Randall Lane, "P.O.V." editor: Mr. Media Interview Classic
Originally published July 21, 1997

Don't hate Randall Lane because he's arrogant. As editor in chief of P.O.V., a new men's magazine waging war in a brutally competitive marketplace, he makes a little attitude go a long way.

Take P.O.V.'s all-out frontal assault on arch-rival Details, a 10-year-old magazine of choice for tattooed, body-piercing slacker punks.

P.O.V., itself a rising magazine of choice for career-bent, humorless twentysomethings, sent out postcards with a picture of the Titanic on one side, labeling Details as a sinking ship following the firing of yet another Details editor and a reported switch in editorial direction from all things featherweight to service features with a pro-career bent.

"They were clearly adrift editorially, and that is one of our fundamental strengths," Lane says. "We have never changed our mission or our focus and to see them all of a sudden do a 180-degree switch and come right to us, struck all of us as a sinking ship. That's where the postcard came from."



The magazine fired another round in June by slapping a sticker on its cover that read "Forget GQ, Try P.O.V." That backfired, at least with one reader. Shades of J. Danforth Quayle.

"While I am pleased that P.O.V. has been awarded 'Adweek's Start-up of the Year,' " wrote Carlos G. Martinez, "GQ you are not."

Some might think P.O.V., with just two years under its belt, was asking for a kick in the pants by taking such cynical and aggressive shots at its competition. But such sass probably grabbed more industry attention than any single edition of the magazine.

"Our most direct competitor is probably Details," Lane says. "We are happy to go straight head-to-head against them, because we are smarter, we know what we are doing and our mission has been validated. Details' new emphasis on careers and 'downtown is dead' -- we have been espousing that for two years and we have been doing it. This magazine was founded by entrepreneurs, people stepped out of the traditional career track, who say that entrepreneurship is cool, that being serious about your work as well as your lifestyle is cool. They are finally coming around two years later and saying, 'Well, you guys are probably right.' The difference is, we know how to do it, we are living the life and we are not just pretending."

Arrogant? Maybe, maybe not.

Oh, sorry, Randall. Didn't mean to interrupt.

"Our direct peers? We will take any of them on," Lane continues. "We are smarter than they are. We know what we are doing. We have never changed our mission, and we think we have the right formula.

"GQ and Esquire, which skew a little older, are not doing a very good job. Guys my age -- I am 29 -- are crying out for something that talks to them, and Details never has. So the reason we singled them out is because we see them as somebody who is trying to do what we do but has always failed. We really understand what is going on. We are not trying to push (readers) into getting nipple rings. Details panders to the idea that the twenty-something person is a slacker, while we say guys in this age group actually work for a living, and yes, we like to have a good time, we like to go out, we like to go to see music, and we care about fashion, but we are also concerned about our going out and exercising and playing sports and also working. That's something Details is finally realizing, but I think they are a little late to the table."

Lane was previously the Washington bureau chief at Forbes, where he met P.O.V. founder and publisher Drew Massey. They are now part of of a generation of fast-rising twentysomething journalists including Swing's David Lauren, the Electronic Newsstand's Brian Hecht and Matt Drudge, author of the highly respected, media-savvy Drudge Report, who are rising to the top of credible, big-money media operations that they helped created.

"Hopefully," Lane says, "(my) credentials are solid enough so people can say, 'Well, this guy is young, but he is certainly not green, and he certainly knows what he is doing.' Our whole staff is like that. Young, but that doesn't mean that we don't know what we are doing. In fact, I think we know what we are doing for this market better than anybody else."




P.O.V. hasn't exactly taken the consumer magazine world by storm. When was the last time you heard somebody say, "Did you see that great article in P.O.V.?" More likely you heard somebody at a newsstand wondering to what the bland-sounding title referred. P.O.V.? Is that anything like POZ, another new magazine, albeit one for HIV-positive men?

It apparently wasn't enough that the editors put "Guy's Survival Guide" in small type under the title; as of the June issue, a ribbon added across the top of the cover now explains it all: "The Men's Magazine with the Smart Point of View."

Get it?

