If it’s trivial, magazine is in pursuit

Here’s a pop quiz: “mental floss” refers to which of the following:

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(a) an improv comedy troupe from Waterloo, Ontario.

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(b) a Jimmy Buffett tune.

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(c) a bimonthly magazine that promotes good cranial hygiene.

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OK, it’s a trick question -- they’re actually all correct -- but co-founders Will Pearson and Mangesh Hattikudur are doing everything they can to make mental_floss magazine, and its humorous way of dispensing pop-culture factoids, a familiar name.

“I want it to be the source,” Pearson says, “like the Discovery Channel, where people go when they want to learn but want to have fun doing it, where people can feel smart again and enjoy the process.”

A sharp-looking glossy, mental_floss comes off like Reader’s Digest as penned by “Jeopardy!” writers or Mad magazine meets the “Harper’s Index.” At an average of 74 pages (about 10 of them paid advertising), a single issue packs enough cocktail party ammo to make even the most intellectually detached person the kind of trivia-spouting maniac not seen since “Cheers” mailman Cliff Clavin.

A recent issue offered an article on “6 Gunshots That Changed the World” followed by a five-page look at the art of Jackson Pollock. Another issue covered “38 Lies Your Mother Told You” (combining Pop Rocks candy and soda can’t actually kill you and Van Gogh didn’t cut off his entire left ear, only part of the lobe).

It’s chock-full of stuff you might not need to know (how a DVD burner works, why the sky is blue) but will make you feel better once you do. After killing all those brain cells in college, mental_floss figures it’s time you restock the pond.

If you’ve never heard of the magazine, you’re not alone; the last issue sold only 50,000 copies. (By comparison, even on its deathbed the now-defunct Mademoiselle was selling well over a million copies a month.) But given its humble beginnings, that’s more impressive than it sounds.

Mental_floss started out as a newsletter that Pearson and Hattikudur circulated while attending Duke University. Its popularity there made them think it might have life beyond the campus.

“It started selfishly,” Pearson says. “We all had varied interests and when we got together we had these discussions about so many different things. We all wanted to know a little bit about everything but didn’t have time to get around to it all.” Their solution was to recruit specialists who would donate their time to pen two- to three-page articles on things the Duke duo wanted to learn more about. Some of those experts -- a mixture of professors and authors -- still contribute to the magazine, only now they get paid.

To launch the magazine, Pearson and Hattikudur recruited three other students and then set about getting some industry support. They convinced some heavyweights -- including Jerrold Footlick, former senior editor of Newsweek, and Susan Tifft, former editor of Time -- to serve on their editorial advisory board. “We showed them we were willing to do what it took,” Pearson said. “And they realized we were filling a real niche.”

With $20,000 cobbled from savings and summer jobs, they launched the magazine’s premiere issue two years ago and sold about 6,500 issues. They used that issue to shop around for investors.

That’s not the way it’s usually done, says Samir Husni, a magazine industry analyst and journalism professor at the University of Mississippi (who also serves on mental_floss’ advisory board). “Major corporations like Conde Nast launch magazines with a minimum circulation of 750,000.” After a few issues, he says, the publisher takes the circulation numbers to potential advertisers.

“The bigger the magazine, the more dependency comes from advertising than circulation, and circulation becomes a mere fact of generating the numbers so you can get the advertising.”

The unconventional approach seems to have paid off. The magazine was named one of the top 10 magazines for 2001 by Library Journal; Husni mentioned it as one of the 30 notable launches of the year and, most important, its sell-through rate (the percentage of newsstand copies that sell) on the first issues was 60% to 65% -- double the industry average. Buoyed by these numbers and a couple of investors, Pearson and Hattikudur went to a bimonthly publication schedule after just a year, well ahead of schedule.

Their approach has kept them from hemorrhaging red ink. “What we pay to print the magazine, for images, all the production costs, that’s all being paid for by the newsstand sales of the magazine,” Pearson says. “And revenue from subscriptions is going straight back into the company.”

But they know they may still have a hard road ahead. According to Husni, 60% of all new magazines die within the first year; by the fourth year only 20% remain in business; and after a decade only one magazine in 10 will still be around.

The last few years have been rough on the magazine trade. Talk magazine, the much-hyped Miramax/Hearst collaboration that launched in 1999, burned through a reported $55 million before folding in early 2002 after 2 1/2 years. In 2001, 6-year-old George, founded (and made famous) by John Kennedy Jr., packed it in despite the deep-pocket backing of Hachette Filipacchi. Nor did things turn out so rosy at Rosie, which folded after a year as the namesake mag of Rosie O’Donnell (after surviving for 125 years as McCall’s).

Yet one industry analyst thinks the bad economic outlook actually helped mental_floss. “To paraphrase Dickens in ‘A Tale of Two Cities,’ sometimes the worst of times is the best time to launch a magazine,” said Steven Cohn, editor in chief of the Media Industry Newsletter, “because less is expected of you and there’s a little less competition out there.”

Cohn also notes that magazines like Talk and George generated a lot of pre-launch buzz and hype. “If you start with high expectations, it’s like the law of gravity,” he says. “There’s nowhere to go but down. If you have low expectations, you’re beneath the radar and you have nowhere to go but up.”

Pearson, Hattikudur and their eight staffers are, indeed, making tentative moves toward branching out across the pop cultural landscape.

In June, the magazine started gracing racks at retail behemoth Wal-Mart for the first time. That same month, Pearson began doing a weekly four-minute trivia segment live on CNN’s Headline News. They’ve just finished the first mental_floss book, “Condensed Knowledge,” which will be published by HarperCollins in early 2004. Covering pop culture, economics and history, chapter headings include “Musicians Who May (or May Not) Have Choked on Vomit or a Ham Sandwich,” “Famous Bubbles That Popped” and “Historical Commodities Brought to You by the Letter ‘S.’ ”

There are plans to feature “fact-of-the-day” and “quiz-of-the day” material on a major Internet portal (“I can’t say more than that right now,” Pearson says) and plans for a board game, and even Hollywood’s come calling. “There are three production companies we’ve been talking with,” he said, “but that’s not right in the immediate future.”

Perhaps most significant of all, collaboration is already underway with Reader’s Digest and online magazine Salon.com. With the Reader’s Digest partnership still taking shape (both sides say it will involve some degree of content-sharing), one thing is certain: It will give mental_floss exposure to a U.S. readership estimated by Digest Editor in Chief Jackie Leo to be 43 million people.

“A magazine started by bright young people that’s not about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll is so refreshing,” Leo says. “It’s got some of the same elements as our magazine as far as humor and good storytelling.”

Mark Hughes, chief executive of BuzzMarketing, a Media, Penn., marketing company, thinks they’re on the right track too. “One thing they are doing very well is they’re making sure they stick to content. You don’t market your way onto CNN by being an advertisement; you need to provide content. That’s what gets people thinking.”

Yes, but not always deep thoughts. The 10th issue of mental_floss, hitting newsstands shortly, is its first swimsuit issue, featuring thinkers like Eleanor Roosevelt, Pablo Picasso, Chairman Mao and Albert Einstein in their beach attire. The cover proclaims: “You don’t have to love them for their minds anymore!”