It sounds like Glamour is losing more than its awful womanizing blogger: An emailer tells us about five editors and a senior celebrity writer who have all left the women's magazine within the past few months, some without other jobs lined up. Crisis! Articles about "men's new sexual needs" and "the 10 greatest catfights" do not conceive, assign and massively rewrite themselves! Names and details after the jump.
In itself, the exit of a junior staffer shouldn't be that significant to Forbes, the right-wing business magazine. But Lea Goldman's departure to Marie-Claire highlights the vulnerability of the storied business magazine, and the increasing importance of web-bait such as listicles in even the most seemingly traditional of media.
MarketWatch media guru Jon Friedman wants to know why you kids aren't reading three of his favorite magazines anymore: U.S. News & World Report, The Sporting News, and Fast Company. We want to know whatever happened to Collier's Weekly! And where's our new issue of The American Mercury? [MarketWatch]
ESPN Magazine is celebrating its tenth anniversary, and you know what that means: it's finally time to become a leader on the fashion scene. Really! The magazine is hiring its first "style director" and increasing its fashion coverage [WWD] because, as they explain rather doubtfully, "People want to know what athletes are wearing to and from the ballpark." What will the sports-centric mag's style look like? We're guessing that the hat that they put on Alex Rodriguez for the issue's cover is a pretty reliable guide to their future in high fashion:
To think that New York was once the compulsory destination for that dying breed, ambitious magazine entrepreneur. Conde Nast, which has absorbed no significant new magazine since Wired in 1999, is reportedly in discussions to buy Dwell, the trendiest of the shelter titles. Both magazines started in San Francisco.
It would probably be better if Photoshop had never been invented. Not only does it distort our mental image of what the human body looks like, but, when wielded incorrectly, it can actually destroy bodies altogether. Some parts get weirdly erased; some get warped beyond reason; and sometimes, unrelated parts of other bodies materialize in pictures like traces of a poltergeist. From a long list at the Photoshop Disasters blog, we bring you the five most grotesque works of Photoshop hackdom you will ever see—unless the monster strikes again.
Well, this is one way for Conde Nast to display its determination to make Portfolio a success. The business magazine's editor, Joanne Lipman, may have lost the confidence of her staff; and the title sells well under a fifth of the copies sent to newsstands. But conglomerate Conde Nast, which has committed $100m in one of the biggest magazine launches in recent years, is launching Portfolio in the UK. Lipman may be sacrificed, but too much money and prestige is invested for Conde Nast to allow the magazine to fail.
Big changes at the magazine set up by Andy Warhol to turn his downtown friends into celebrities: in place of a frumpy lesbian, Interview is now to be led by a gay fashion template. From John Koblin's profile of Christopher Bollen, the magazine's new editor: "In crisp white oxford-cloth shirt by Adam Kimmel ("He's my favorite designer"), gray Karl Lagerfeld sweater vest, Dior navy cords and Margiela brown shoes, he was an advertiser's wet dream." One didn't think it possible: the new Interview may be even more self-loving than the old.[New York Observer]
When Glamour fired their so-called "Edgy English Teacher" dudeblogger Mike yesterday, Radar Online's resident man-about-town (and former Gawker intern) Neel Shah got on the case, as he is known to do! Mike was fired by basically provoking commenter revolt after he got a little too open and honest about his womanizing on his "Man Needs Date" Glamourblog. What did these two heartbreakers discuss? (Fuckin' women!)
Glamour, that bastion of informed debate about "men, sex, love and dating," had their very own dudeblogger, named Mike (aka the Edgy English Teacher, barf), installed after the demise of the oft-mocked Alyssa Shelasky. Mike is (was?) "32, single, living and teaching in LA and looking for love in all the wrong places..." Like the internet! Today, Glamour had to fire him: "We've read your comments, every single one. Our ultimate goal here is to open a productive conversation... clearly, that can't happen when the majority of readers would like to pulverize the blogger. And so, we've decided it's time to move on; as of today, Mike is no longer blogging for us." It's a old story with a bloggy twist: Mike's readers got fed up with his womanizing ways, and lashed out in the comments section. (Does one of the girls he "dated" respond with gritty details in the comments? Yeah. Yeah she totally does.)