Lane says the magazine's title indicates "that we have a focus, and our articles are pointed, are opinionated. This isn't just your flat, windy magazine. This is a magazine with some spice to it, and hopefully the name encompasses a lot of that. It is also a name that doesn't have a lot of preconceived notions because people can't assume they know what you are about automatically. I mean, what did 'GQ' mean when GQ was founded? (THIRTYSOMETHING MR. MEDIA SEZ: "GQ" is shorthand for Gentleman's Quarterly") The editors of GQ made it mean something. I mean, if anything, decades ago, when Esquire started, maybe you thought it was a magazine for lawyers, but what Esquire did was make 'Esquire' mean something. That's what we are doing here at P.O.V."

The biggest difference between P.O.V. and other magazines is that P.O.V. is all "service," meaning it seems like every story tells you how to do something or where to do it. It's packed with advice and personal experience, such as Brian Dawson's hysterical, first-person "You Got Balls" (August) story about spending a season as a gopher for Detroit Tigers ballplayers. Other men's magazines tend to view service features as part of their mix, not the whole thing, probably because it makes P.O.V. come across like another all-service title, Men's Health. No matter how well-written and informative -- and they are both -- they become interchangeable and somewhat bland.

"If you had to say we were one thing or another," Lane admits, "we probably would go down as a service book. What isn't a service book nowadays?"

He's got a point there, at least as far as newcomers go. Maxim's second issue was virtually all service. Verge, another new entry, is even subtitled "Essential Gear for Life." And Swing is very similar to P.O.V. in terms of pitching a work hard, play hard philosophy.

Lane, however, doesn't believe it's fair to compare his most excellent men's magazine to anyone else's, let alone the service-dominated women's titles.

"We are trying to provide our readers (with) service," he says, "but unlike women's magazines, we don't patronize and we don't pander to the lowest common denominator. There are some new titles in the men's magazine market that seem to think that is a good formula and just really sink to the lowest common denominator."

You wouldn't be referring to one edited by a woman, would you? Say, Maxim?

"You said it," he says. "I didn't. But, a woman who came from a women's magazine says it, to boot. And that's fine if they think that works. I am telling you that the guys I know and our readers don't want to be insulted, they are not stupid. I am not sure who Maxim is trying to get (as readers) other than people who maybe need to turn their brains down to medium or medium-rare or something when they are reading it."



What sort of man reads P.O.V.?

"Our focus is on a guy in his late twenties, professional, college-educated, has a job, wants to have a better job, is serious about his career and is serious about his social life as well, serious about playing sports, getting ahead at work, relationships, investments, the whole package. We are about people who just want to live a full life, and we are not trying to cut them down in any of those directions."

Let's talk content. P.O.V. typically runs celebrity pictures on its cover, but until recently never ran accompanying stories on the celeb. The photos always illustrated a greater theme from rating the coolness of a job (Beavis and Butt-head) to indulging one's vices (P.O.V. has added short interviews to complement its celebrity covers.

The feature that Lane says personifies P.O.V. is its "When I Was 25" column, which was launched from an April cover story. You might call it the "Old Fogeys Page," where men such as Ed Rollins, Scott Turow and Ed Bradley, who have long since left their 20s behind recall their glory days.

"We don't ask people to write for us who inherited their positions or were born in their position," Lane says. "The idea is to show our readers that we were all living in a dingy apartment at one time and we all started at an entry-level job. The fact is, there is no limit as to what you can accomplish and we show people who have gone on to be the best in their field. I think that is inspirational and that is what we are trying to do at P.O.V., in part: inspire our readers."

Now we're getting somewhere. Because the biggest difference between P.O.V. and older competitors such as GQ and Esquire is the age into which it was born. An educated young man 20 or 30 years ago probably expected to land a decent corporate job out of college with a firm that he might well stay with his entire career. Today, he's just as likely to go into business for himself right out of school or after getting some practical experience at a larger company.

It's a different world that young people are entering and Lane says that his background at Forbes gives him an advantage, an entrepreneurial bent that his older counterparts at other men's magazines may lack.

