The Times' management, no doubt, enviously saw the successful example of the Financial Times' amazingly vulgar and trashy (although not in a throw away sense) weekend supplement, How To Spend It. A quick glance through the New York Times Magazine show that one of its biggest ad categories is now partial-page direct selling classifieds, helping to make it look like a throw away. You can't have an important looking magazine without important (or at least expensive looking) advertising. This is a demonstration of, among other things, the vitality of advertising. T came along and sucked up all the richest advertising pages from the Magazine. That's precisely what happened to the New York Times Magazine. Accordingly, the publishing industry has created many specialty titles seeking those advertisers, crowding out the news and general-interest magazines that used to profit from those categories. Such advertising has now been reduced to only a few profitable categories (and those are less profitable than they once were): traditional women's magazine advertisers, packaged goods, makeup, and personal grooming and luxury goods, fashion, fragrances, jewelry. "Not a peep.")Īnd advertising: there were once many kinds of magazines because there were many kinds of advertising. For a writer, appearing in the Magazine (always called "the Magazine") was like a comedian appearing on the Johnny Carson Show – everybody who was anybody suddenly calling! (I recently asked a friend who, a few weeks ago, published his first piece there about the response he'd gotten. The magazine was a testament to the power of audience – or the power of its attention. This had less to do with its famous long-winded prose, then with the fact that it was a supplement delivered with the Sunday Times, and therefore read at nearly the same moment on Sunday morning by the Times readership – some of the most influential people in America, in attentive repose. The nostalgia: the New York Times Magazine was once, arguably, the most influential magazine in America (the runner ups would be the New Yorker and Time), as well as one of the most profitable. And about advertising, which, confoundingly, most writing about publishing is not about. It is also about nostalgia, as so much about publishing is these days. Rather, it is about the nature of magazine publishing, and about publishers and the choices they make. This column is not, let me hasten to say, about the death of news values and civic interest, that the two magazines, side by side, might seem to reflect.
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