Special Reports: Prescribed for Doctors’ Waiting Rooms Only

If you visit your doctor next fall, you may find the dogeared copies of Time and National Geographic in the waiting room gone, replaced by neat racks holding six related magazines with the generic title Special Reports.

The idea, the latest brainchild of Christopher Whittle, the Knoxville publisher, seems innocuous enough, but it has the magazine industry in an uproar.

The Special Report magazines--quarterlies devoted to family, health, living, sports, personalities and fiction--will be available only in doctors’ offices, principally those of pediatricians, obstetricians/gynecologists and family practitioners.

Contrary to magazine industry convention, Whittle Communications is limiting ads in Special Reports to one in each category--one toothpaste, one deodorant, one baby food. For $1.2 million, an advertiser can place the same ad for a year in all six magazines. Though that is considered a steep price for a relatively small circulation, the publisher reports the first year’s ad space is almost gone and estimates first-year gross advertising revenues of $37.5 million.

Advertisers are apparently attracted by the high pass-along rate per copy, by the audience of young mothers with growing children and the guaranteed exclusivity.

According to publishers’ research, physicians spend on average more than $200 a year on waiting room periodicals. While not saying what, if anything, doctors are being asked to pay for the Special Report package, Whittle is betting that they’ll be eager to replace the usual sprawl of magazines with an orderly, durable and continuously updated display of reading material.

The Special Reports are a large-format 10 1/2x14 inches. The articles in each add up to roughly 27 minutes of reading, the amount of time, not uncoincidentally, that some academician has estimated is the average patient’s waiting time. The covers are of a heavy stock designed to take a lot of handling. In addition, Whittle’s service staff will visit each office once a month to replace worn copies with fresh ones.

The company was founded in 1970 by students at the University of Tennessee. Their first publication was a guide for freshmen called Knoxville in a Nutshell. By the mid-’70s Whittle was pioneering targeted media vehicles, industry jargon for periodicals aimed at special interest groups rather than the mass audience. The publisher also emphasized single-sponsor and syndicated media systems, which is to say magazines with only one advertiser. In the early ‘80s Whittle developed wall media--periodicals in the form of large posters, a concept not seen since the Cultural Revolution. From a nutshell, Whittle has grown to 850 employees and more than 35 properties.

Whittle already has 18 health-related projects, including an annual New Parent Adviser, a thrice-yearly Caring Practices Newsletter for senior care professionals, a quarterly Dental Health Adviser, a bimonthly Skin Care, a monthly Woman’s Health Adviser and a biweekly Esquire Health & Fitness wall medium. Physician’s Weekly, a 38x26-inch wall poster whose single ad changes according to the doctor’s specialty, reaches 70,000 MDs.

Rivals Incensed

Rival publishers were incensed by early reports that Whittle was giving away subscriptions to Special Reports on the recipients’ promise to remove all but two other publications from their offices. Many publications depend on the pass-along factor in waiting rooms as part of their circulation guarantee. Time and Newsweek estimate that as much as 12% of their circulation is pass-alongs. For magazines like American Health and Prevention, the pass-along factor can go much higher.

Others have special strategies aimed at doctors’ offices. Newsweek, for example, distributes Newsweek on Health, a quarterly digest of articles from the magazine, free to 250,000 physicians. Family Media, which publishes Savvy and Discover, has plans for a similar anthology of excerpts from its journals and Time is expected to announce its waiting-room plans soon. Smithsonian has begun a campaign specifically targeting doctors’ offices. Hearst’s Diversion magazine, aimed at physicians rather than patients, is spinning off a Sports Annual, which is expected to wind up in the waiting area.

Whittle’s first response to the competition’s objections was a series of full-page ads in the New York Times cheekily twitting the magazine industry for its lack of imagination. Even after Whittle seemed to back down from the two-other-magazines rule in an appearance before the board of the Magazine Publishers of America trade association, protests have continued. Rodale Press, which publishes Prevention, sent letters to 41,000 physicians asking them to reject Whittle’s offer. Gruner and Jahr USA wrote on behalf of its Parents magazine and will do another mailing for Expecting, which is distributed almost exclusively through doctors’ offices.