It's an attitude of "No one is going to take care of us, so we have to take care of ourselves."

"And so that is exactly what we are trying to do," Lane says, "empower our readers to take their lives into their own hands. We are trying to say, take charge yourself."

So don't hate him because he's arrogant. He's just doing his job.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

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Labels: Details, Esquire, GQ, Maxim, P.O.V., Randall Lane

  ¶ 10:37 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Clare McHugh, "Maxim" editor: Mr. Media Interview Classic
Originally published March 31, 1997

Does America really need another men's magazine?

Do men need another 172 pages every month or so telling us how to behave, how to get lucky more often, how to pick wine, who's hot and what's not?

If subsequent issues of a new magazine called Maxim are as ticklishly unsubtle as the first, the answer is a testosterone-cup-runneth-over yes.

Mr. Media reads piles of magazines each month, but the men's category is his favorite. Not for the pictures, either, although . . . The quality of writing in Playboy, Esquire, and GQ, for example, is generally excellent. But no matter how much older, wiser and wealthier Mr. Media gets, he never quite sees himself as the model reader for those publications. In his 20s, he thought he'd grow into that debonair, literate, sophisticated fella.

But now, in his mid-30s, all those guys seem much younger!

Maxim, on the other hand, is a perfect fit.




What makes it so different? Is it that Maxim is the American edition of a popular European magazine? Or could it be that this is the only major men's magazine in this country edited by a woman? A woman with a tree house sense of humor, that is, who could hang out and be accepted by your average bunch of guys talking sports, knocking back a few, checking out babes and scratching themselves. Okay, maybe not that last thing.

"I spent a lot of time studying men because I always wanted them to be interested in me and think I was good fun," says Maxim editor Clare McHugh.

McHugh, 35, certainly pushed the right buttons in her first issue. On the cover is Christa Miller, Drew Carey's TV gal pal; inside is a photo of Star Trek's Spock and Kirk; a directory of women who guest starred on "Seinfeld" and went on to greater glory -- providing an excuse to run Teri Hatcher's picture; a comparison between Macintosh and Windows users; and useful advice on buying lingerie for the woman in a man's life -- accompanied by 11 photos, natch.

But it's that very lingerie story -- "The Gift That Keeps On Giving" -- that spins the editor's gender. "It's a match made in heaven," reads the subhead. "Women love wearing lingerie; we love seeing it in action."

Not to be too picky, but if the editor is a woman, that sounds a little, um, funny.

"Some guy did write that," McHugh protests. "You have to assume the 'we' is a masculine voice. Besides, I don't think people will realize right off the bat that there is a woman editor."

C'mon! Mr. Media protests. There's a picture of you on page 16 over the headline, "So who's the chick?"

"I hadn't thought of that, really," McHugh says demurely, chuckling.

And it is a small point, but one that's important in a business where men's -- and women's -- magazine are closely identified with their editors -- Hugh Hefner is Playboy; Ed Kosner is Esquire; Art Cooper is GQ, Helen Gurley Brown was Cosmopolitan.

"Helen Gurley Brown is a brilliant editor because she really speaks to the readers where they are," McHugh says. "If I could wish for anything for Maxim it's that I could address men where they are, not in some idealized place or role of what masculinity is or means."





Staking out a piece of the newsstand to call her own, the fast-talking editor litters her magazine with politically incorrect lines her male counterparts couldn't pull off, such as "Hot Babe Management Tips."

"You've uncovered my secret!" she says, laughing. "I think I can get away with things that male editors can't."

Doesn't she care about potentially offending members of her own team?

"I don't care, in fact," she says rather bluntly. "In my mind, I think that if women are not upset by it, I'm doing something wrong. It was very important to strike a very male tone and attitude toward women. Not in an antagonistic way. But for lots of men, women are confusing and mysterious -- and also annoying! So we really had to write about women the way men thought. I'm not trying to explain women to men as much as I'm trying to address men's concerns about women."

McHugh's last job was launching another European import, Marie Claire, in an American edition. And her boss there was Bonnie Fuller, who recently stepped into Brown's fashionable shoes at Cosmo. Before that, McHugh worked her way up the Big Apple media food chain: New York Post, The New York Observer and New York magazine.




