, a flood of new magazines

With fall, a flood
of new magazines

Must be the ad thaw. Or something in the water.

By Jeff Bercovici

    Summer officially starts today, but fall is just around the bend, and with it a gaggle of new magazine arrivals.
   With each passing day, more publishers, gauging the gradual recuperation of the ad economy, unveil plans to roll out new titles, or to brush the dust off projects that have been languishing on the shelves awaiting better days.
   In Touch, The American Conservative, Justice and American Curves are among the recent additions to this autumn's roster of launches.
   They join Chic Simple, Living Room, Budget Living, Common Good and Style 24-7 in a season that's looking more and more like the newsstand equivalent of the D-Day invasion.
   Inspired, perhaps, by the success the National Enquirer has had in its push to attract more advertising, a number of the new magazines will take their cues from supermarket tabloids.
    Among them is In Touch, a celebrity gossip magazine that will appear on newsstands in October with a formidable initial circulation of 1.5 million and a tabloid-esque cover price of $1.99. In Touch will be published by Bauer Publishing, which owns the 1.6 million-circulation Woman's World.
   Justice also expects to find much of its audience at supermarket checkout counters. Its focus will be on the intersection between celebrity and the criminal and civil justice system, making it a natural outlet for stories like the Robert Blake murder trial and Winona Ryder's shoplifting arrest.
Conceived by Randall Lane, former editor in chief of P.O.V., and mass-circulation pro Dan Zucchi, Justice will debut early in 2003 with a rate base of 250,000 or more.
A political magazine, The American Conservative will presumably comport itself with a bit more dignity than the average tabloid -- or maybe not, given the crew behind it. Executive editor Scott McConnell was formerly editorial page editor of the New York Post, and right-wing fulminator Pat Buchanan will serve as an advisor and contributor.
    Backed by millionaire New York Press columnist Taki Theodoracopulos, the new biweekly is expected to be more conservative than either The Weekly Standard or the National Review. It launches in September.
    Coming in November, American Curves is a men's magazine for a niche market: guys who like their women brawny.
    It will consist mostly of pictures of pumped-up ladies in their skivvies, along with articles on dating and the like. Published by the same company that puts out MuscleMag International and Oxygen, a women’s weightlifting title, American Curves will have a circulation of 200,000 in the U.S. and Canada.

-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.

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