Other Voices, Other Views

Forbes or Fortune?

Why is it so hard to tell magazines apart these days?

Summer 2009 By Paul B. Brown

Maybe it’s because the magazine industry uses the same handful of consultants who keep pushing the same handful of ideas (“have shorter articles”; “use the words ‘you’ and ‘how to’ more”). Or maybe it’s because writers and editors change jobs frequently, taking their best ideas with them. Or maybe it’s because I get more than one hundred magazines a month. (Really.) Whatever the reason, it sure seems like all the magazines out there are starting to blur.

And it’s more than their style that is meshing—it’s their substance. No one is suggesting that Dog World start covering elephants or that BusinessWeek begin writing about the latest rumored Brangelina adoption, but even within their own space, magazines seem to be getting duller and increasingly indistinguishable.

James Walker Michaels, the legendary longtime editor of Forbes, was fond of saying to his writers and editors, “If you give readers just one great unexpected story an issue, they will renew forever.” Editors and publishers may want to turn that quote into a sampler, frame it, and display it above their desks. Granted, I know there are only so many topics a magazine can cover, and yes, readership turns over every three years on average, so an article about X four years after a basically identical piece on X still manages to reach many new readers. Nonetheless, stories that make you sit up and take notice seem to be in short supply. So when you do find something out of the ordinary, it leaps to the fore.

Consider: Every personal-finance publication has been filled for months with stories about how you should scrimp and put away all your savings for today’s rainy day. That’s why a recent Knight Kiplinger column in Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, headlined “Spend, If You Can,” was jolting. Kiplinger’s point: If your job is secure, and you have your financial obligations under control, and you are already saving 10 percent of your income, then there really isn’t any reason to do your impression of Scrooge McDuck. “Acting as you normally would will help offset belt-tightening by those in genuine distress,” Kiplinger wrote.

Now, you can quibble with the advice—who knows how stable anyone’s job is? But it’s refreshing to see an article that argues it is OK to spend money in this environment, especially in a magazine devoted to saving and investing.

In a similar vein, Smart Money in its May issue questioned whether investors should abandon the fundamental building blocks of financial planning: low-cost index funds. “[W]e can already hear the howls of protest at the very suggestion,” Daren Fonda wrote. “But the stock market’s crash does beg the question: Is it time to move beyond the vanilla index fund?” The argument the magazine is making is simple: While it is true that given “their rock-bottom fees and tax efficiency, index funds are tough to beat over the long run,” they’re bad news during a declining market. The point of the piece was that you might at least want to rethink having all your money in index funds.

And speaking of money, there was nothing funny about the market meltdown of 2008. When the Dow falls 34 percent, the S&P is off 38 percent, and the Nasdaq is down 41 percent, there aren’t a lot of yucks. But Best Life author Jason Daley points out in “How the Rich Got Poorer” that things could have been worse: Actor Randy Quaid lost millions by investing in his wife’s “art-house dud” movie, actors Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick joined the list of Bernie Madoff victims, and Prince Abdulla of Bahrain lost money by betting on Michael Jackson’s comeback.

A final word about all this: One publication positioning itself as the place to go for the unexpected is Mental Floss, a humor magazine designed for smart people. In its May/June issue—which parodies other magazines’ top-ten lists, only with real stories and real facts—you learn (in “10 Vatican Secrets Exposed!”) that the ATM in Vatican City offers Latin as a language choice. You also discover (in “10 Not-So-Bright Ideas in Science”) that the fleas on a dog can jump higher and farther than the fleas on a cat. The scientists who proved this, wrote David Downs, “noted no scientific application for this research. Some things you just do for the joy of learning.”

On its website, the magazine tends to do more business-related (but still funny) stuff. For example, you can find out what happened to the founders of some of the biggest dotcom flops and what kind of summer jobs people such as Warren Buffett had growing up.

168 Hours Late?

Even when magazines manage to stand out, there’s no guarantee that readers will check them out. For instance, perhaps the only print publications even more endangered than newspapers are the weekly newsmagazines, specifically Time and Newsweek. After all, if people find newspapers outdated—given that they publish what happened up to twenty-four hours after it occurred—what hope is there for a weekly magazine that is 168 hours late?

But after countless attempts to reinvent themselves, both Time and Newsweek are interesting once again. They have started doing a much better job of “playing off the news,” using what happened as a jumping-off point for a story, instead of simply offering a rehash. For example, Time recently did a great job talking about “The New Frugality,” explaining how people are dealing with the recession (eliminating doctor visits is one troubling option). In that same week, Newsweek took the other path that these magazines have decided upon: creating news. It had a long cover story on Eliot Spitzer’s first tentative steps on the road to redemption.

Both publications are scarily free of ads, so one wonders how long they will stick around. For the time being, anyway, they are worth reading.

R.I.P. Portfolio

By now you probably already know that Condé Nast Portfolio closed. If you asked, “Who cares?” when you found out, you are brighter than most publishers. Periodically, media types—particularly business writers and editors—become fascinated with the idea of starting the next new really smart, insider-y, edgy, snarky magazine that will tell everyone what is really going on. And so publications such as Manhattan Inc., Business 2.0, and Portfolio get born—and inevitably die not long after. The problem is, other than those same business writers and editors—and the salespeople who love them—there isn’t a huge audience. The publications fail to attract advertising and go out of business.

Yet even with all the talk about the death of print journalism, you can still expect that there will be another one of these magazines sometime in the next decade.

Paul B. Brown is author or co-author of more than a dozen business books, including Customers for Life.