Joining a previously all-male fraternity, McHugh doesn't seem the least bit worried about comparisons with her "brother" magazines in the category, based on these blunt assessments:

Details -- "Cool. Maybe too cool."

Playboy -- "Nobody reads it just for the articles."

GQ -- "It's a fashion magazine."

Men's Health -- "A great magazine. Practical. It turns off people who aren't that interested in health. And it does tend to be the same issue over and over again."

Esquire -- "It's a literary magazine. For older gentlemen."

"Women's magazines in this country have done a better job of addressing women than men's magazines have done addressing men," McHugh says. "Men's magazines lag behind the development of men. I don't think men really changed through the ages. Feminism affected them in a way that it's given men more opportunities to do what they want. They don't have to fall into the stereotype of what it means to be masculine. You know, the good provider, the mountain warrior, the Hemingway wannabe. Other men's magazines address this heroic, iconic man, whereas most guys I know are very warm and interested in having a good time. They're in touch with themselves in that they know they like sports, they like women. They drink beer. They like to know stuff. They like to have a little something up their sleeves so they seem like experts. They don't spend a lot of time worrying if they're 'adequate' or not."

McHugh is surrounded by men, both at the office and at home. Beside her husband, renowned freelance writer Mark Lasswell, and their two-year-old son, Charlie, she also has two younger brothers and an "overpowering" father, who is a distinguished professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins.

Still, won't guys doubt you know what's going on?

"I hope to prove worthy of the job," McHugh says. "It is strange to edit a magazine for a group that you are not a member of. On the other hand, it does give me freedom and it's a new slant on doing men's content to have a woman's touch. I hope it works out for readers; I hope it works out for me."

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

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Labels: Christa Miller, Clare McHugh, Drew Carey, Esquire Magazine, GQ, Hugh Hefner, Maxim, men's magazines, Playboy

  ¶ 7:10 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Chris Napolitano, "Playboy Magazine" editor: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 2
ANDELMAN: One of the main things that’s different about Playboy today than it was in 1988 when you joined is the competition. For a long time, it was basically Playboy and Penthouse. It was Hefner and Guccione. Today, Penthouse is basically on the scrap heap of adult magazine history, and your biggest competitor, I think, in print at least, would seem to be Maxim. There was an effort the last couple years to sort of “Maxim-ize” I hate to use the term, but Maxim-ize Playboy a bit. My sense is that you guys did that, but gradually you’ve kind of even pulled away from that and gone back to more of the older Playboy style.

NAPOLITANO: Yeah, that was a very conscious decision based on what feedback we were getting from our audience and from young men. It’s very true that when it comes to female personalities and stuff like that, Maxim, in their cover choices, is a very close competitor to ours. They are a starter magazine for a lot of young men.

ANDELMAN: Oh boy. They’re gonna love that term. I like that.

NAPOLITANO: Oh sure. Well, they have been reinventing themselves three times a year in an effort to get away from that, but the reality is that you can attract a guy’s attention, but to hold it over the long term, which is what most magazines on the newsstand are about these days, they are in a place where they can’t claim newness anymore. You have to provide something substantial, and those are the kind of reactions that we were getting, that there might be short attention span stuff going on everywhere on the net or on TV or on video games or whatever, but the best service a magazine can provide is high-quality entertainment in print form.

So we look at the core of our magazine, the well, the interview, and everything in that as not easily mimicked or something that works best on paper right now. That’s the big draw, and that’s what we’ve dedicated ourselves to providing to readers, and I don’t think that anybody really matches up against us in that way. We’re a general interest magazine for men. We have a lot of content overlap with Esquire. We have a dedication to fiction which puts us in a similar place with The New Yorker. We go in depth with personalities who have given our interview which kind of aligns us and puts us in competition with Vanity Fair. But the package is unique to us, and we don’t want to mess with that because in that mix, which also includes jokes and cartoons, is the secret to why people stay with us so long. And I think that’s a lesson that will be learned by other people who truly want to compete with us.




