Magazine Moguls Meet Amid Doom and Gloom

“You see that woman over there?” said Masthead Media President Larry Anderson, lifting his fork from a plate of salmon to point it across the Sheraton New York luncheon room. “I pulled her drunk out of a coconut tree at the conference in Florida a few years ago. That’s not exactly happening this year, is it?”

Indeed. The 2001 Magazine Publishers of America conference was planned for a resort in Phoenix, to add pina coladas and tennis whites to the yearly Power Point presentation. Last year’s Bermuda event had been memorable for its fun in the sun, even as the industry’s economic bubble trembled. And in Florida the year preceding, well, only the coconut trees seemed shaky.

But at the conference this year, the Year of the Burst, in the weeks after the Day It All Changed, in a city attacked, it was a different world. Speakers were afraid to fly to Arizona. New York-based attendees didn’t want to be so far from families, or from the Big Story. And, of course, it was an excellent opportunity to bring much-needed support, both economic and symbolic, “back home to New York,” as New Yorkers--including Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Gov. George Pataki--repeated on podiums ad infinitum.

More than 500 industry bigwigs convened around the corner from their midtown offices earlier this week, sporting dark three-piece suits instead of bright swimsuits. Even Martha Stewart, known for her camera-ready cheery twill, donned a black turtleneck (though perhaps she joyfully carded the cashmere herself).

The somber dress was certainly fitting. The financial fallout of Sept. 11 heaped disaster atop the sudden end of a fat and happy decade--in the days after the attack, the industry lost an estimated $1 billion in advertising. And so executives filled the gloomy ballroom here to listen raptly to quickly organized panel topics such as “Managing the New Realities.” The new reality is clear; how to manage it is a largely unanswered question. Slash-and-burn plans contradicted mantras of connection and respite--or expansion--as dumbfounded executives paraded across the stage.

The magazine world’s top brass seem hard-pressed to provide a cohesive response to these unfamiliar dark days. A decade of growth forged some tough habits to break. The executives gathered here are accustomed to signing acquisition checks, not pink slips, though based on the absence of publishers from recently folded magazines--such as Mademoiselle, the Industry Standard, Brill’s Content--they’ve begun practicing in earnest.

Still, even Miss Martha, as famed for her ruthless business eye as her souffles, can’t kick the expansion habit. She announced to the perplexed crowd that she was thinking about adding yet another eponymous title to her roster of many. And if that message weren’t surprising enough, she declared she was moving deeper into the Internet, beginning with a relaunch of her site this week. “We’re spending lots of money, to the dismay of Wall Street,” she chuckled.

Dismay was certainly the new industry theme as sighs and occasional gasps stirred the ballroom chandeliers, their volume increasing as projected charts showed profits decreasing, like an Economics 101 lecture in worst-case scenarios.

Graying coifs shook as Hearst Magazine President and MPA Chair Cathleen Black intoned in her opening speech, “We’re getting hammered on all sides.”

Conde Nast President Steve Florio--who pulled the plug on 70-year-old Mademoiselle--delivered a similar message: “I keep being told this is the toughest marketplace since World War II,” he said. “We have to make changes. Real changes.”

But what changes? This year’s MPA conference was a cacophony of contradictory plans and messages. Throw out the models, the speakers directed ad infinitum. But how? Change your business plans, consolidate your titles, engage in the process of “creative destruction,” as Dick Foster, the director of McKinsey and Co., termed it. “Anything that looks venerable is less venerable than vulnerable,” he said, adding that preexisting “divisions” were like milk in the fridge. “They all should have date stamps on them.”

Industry watchers have predicted that the first carton to be emptied down the drain would be the past decade’s greatest magazine legacy, and perhaps most dubious achievement: celebrity journalism. David Granger, Esquire’s editor, took the stage to say that since Sept. 11 he had been bombarded by phone calls from reporters all asking the same question: Had the sun finally set on celebrity fixation? He told the story of how on that day, Esquire was closing an issue featuring Cameron Diaz as the cover story. He stared up at her picture hanging over his desk as he filtered through the news coming in from downtown, and dumped it.

“Even before Sept. 11th, didn’t anyone else find celebrity profiles moribund?” he asked the nodding crowd, ecstatic that finally an answer had come about where--or where not--the industry might be headed. “Yes, fame will endure, but people we’ve appointed as celebrities have had too much power over our imaginations.” Affirmative murmurs signaled relief at this rare show of clear direction. Granger went on to show a slide of the very serious, very dark, very celeb-free cover Esquire had in place of Cameron’s countenance to grace November’s issue.

Then Granger showed a slide of the cover planned for December. There, surprise, surprise, flashed the unmistakable grins of Julia Roberts and George Clooney. Cancel that certainty. “Well, I didn’t change December’s cover.” Granger was clearly pleased with his presentation’s effective visual punch line. “The cover and the story are delightful. And delight has power,” he said. “Is it OK to do celebrity profiles again? Well, yeah. But we have to find new ways to do them.”

These mysterious new ways are opaque and unfathomable in an industry where the only certainty seems to be a financial crisis that is predicted to continue to slide south until summer 2002. Whether Cipro or celebrity covers offer a way to minimize the strain is anyone’s guess.

The publishing crisis dove-tailed consistently with the national one, sometimes uneasily. Gruhner and Jahr President Dan Brewster delivered a call to arms against coming United States Postal Service rate hikes, just hours after the death of two postal workers from anthrax was announced.

Even in the corners where the industry may be seen as benefiting from the national crisis, financial woes loom. News magazines have seen their readerships skyrocket in the past six weeks, but for once the ad money is steering clear of a strong reader base. Business Week’s Steve Shepard seemed dumfounded. “Newsstand circulation is up in this, reader intensity is up, and yet advertisers don’t want to advertise. They don’t want to be in this environment.” As New York Magazine media critic Michael Wolff explained, “We’re playing a story constantly that undermines consumer confidence.”

And so in this damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t market, publishers are scrambling more than ever to figure out what readers want. Many of them are in an especially impossible quandary in which their three-month lead time forces them to predict the mood a season into the future at a time when it seems to shift daily. “We can only deal with this one week at a time, one deadline at a time--it’s all you can do. It’s all you can know,” said Shepard, shaking his head as he surveyed an audience of 550 gloomy colleagues. After listening to a parade of suits urgently intoning the need for forward thinking and decisive leadership in a time of crisis, this was not reassuring news.

But, not surprisingly, Oprah Winfrey presented herself as a steadfast oracle of media omniscience and certainty. “I don’t need to do a focus group. I sit with 700 women, and some husbands, every day,” she said to the ballroom. “Even before Sept. 11, I said ‘connection’ is the word of the decade. That is what people are looking for.” Her message was as unambiguous as her success, perhaps suggesting that Graydon Carter was right to declare the death of irony. “We don’t sell magazines. What we sell is connection, connection, connection,” she instructed to the top-brass crowd that suddenly looked as if it had traded in nylons for knee-highs in the priestess’ presence. “Be a homemaker. Be a mom,” Stewart told the suited throng by way of offering advice for handling its uneasy staffs. “We’ve got a lot of mopping up to do.” Women looked down at their pointy stilettos--bubble-era footwear of choice. Mopping? In these shoes?

Questions of stilettos and celebrity are only the outermost symptoms of a publishing culture accustomed to an advertiser-reliant boom lifestyle. Now, these executives will have to strive for Oprah-like connection while downsizing their own publishing “families.” Perhaps Stewart’s new magazine will offer some helpful tips for making paper houses out of many fewer pages, or how to build new hearths from the rubble of the bust. Sounds hard to do in heels.