The NYT's T Magazine has a handy graphic breaking down the fashion styles of indie rockers, and confirming once and for all that nobody should aspire to be an indie rocker. Each band profiled corresponds to a luxury brand. Doesn't that violate some sort of tenet of indie cred? PLUS they are all matched with smiley fashion slogans summing up their look, which just makes you realize that it is always an unwise decision for a band to agree to participate in a story in T Magazine. Below, a picture of each band and their supposed "look"; which is most preposterous? [I vote "Williamsburg prep"]
A big magazine industry report came out, and it turns out People magazine's top selling regular issue last year featured Owen Wilson on the cover just after his attempted suicide. People's biggest seller so far in 2008 was about Heath Ledger's death. The magazine's top sellers of all time were Sept. 12, 2001 and just after Princess Diana died. But death and misery do not rule completely:
From Wired editor Chris Anderson's big cover story/book excerpt on how most products will soon be free: "Externalities [is] a concept that holds that money is not the only scarcity in the world. Chief among the others are your time and respect, two factors that we've always know about but have only recently been able to measure properly."
The preponderance of outstanding evidence has finally and inexorably built up to the point that no reasonable person can avoid coming to the conclusion that "Alternadad" author Neal Pollack, who enjoys both chronicling and defending his decision to chronicle his young child, is just not much of a writer at all. Despite his background as a professional writer with the Chicago Reader, McSweeney's, Vanity Fair, GQ, and other respected outlets—as well as his ability to convince publishing houses to pay him money in order to write books—it is now impossible to deny the fact that Pollack is just not cut out for this whole writing thing. The scale-tipping work is his new Men's Journal profile of Woody Harrelson, in which the sheer lack of insight, or even cleverly redeeming turns of phrase, has us vowing never to read anything by this fucker again.
WE HEAR that Adweek editor in chief Alison Fahey—known for her skill in coldly berating her staff members until they leave the magazine in droves—is being promoted to a corporate position, out of knife-throwing range of the editorial staff. The "weekly," which recently switched to a 36-issue per year schedule, now has headhunters poking around the industry for a suitable replacement for Fahey. Although the consensus seems to be that her unique style of personnel management will be hard to duplicate. Any further info, email us.
"A lot of doctors smoke. I think it's more common than people realize, particularly among young doctors. It doesn't affect my ability to think, but I do find myself searching for words a lot more than I previously had to, and my memory is kind of hazy. I never forget patient information, though." [Time Out New York]
Writerly power-couple Tom Jenks (former fiction editor at Esquire, GQ and Scribner's), and novelist Carol Edgarian (Rise of the Euphrates), are profiled by the SF Chronicle about their literary-online magazine, Narrative. It has "selections from writer friends such as Jane Smiley, Tobias Wolff and Joyce Carol Oates;" its goal is "to connect more readers to more literary writers." It is literally subtitled "The Future of Reading." (The future of reading still involves Joyce Carol Oates and the Internet?) Sixty-five people volunteer for Narrative without pay, including big shots like Michael Wiegers of Copper Canyon press, a poetry publisher. So why exactly is the future of literary writing online?
Word comes in over the tipline that Christopher Bollen of V Magazine is to take over as editor of Interview, the post recently vacated by the unpleasant Ingrid Sischy. If true, hottie-about-town Bollen would be an appropriate hire for Interview, a magazine founded by Andy Warhol to explore the cult of celebrity which has devolved into a desultory circle-jerk of downtown personalities. Bollen was featured in Me Magazine, a publication with a similarly nauseating premise: each issue is devoted to a single "creative individual" and their circle of equally creative friends. (Much like today's Gawker!)
Meredith's Better Homes and Gardens "posted a 71.5 percent jump in single copy sales" in the second half of 2007, making it a rare success story in an industry struggling with newsstand sales across the board. Their secret: selling overrun copies of the mag at "steep discounts" at the dollar store. They had to end that deal when "Wal-Mart threatened to turn the publisher's titles away from its newsstands." Yes, the publishing industry has less clout than the people who manufacture budget toilet paper. [Folio]
"I'll never write a listicle," promised exiting Gawker editor Choire Sicha, naming the article form that symbolizes mediocrity (unless you are the Constitution). And while everyone in media except Sicha remains willing to pass off lists as articles, not all listicles are equal. Here are the industry standards for number of items in a listicle.