ANDELMAN: I could see that there was a point a few years ago where Maxim was certainly the hottie on the block, and people were talking about it, and there’s rarely anything that goes over a page it seems like. But, Playboy , you open it up, and you expect to be engrossed in the stories, you expect to be reading it and turning the pages and following it and jumping to the back of the book to finish the story and to learn something. Maxim it seems like, by the time you get interested in it, the story is over, and then you’re on to the next thing. They used to talk about the MTV Generation years ago, with all the jump-cutting, the short attention spans, but maybe if you buy into what you said about it being a starter magazine, yeah, it gets you into it, if you’re a young man and you haven’t been reading magazines, certainly there’s eye candy and you start reading it, but it leaves you kind of empty.

NAPOLITANO: Yeah, I would agree. I think definitely we’re editors talking to each other, and we’re in a field where we’re curious, and we like to read and consume that kind of material. I’m not opposed to a guy going to a newsstand and picking up a magazine that is different from mine, because I think that it basically will spark something in them that they’ll draw a connection; if they ever get a look at Playboy, they’ll be favorably impressed. But they’ll be in the habit of looking at the stuff. And judging from what Maxim is doing, they seem to have gone heavily in the direction of service journalism, so they’re still kind of pitching woo to their marketers and their advertisers and providing them with a lot of face-offs that are similar in terms of content. But the flip side is that they really are kind of packing every page with a lot of consumable things. They’re keeping their guys up to date with a lot of products and gadgets. And we’ll have to see whether that’s gonna be successful for them. But they don’t seem to be showing any interest in personalities or articles or fiction, so it’s a different model.

ANDELMAN: Now, I mention that it used to be Hefner and Guccione were the guys that everyone equated with men’s magazines. Guccione, of course, is not involved with Penthouse anymore. Hefner, from what we read, what we see, he’s still there but not maybe as active in the magazine. My question really is, do you think there’ll be another generation of editors, perhaps like yourself, that will rise in the coming years and become associated with these magazines? At Esquire, David Granger is clearly connected to that. People kind of in the industry know that’s a David Granger product. It’s got his fingerprint all over it. Will people be talking about Chris Napolitano the same way or whoever takes charge at Maxim, or will these things still be, Hefner and Guccione, and then there’s not so much a visible personality beyond that?

NAPOLITANO: Yeah, well, it’s funny to say. Less so than Guccione and more so Jann Wenner. I think Jann and Hefner and their magazines and their products are kind of very similar, and they both invented these things. And I don’t know whether magazines and the corporate climate necessarily whether you’re gonna see magazine products that are identified with a personality like that. I would say that this is a Hugh Hefner product. I’m in there, and I’m making a lot of decisions about where we’re going and generating material, but for our company, there’s nothing wrong with the identification of Hef and the magazine and the Playboy brand. That just is. I don’t think that we could possibly get somebody else to do the things that Hef does for this company.

ANDELMAN: I’m glad you mention that because I want to ask you, what does, relative to the magazine, what does Hef have to do with the magazine these days?

NAPOLITANO: Oh, he does a lot. He is a very easy guy to reach. For as famous a guy and as much as he has going on day to day, I don’t know where he finds the time, but he dedicates two or three hours a day to the magazine. And that goes from everything of talking to our photo editors on the West Coast who are very close to him and nearby generating Playmate photography or working with our photo director, Gary Cole, on the major and minor photography or engaging in dialogues with our cartoonists and approving the work that they do, get a lot of different ideas coming across his desk, and he’s picking stuff for them to finalize.

ANDELMAN: Who’s the last hand on the magazine when it goes out the door, is it you or is it him at this point?

NAPOLITANO: I would give it to him, but I don’t quite know what that really means. There are three or four points when the material that we’re pursuing is passed before Hef for review. We pace out the magazine at the very beginning of the process before any work is even turned in. We basically know where things are going in each magazine. He might think that something is inappropriate or wish for us to improve it, but we’re probably on the same page with that. And then the work starts coming in, and it’s a lot of work, a lot of moving parts to this thing. And when stories enter the system, he’s going to get a read on it. When layouts are being built, they come out of Chicago and New York and go for his approval. Eventually, he has seen everything that goes into the magazine and given it the thumbs up, and then we have to make it all work. That’s really the last hand in terms of the detail work. If there are changes that come along or things that get adjusted, it’s just time to pick up the phone and fill him in.



