Magazine Leaps Into ‘Low Culture’ : Saturday Review Changes Image in Effort to Boost Sales

A magazine cover adorned with a honey-limbed blonde and the headline “Sex Sells” won’t raise an eyebrow in the publishing world. Unless, perhaps, the magazine is a 60-year-old institution that became known for arts criticism and lofty espousal of such causes as nuclear disarmament.

This month’s issue of Saturday Review is wrapped with just such a blonde, in what its editors acknowledge is an all-out drive for newsstand sales and advertisers--and what some insiders fear may reflect continuing problems for this erstwhile standard-bearer of liberal humanitarianism.

Founded by Christopher Morley, Henry Luce and others, the bimonthly has changed hands three times and altered its format yet more often since its glory days of the 1950s and 1960s under editor Norman Cousins. Yet Saturday Review Limited Partners, which bought the magazine in June, 1984, feels the review has needed to do more to shake a stodgy image and attract the sought-after younger and more affluent readership.

This month’s issue was designed to improve newsstand sales and draw new advertisers in preparation for a direct-mail subscription campaign. In ads in advertising-trade magazines, management is touting the racier look under the slogan “Hot New Now.”

Shake People Up

“It’s meant to shake people up a little bit,” says Paul Dietrich, the magazine’s publisher and part-owner, who is also head of a conservative Washington, D.C. think tank, the the National Center for Legislative Research. “We’re trying to say we’re not that old, boring literary magazine any more.”

In an illustrated cover story, the review reports how such magazines as Newsweek, The New Republic, Discover and Sports Illustrated have marketed sex. The story’s tone is ironic, with a headline, “Sex sells everything, from magazines to meat grinders, which explains the appearance of an otherwise gratuitous photograph of a model in a swimsuit on the cover . . . “

To further boost the cover’s mass appeal, a second cover photo shows Sylvester Stallone’s movie-hero Rambo, muscles rippling and machine gun ablaze.

In another illustrated story, the magazine reports on an exhibition of the works of the late Albert Vargas, whose ample beauties brightened Esquire and Playboy magazines. Elsewhere, the magazine offers an arty photo-spread, a report on New York’s undiscovered artists, a profile of spy novelist Frederick Forsyth, and book, film and record reviews.

Some current and former writers and editors are among the critics of the new look.

“The sex is awfully mild stuff, but this strikes me as a pretty disingenuous way of trying to sell the book,” said one writer who has contributed to the review. Said another: “I’m rooting for the magazine, but I won’t buy this sex issue.”

Bruce Van Wyngarden, first managing editor to work under the current ownership, describes the new look as “remarkable” in light of Saturday Review’s past. “I just wonder if their newsstand presence is enough that this will make a difference.”

In the past year, the review has gone through three managing editors and dismissed several key writers, including Stanley Kauffmann, formerly theater critic. Kauffmann, whose film reviews appear in The New Republic, said he was told last month that his reviews were too long to fit in with the magazine’s new look.

Some contributors have been paid five months late, and the review has postponed plans to move from a bimonthly to a monthly schedule.

Yet Dietrich says circulation and advertising revenues are slowly improving, and that the overall trend is up. Circulation has edged to 240,000 from last year’s 210,000, he said, although noting that the first independent review of circulation, by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, has not been completed.

“We’ve seen a little bit of a tough time, but I’d call this a first-ditch effort, not a last-ditch effort,” says Dietrich. The magazine fired two managing editors, he says, because “they wanted it to be a little too much like the old days,” he says. “I describe them as young fogies, and I say that fondly.”

The magazine’s current goal is to cover culture of all sorts, not just the “high culture” that Saturday Review followed in its earlier days, said editor Frank Gannon, a former CBS News journalist and ghostwriter of former President Nixon’s autobiography.

“We could do only stories on neoexpressionism and searching profiles of (composer) Philip Glass . . . but people are interested too about the mass creative stuff that’s being done,” he said. “A lot of it is trash, but you can learn from low culture.”

Saturday Review Limited Partners, which last year bought the magazine from St. Louis publisher Jeffrey M. Gluck, forecast in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing last January that its 1985 loss would reach $1.4 million. Dietrich says he now expects the loss to total between $1.5 million and $1.6 million as both expenses and revenues have exceeded expectations.

Several present and former staff members are not particularly sanguine. Valerie McGhee, who left a month and a half ago as managing editor, said the current issue is “a big test” and “a calculated risk,” noting that the editors expect it to drive away at least some of their traditional readers. McGhee also said that, without a pickup in revenues, the partnership may be able to keep the magazine going for only a few more issues.

Michael Bienstock, vice president of BBDO, a New York-based ad agency, agreed that the change in direction carries risks for the magazine. “What they’re seeking is to get new readers to try the magazine. But they’ve got to worry about the loyal subscriber base that’s been with them.”

Dietrich says he expects that the magazine’s two limited-partnership offerings will have raised a total of $7 million by the end of next month. That includes $2.8 million in the first offering and $4.2 million in the current one, he said.

Gannon says the new look was recommended by consultants who were particularly concerned about the two-inch strip just to the right of the magazine’s spine. Those two inches are all that appears to browsers at many magazine-glutted newsstands, he observed.

“If you look at this cover, what you see in that section is a shot of Rambo, the word ‘sex’ and part of the girl’s arm,” said Gannon. “We’re learning that newsstand display is a science not an art.”

Gannon said the previous issues suffered because some newsstand owners have been unwilling to carry it on their racks. For example, in the second issue published under the new ownership, 51% of copies sent to Chicago gathered dust in the distributor’s warehouse because of newsstand owners’ lack of interest, he said.

Since then, newsstand distribution has improved, he said.

Long-time editor Norman Cousins said he wouldn’t pass judgment on the magazine’s new look because “the last thing I want to do is speak up as if from Olympus.”

But he suggested the move points to a larger issue. Postal rates for magazines are now at “punitively” high levels that reduce the value of subscriptions and force publishers to design magazines that sell well at the newsstand, he said.

“It raises a real question about the survival of serious magazines,” he said.