LA Business Aims at an Elite Crowd
If you received a copy of LA Business, the slick new monthly report on Southland business issues and personalities, you probably fit an affluent demographic profile that’s extremely attractive to advertisers.
You are, according to the publisher’s estimate, a business executive or professional with an annual household income averaging $130,000 and a net worth exceeding $936,000. You also happen to be one of 85,000 Southern Californians already subscribing to the new journal’s stablemate, California Business.
But with enhanced coverage of the city’s business community in daily newspapers and weekly magazines, the question remains: Is there a need for yet another publication like LA Business?
Fraternal Twins Only
Born 22 years apart, California Business and LA Business have a relationship that is merely fraternal, though the casual observer can be forgiven for thinking they are identical twins. Not only do they share top editorial and production staffs, including publisher Jim Gressinger and editor Joan Yee, they look remarkably alike.
Yee maintains the two periodicals are completely different.
“California Business focuses on national and international issues that effect California business, while LA Business looks much more intimately at local interests and trends.”
Gressinger said the magazines will not compete for advertising dollars. By the end of the year, he said, each will have its own circulation base.
“There are thousands of upscale retailers for whom California Business is not appropriate, for whom LA Business would be perfect,” he said.
Dowdy Look Is History
California Business began as a weekly tabloid in 1965. Ten years ago, it was bought by entrepreneur Martin Stone, who converted it to a monthly format. With its March issue, the periodical’s dowdy mid-’70s newsweekly look has been abandoned for a fresher design.
The number and quality of color photographs and illustrations have been doubled, there is a mixture of typefaces, a liberal application of sidebars, captions and white space, all designed to appeal to an upscale, college-educated audience.
In recent months, the editorial budget has been tripled, increasing the book’s size by 28 pages to 80. With circulation at 130,000, California Business is the nation’s most successful regional business magazine and the best-selling business magazine in California.
Seven months and $1.5 million in the making, LA Business is strikingly similar to its older sibling. But unlike style-conscious fashion magazines, the two business journals have not persuaded advertisers to match the tone and artistry of their editorial pages.
The cover story in its maiden issue profiles Columbia Savings & Loan’s Tom Spiegel, who in 10 years, with help from Drexel Burnham Lambert’s junk bond expert Michael Milken, built the assets of the sleepy Eastside business from $40 million to $12 billion. Another article reports that it is not the Democrats but the Republicans who are benefiting from large-scale fund raising in Hollywood.
Regular Features
Regular sections include Disclosures, a collection of short items remindful of the front of Harper’s; The Buzz, the inside skinny on the city’s politics, deals, alliances, schemes and strategies; Modern Management, a guide to office innovations, legal pitfalls, labor negotiations, etc.; Cultural Assets, the business of the arts, and Last Take, a concluding essay on what it means to live and work in Los Angeles (in which the author ironically finds more freedom of action in a giant international law firm than in his own small company).
Both publications will be distributed through what is called qualified requested controlled circulation. In order to get the publications for free, a subscriber must send a request and meet certain occupational and income qualifications. Those who do not qualify can buy California Business on the newsstand for $2.50 or subscribe for $24 a year. LA Business will not be available separately for some months.
