I’M THINKING OF TURNING the print version of MISCmedia into something closer to a slick magazine, with prettier paper and a real cover and everything.
Three things are keeping me from making the jump:
1. The startup costs.
2. The time commitment involved (which is really an excuse for the emotional commitment involved).
3. The iffy current state of the magazine biz.
Specifically, there’s a glut of newsstand magazines out there. Publishers have tried to seek out every potentially lucrative demographic niche market, and have accordingly shipped hundreds of new titles in recent years.
We’ve previously mentioned such hi-profile attempts as Talk, George, Brill’s Content, O: The Oprah Magazine, those British-inspired “bloke” magazines such as Maxim, those corporate-warrior business magazines such as Fast Company, and those Helvetica-typefaced home-design magazines such as Wallpaper.
But that all’s just the proverbial flower of the weed.
The shelves of Steve’s Broadway News and the big-box bookstores are verily flooded with unauthorized Pokemon collector mags, kids’ versions of Sports Illustrated and Cosmopolitan, Internet magazines forever searching for excuses to put movie stars on the cover (“This celebrity has never actually used a computer, but somebody’s put up an unofficial fan site about her”), superstar-based music magazines, genre-based music magazines, fashion-lifestyle magazines, ethnic-lifestyle magazines, and “ground level” magazines a step or two up from zinehood (Rockrgrl, No Depression).
(Then there are all the ever-more-specialized sex mags, from Barely Legal to Over 50.)
In all, there are now over 5,200 newsstand-distributed titles big enough to be tracked by trade associations. (That figure doesn’t include many ground-level titles. It also doesn’t include most comic-book titles, which these days are sold in specialty stores with their own distribution networks. It does include many regional and city magazines that don’t try to be sold everywhere.)
The good news about this is that it proves folks are indeed reading these days, no matter what the elitist pundits rant about our supposed post-literate society. Or, at least, that the media conglomerates are willing to place big investment bets that folks are still reading.
And it means a lot of writers and editors (even mediocre ones) have gotten work.
The bad news is it can’t last. Literally, there’s no place to put them all. Not even in the big-box stores.
Even the ones that make it into enough outlets can’t all attract attention through the clutter. Some big wholesalers now find only 33 to 36 percent of the copies they ship out actually sell through to consumers. The rest are shipped back to warehouses, stripped of their covers (which go back to the publishers for accounting purposes), and either recycled or incinerated.
One industry analyst estimates more than half the newsstand mags out there now will be gone within a year.
Granted, there are still enough startups in the pipeline that the net reduction will likely be smaller than that.
And many, many of these threatened titles won’t be missed much, maybe not even by those who work on them. (Though I could be wrong; perhaps in 2002 there will be eBay auctions for scarce old copies of Joe or Women’s Sports & Fitness).
So where will all the thousands of potentially soon-to-be-jobless word and image manipulators go?
Barring a sudden revival of commercial “content” websites (now intensely disliked by investors), a lot of them might end up trolling the streets of New York and other cities, trying to round up nickel-and-dime investments from pals to start up their own publishing ventures.
Just like me.
TOMORROW: Men’s designer fashions become just as silly as women’s.
ELSEWHERE:
