Magazines Find a Slick Setup in Orange County : More than 250 periodicals are based here. The bulk are obscure titles dealing witheverything from optical-frame fashion to heavy-duty trucking.
With its ultra-slick fashion journals and influential news weeklies, New York has a deserved reputation as the world leader in magazine publishing.
But unbeknown to many Southern Californians, an astonishing number of magazines call Orange County home. More than 250 separate magazines are based here, a figure that includes entertainment guides, magazines published for club members or for onetime events, and some tabloids, according to James Hamilton, a Costa Mesa management consultant who maintains one of the largest magazine databases in the state.
The range of publications is best viewed at the offices. Because magazine journalists are often enthusiasts in the very topics they report on, their workplaces tend to take on the personality of the subject matter. At Irvine’s Cat Fancy magazine, cats have been known to prowl the halls, at times leaping quietly but alarmingly onto editors’ desks and scattering papers.
And, virtually every writer at the Orange County surf magazines is a hard-core surfer. Visitors to these offices find surfboards propped against walls, innumerable surf photographs tacked onto bulletin boards and enough sand in the carpets to fill a bucket.
Indeed, Orange County journalists quietly produce an estimated 15% of all magazines in the western United States. Combining to form a $200-million industry, more than 100 county companies publish magazines as their sole business or as an adjunct to their business.
The county owes its sizable publishing industry in part to its proximity to the mammoth publishing scene in Los Angeles. Hundreds of support businesses such as typesetters and color separators have set up camp in Southern California. Also important is the region’s overflowing talent pool of writers, photographers, graphic designers and illustrators.
“Publishers in Orange County find it easy to hire people who have good experience, because many would rather work here than in L.A.,” said Allan Halcrow of the Western Publications Assn., an industry group representing 650 magazines in 14 western states.
The county’s magazines are as diverse as the readers they target.
There are the high-visibility newsstand titles such as Road & Track, Orange Coast and Surfing. And there is Entrepreneur, whose bright red logo on its building next to the San Diego Freeway in Irvine is seen by thousands of motorists each day.
Then there are dozens of more obscure magazines, scarcely relevant to the majority of the public. These are the specialized publications that serve as bibles to sports car enthusiasts, cat-lovers, snow-boarders and other precisely targeted consumer groups.
Yet another class of magazine is virtually invisible to the public eye. These are the 100 or so trade journals published in the county. Virtually all industries have their own journals, and most have two, three or more magazines competing for advertisers’ dollars. These business-to-business publications can range in size from a couple of dozen pages to 1,400 pages or more for some quarterly directories. And although you’ll never see them on any newsstand, they constitute three of every five Orange County-based magazines, says Hamilton.
Orange County’s trade magazines serve some widely disparate industries. Among the more prosperous publications are Irvine-based Frames Quarterly, a huge directory of eyeglass styles for opticians; Personnel Journal, published in Costa Mesa for personnel managers at large and small companies; Performance Racing Industry in Laguna Beach, serving race car engine builders and race shop owners; and InfoText in Capistrano Beach, serving the burgeoning market for 800 and 900 phone numbers.
One of the oldest and most successful is a trade publication at Newport Communications in Santa Ana. Heavy Duty Trucking, which moved to Orange County from Los Angeles in 1966, began national distribution in 1968. Although its ad revenue at that time put the magazine in seventh place in its market, Heavy Duty Trucking has since risen to No. 1. Three more titles have been added to serve truckers, truck-stop operators and fleet managers.
Unlike most publishers, company president Kent Powell did not emerge from the ranks of advertising salespeople. He’s a former editor, and has made a point of giving editorial director Doug Condra the freedom to tackle industry issues from a journalistic standpoint rather than kowtowing to the wishes of advertisers.
As a result, Newport Communications is now one of the nation’s most respected business publishers. In 1990, the American Business Press in New York honored Condra with the Crane Award, the most prestigious award in business journalism. His titles have also won 16 Jesse Neal awards from the American Business Press.
“From the beginning, we’ve made a concentrated effort on good reporting and interpretive business analysis for the truck manager,” Condra said. “We took on some industry issues, such as government regulations, and attacked the ones that were hurting the industry even if some of our advertisers might have profited from the laws. But we didn’t lose any ads; in fact, we gained them.”
But despite its success, Newport Communications has had to make many of the same cutbacks as other publishers who have been hit by the recession. To save on printing and postage, magazines have reduced both paper quality and the total number of pages. Travel and entertainment expenses are down, and hiring freezes have been instituted at many firms.
Companies that publish multiple titles are consolidating their resources, putting employees to work on two or more magazines rather than just one, says Halcrow.
“Publishers are renegotiating print contracts, and they’re looking for more pockets of revenue from advertisers,” he added. “Nowadays advertisers are reluctant to buy full pages, so companies look to them to sponsor special events.”
In one such event at Halcrow’s magazine, Personnel Journal, advertisers sponsored a round-table discussion in which industry members gathered to talk over market issues. In return for picking up the tab for the affair, the advertisers got to meet members of their target audience face to face.
The road to magazine ruin, however, is paved with financial cutbacks.
“Magazines that do die get very lean before they do so,” said consultant Hamilton. “They scale back tremendously on their own advertising and promotion monies. They cut money for editors, and try to run them with no ad salespeople. They’re not spending on ad marketing, and some are not even spending on circulation marketing, which is stunning.”
Since the recession began two years ago, about 50 magazines have folded in Orange County, Hamilton said, compared with an average of just one a month previously. But, unlike the magazine industry in Los Angeles, no large companies have closed their doors. Rather, marginal titles have been quietly discontinued.
Virtually every aspect of magazine publishing is represented in Orange County except the biggest, noisiest part: printing. Emissions laws have made California a costly place to do business for the big printers that specialize in magazine work, and most have moved to the Midwest or Northeast, according to Bob Crowell, a printing broker based in Redlands in San Bernardino County.
Before it closed its doors, Orange County’s last major magazine printer, Ringier America in Fullerton, reportedly spent more than $1 million to retrofit two of its presses to comply with the laws. And even then Ringier was not assured of being able to operate the presses legally for more than a year, Crowell said.
Starting a magazine presents a host of perils. One of the toughest for monthly magazines, publishers say, is persuading advertisers to buy space in the second issue when the first issue has not yet been printed and no one has been able to see it and react to it.
In addition, many new magazines suffer what Hamilton calls the “third-issue blues.”
“When they hit the third issue, they realize they didn’t have enough capitalization. They don’t have money to pay the printer because they haven’t been paid for the first issue from advertisers,” he said.
Despite the uninviting climate for publishing, a few new magazines are giving it a go early this summer.
Response TV, to be a sister magazine to InfoText in Capistrano Beach, will address the direct-response TV industry, such as 30-minute “infomercials” and home shopping networks, said editor Jack Schember.
In Huntington Beach, Longboarder will target older, more affluent surfers with a 48-page issue to debut in June. After that, publisher Bob Bohanan promises quarterly issues that feature articles on surf travel, personalities and the environment.
Golf Life, which produced its premiere issue in Dana Point last year, also has plans to go quarterly. In describing his brainchild, publisher Jay Jenks displayed the ebullience and unquenchable optimism that identify magazine marketers everywhere:
“It’s the total, definitive world guide to the golf lifestyle,” he says. “An imaginative combination of Architectural Digest and European Travel & Life, reporting on only the best of golf resorts, travel, fine wine and gourmet food.”