ANDELMAN: And Chris, you’ve been sitting in the big seat now for I think about three years, I think we’re just about at three years, have you had a moment where he’s wanted to do something or something has come up, and you’ve had to say no to Hugh Hefner or you’ve had to take a stand and kind of say look?

NAPOLITANO: Yeah. In the three years that I’ve been doing this, I’ve been here for a very long time, he’s very clear about what he wants. He knows that he’s creating an atmosphere and a feeling. He doesn’t pretend to be inside the mind of a 30-year-old guy, but he pretty much wants to know what that 30-year-old guy should think of us. So using that, we generate a whole lot of ideas. In that time frame that I’ve been here, he’s spiked, I’d say, about three stories for admittedly good reasons, and this is where he and I both are approving it all on the process where, okay, you see it on the schedule or maybe it’s an iffy idea, but you really go through the whole thing, and then you’ve got two weeks before you go to the printer, and he says, “No,” usually in the humor or the more Maximy vein of things. I’ve had no problem pulling those pieces because he’s usually very persuasive in making his case. I’ve never told him or had to say no to any ideas that he has because editors, we have batting averages, and he’s got a very high batting average for what is successful for the magazine, and so we see it three months later down the line in showing up on the newsstand.

ANDELMAN: I would think that there are real pros and cons to being the guy who’s been there for 20 years and that you’ve come up from an editorial assistant to rise, like I said, to the big seat, that the pro is that you have this incredible institutional knowledge, you probably know where every paper clip is kept in the office. On the other hand, having been there all that time and started under this incredible publishing legend, and I’m not just saying it to suck up to him, he is an incredible publishing legend, and he’s a man who’s influenced an awful lot of things. But then suddenly, you’re in the position 20 years later of the other people in the organization turn to you when there’s a dispute, or if there’s an issue, they turn to you and say, “Chris, this is what we believe, and Hef may think this, what are we going to do?” It’s got to be a little challenging at times.

NAPOLITANO: It is, but the best thing is to keep the dialogue going. Hef is, first and foremost an editor, which is a very interesting kind of thing. He’s many things, and he’s had many roles here, and he’s been famous for 54 years. But, his love is the magazine, and his greatest knowledge is as an editor. I feel very comfortable with him, and I’m not going to stroke myself here, but I believe that we’ve been putting out a fantastic product in the last three years, and I’ve heard as much from him. He doesn’t like getting in a place where he is dictating material. He wants you to understand what he’s looking for, and he wants to get it, but when he starts shortening that leash, or when he starts feeling that you can’t give him what he’s looking for, that’s when people panic or start making the wrong moves. So you have to be as aggressive as you would be under anybody.

Every editor has a boss, and sometimes that boss is waving newsstand results or advertising results in front of your face. Hef is waving quality and instinctively knowing what he thinks Playboy should look and feel like.

So let’s go back to one of the stories that -- I’m long-winded I know -- but the one thing that he’s been very gracious about is one time I was saying yes to something that he was saying no to, and that was a very nice piece from a book called The Weathermakers. It was all about global warming, and we were ahead of the curve on that one, and he had some problems with the layout, and he really didn’t want to go forward with the piece, but I persuaded him to think twice about it. It was going to be a big topic, and he was very happy when our issue hit the stands and two weeks later, “60 Minutes” used the same kind of iconic image that we did, which was a polar bear on a tropical island, and then two weeks after that, Vanity Fair came out with their first green issue. So you do have to stand your ground and persuade him, this is why we’re doing this. And he’s very quick on the uptake, and so things move forward. So those are the kind of conversations you have with him.



ANDELMAN: Well, Chris, before we finish, I want to try something with it. Do you remember the movie Sophie’s Choice?

NAPOLITANO: Uh, I never saw it.