Comfort Factor

Whittle’s insistence on the unconventional sometimes leads the publisher astray. The Special Reports, for example, are too big to be held comfortably, especially in the narrow confines of the usual outer office.

Southern Style, a 11x15-inch glossy fashion bimonthly published by Whittle for Procter & Gamble, shows how far wrong an idea can go. P&G;’s advertising agency made no adjustment for the larger-than-normal page size or the classy editorial copy and illustrations. They just took the Women’s Day ads and blew them up to heart-stopping size. Imagine how unappealing an ocean of peanut-butter or a battered chicken leg as big as a pit bull can be.

In the final analysis, the success of Special Reports will probably come down to how many doctors find the concept’s tidiness appealing, or how many consider its efficiency chilling.

Bruce Catton called baseball “the greatest conversation piece ever invented in America.” Certainly no sport has generated more words. Baseball fans not only watch the game, they talk about it, write about it, relive last season and debate the next. They have library shelves weighed down with novels, memoirs, record books and encyclopedias. And of course magazines, the latest of which is Gravengood’s Baseball Today, recently introduced with a 1988 Annual.

Subtitled “A Magazine by the Fans for the Fans,” Gravengood’s Baseball Today is a lively, well-written summary of the state of the game at season opening. Although the bulk of its 174 pages is devoted to 1987 stats and in-depth team profiles, 42-year-old editor Cort Gravengood includes an interview with the voice of the Chicago Cubs, Harry Caray; reports on the 1988 U.S. Olympic baseball team, on tomorrow’s superstars currently in the minors and on outstanding college teams and players; a guide to investing in baseball cards for fun and maybe profit, and tips on playing Rotisserie League Baseball and the three major table-top baseball simulation games.

Gravengood’s was conceived one afternoon when San Diego tennis court contractor Peter Pursley dropped in on old high school chum Gravengood. “He had thousands of baseball reference books. He was poring over about 10 of them. When I asked what he was doing, he said he was looking up left-handed relief pitchers from the ‘50s.” It was, Gravengood told Pursley, a hobby.

Source for Statistics

Having spent many weekend afternoons at swap meets and in baseball memorabilia shops with his 12-year-old son Brian, who is an avid baseball card collector, Pursley thought he knew something about hobbies. “I said, let’s put your hobby to use.”

Gravengood had another passion, the major league baseball managing game introduced by the APBA Game Co. in 1951. APBA is heavily dependent on statistics and Gravengood was frustrated by the lack of a reliable ongoing source of stats. Although there are a number of annuals published in early spring, there is only one monthly baseball magazine.

“I put up the money and Cort put up the expertise,” Pursley said, and Gravengood’s Baseball Today was born. Success has come quickly, despite the inevitable problems and delays associated with start-up publications. A national distributor, Kable Communications, was found immediately, and the Associated Press was impressed enough with the publication’s stats to make them a regular feature of the wire service.

Plans call for two more numbers this year--an all-star issue on July 5 and a World Series edition on Oct. 4--followed by six issues in 1989 and monthly the year after. A single issue of Gravengood’s Baseball Today is $3.95 on the newsstand. A subscription to the nine announced issues is $21 from 829 2nd St., Encinitas, Calif. 92024.

DeWitt Henry, director of Ploughshares, the distinguished Boston literary quarterly dedicated to new writing, has announced the guest editors for 1988. Poet and fiction writer Maxine Kumin will edit a poetry and fiction issue. George Garrett, who put together Ploughshares’ Southern Writing issue, will do a special double issue featuring fiction “discoveries.” And poet and translator Philip Levine will edit a poetry issue. Ploughshare subscriptions are $15 a year for individuals and $18 a year for institutions from Box 529, Cambridge, Mass. 02139.