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to shake the Tina thing
It won't be easy. His Radar so resembles Talk.
By Jeff Bercovici
Why should Radar succeed where Talk failed?
It’s a question Maer Roshan has heard often over recent months, and he’ll likely hear it quite a few more times between now and mid-April, when Radar, his new general interest magazine for twentysomething urbanites, publishes the first of three test issues.
It’s also clearly a question that Roshan, who was Talk’s editorial director when it shut down a year ago, doesn’t particularly enjoy being asked—at least not again.
“I spent six-and-a-half years at New York magazine and, what, 10 months at Talk, but no one ever says Radar reminds them of New York,” he observes, somewhat wryly.
Still, the question is unavoidable.
Like Talk, Radar will cover pop culture, high culture, politics, crime, fashion and the New York- Washington-Hollywood society axis.
Like Talk, Radar has already attracted the highest-profile of contributors, with upcoming bylines including Candace Bushnell, Brett Easton Ellis, David Rakoff, Jake Tapper, Mim Udovich and even Talk editor Tina Brown herself.
Like Brown, Roshan is big on what he calls “the high-low thing.” By that, he means mixing literary and tabloid sensibilities, moving back and forth between Park Avenue and the trailer park.
Headlines on a mock-up cover of Radar include “Paging Dr. Feelgood!: Inside the trial of Hollywood’s drug-dealing doctor” and “Is Your Baby Gay? Only his psychiatrist knows for good.”
Neither would have seemed out of place in Talk’s pages.
To be sure, there are differences.
For one thing, Radar will target a younger and more urban demographic.
Perhaps more significantly, Roshan vows that Radar won’t curry favor with big-name stars by running toothless profiles and pre-approved, airbrushed photos. For covers, he plans to use mainly candid pick-up photography rather than posed studio shots, the artificiality of which has been highlighted by recent allegations of photo-tampering at Harper’s Bazaar and British GQ.
“The tone should immediately set it apart from Talk,” says Roshan. In Radar’s media kit, he is quoted as saying, “We will fearlessly cover celebrities as we would any other news subject, and won’t sacrifice accuracy for access.”
That’s not to say that Radar will be out to get anyone, though, says Roshan. “Just because you cover celebrities accurately doesn’t mean the stories are always going to be negative. This is not the Enquirer.”
At any rate, it isn’t so much the editorial comparisons between the two titles that Roshan minds. “I don’t run away from the Talk thing, so if there are similarities between them, that’s okay,” he says.
What bothers him is that the question “why should Radar succeed where Talk failed?” supposes that Talk, as an intelligent general-interest magazine for the masses, was predestined to be a failure in today’s increasingly vertical media environment.
That’s simply not the case, he argues, pointing out that the magazine’s total paid circulation was up more than 16 percent, to 720,000, in what would turn out to be its last six months of operation.
“It was the experience that Talk was working that kind of fueled this quest here,” he says.
So if Talk had the readers and if, as Roshan claims, it was also catching on with advertisers, what killed it? And what, by extension, is the mistake Radar must avoid repeating?
“It was a cash-flow problem,” he says. “The lesson to me in doing this project is start small and keep it cheap.”
Whereas Talk could be likened to a $100 million Hollywood production like “Pearl Harbor,” the model he invokes for Radar is a small-budget independent movie or the cable network HBO (whose founder, Michael Fuchs, is among Radar’s backers).
All those A-list writers were lured in by the promise of being able to tell interesting stories, not by fat contracts, says Roshan; Radar’s contributors, even the famous ones, will get the industry standard $1 per word, he says.
Likewise, the magazine has its offices not in some midtown high-rise but in a couple of small rooms in a building off Union Square, where it shares space with Red Herring – a fitting reminder of the perils of out-of-control spending.
Roshan says that these and other measures should allow Radar to start turning a profit when it reaches a circulation of about 500,000.
That’s still a pretty high target, given that the three test issues of Radar, which will appear in April, May and June, will have a distribution of 100,000-125,000.
After that, plans call for the magazine to publish biweekly, a frequency Roshan believes will help it to attract advertising from movie studios, TV networks and other timing-conscious marketers.
Meanwhile, though Radar has been generating considerable press as one of the year’s most attention-worthy launches, don’t expect a Talk-style media blitz during the run-up to its debut. That’s another lesson Roshan took away from his last job.
“I know more than most that all buzz is not good. I have full confidence that this is going to be a fine product, but like any product it’s going to need to grow. All this incessant scrutiny is a good way to kill something.”
February 11, 2003© 2003 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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