ANDELMAN: Well, the basic idea was that I think it is the Nazis, they are going to take, she has two kids, they’re going to take one of the two kids, and she has to choose which one’s gonna die. So this is your Sophie’s Choice. I’m gonna kill one of Playboy ’s most treasured features, and you have to choose which one to save. Is it the Playboy interview or the Playboy jokes?

NAPOLITANO: Oh, boy. Oh, I would…..Wow, wow. I’d kill the jokes.

ANDELMAN: You’d kill the jokes, okay. I’m not done. Now, the Playboy interview or the Forum?

NAPOLITANO: Uh, I’d kill the Forum.

ANDELMAN: Okay, the Playboy interview or the Playboy advisor?

NAPOLITANO: Wow, that’s another tough one. I could get what I get from the advisor in other places. I’d kill the advisor.

ANDELMAN: Oh, tell Chip Rowe I’m very sorry.

NAPOLITANO: Yeah, we’ll give him something else to do.

ANDELMAN: Alright, last one. Well, he is multi-talented. Playboy interview or the centerfold?

NAPOLITANO: The interview.

ANDELMAN: Ah, there we go folks. We’ve narrowed down what’s important in the magazine. Alright, last question. Chris, you’re married, and I understand you’ve got two children.

NAPOLITANO: Yes.

ANDELMAN: How does the editor of Playboy position his workday when he gets home at night?

NAPOLITANO: Oh, I got to let it go. I have to let it go. I don’t take notes as to what happens during the day. This is a very interesting job to have, but you can care about something too deeply, and I’m so happy and pleased with the editorial product that we put out. I don’t want to brag, but there’s nothing that I don’t like about what we put on paper for the magazine. There are a host of other things that I’m responsible for or in the middle of. If there are 10 things, I have to be happy. Success is defined by six out of those ten things being right, and I want ten out of ten, and that can be nerve-wracking. But that’s my problem, and I got to let that go.

ANDELMAN: Maybe I should have asked the question slightly differently. I think you’re 43?

NAPOLITANO: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: Okay. You’ve got two kids, probably not too old, a wife, how do they explain what daddy does?

NAPOLITANO: Well, it’s kind of interesting. I have a daughter, and she’s older. I don’t think she’s at the age yet where her classmates might have picked up the magazine or found it. But they’ve been in the office, and they’ve seen, gotten glimpses of what we’re all about here. And it’s just a simple thing of like this is for adults. This is for adult men. Just like you’ll see me have a glass of wine during dinner, and you’re drinking juice. That’s just the way it is.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Labels: Bob Guccione, Esquire Magazine, GQ, Hugh Hefner, Maxim, nudity, Penthouse, Playboy, sex, The New Yorker

  ¶ 9:38 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Lisa Granatstein, "Mediaweek" editor: Mr. Media Interview I love to read. They don’t start calling you Mr. Media because you’re illiterate, of course, and magazines have always fascinated me. When I pass a newsstand, I absolutely must stop and see what’s new and different. Drives my wife crazy.

My garage is littered with the carcasses of many forgotten publications, including Might, which was the first most people ever heard of Dave Eggers, and Smart, which gave a lift to a young Terry McDonnell, now editor of Sports Illustrated. Somewhere out there is also a copy of 7 Days, the short-lived city magazine that put Adam Moss on the map. Moss recently led his new magazine, New York, to three big wins in the 2007 National Magazine Awards, contributing to the 0 for 9 shut-out of The New Yorker and its respected editor, David Remnick.

Talking media, and magazines in particular, is great sport for me, so imagine my delight when Lisa Granatstein agreed to do a Mr. Media interview.

Lisa is the managing editor of Mediaweek and editor of Mediaweek.com. She’s a brand name in media coverage and has been so for nearly a decade.

Earlier in her career, Lisa was a reporter for Time magazine and an associate editor of its technology spin-off, Time Digital. She’s also worked at US News & World Report, Conde Nast Traveler Online, and she was a stringer for The New York Times metro desk.



BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Lisa, the news these days has been pretty bad for print media, especially in newspapers. Every day, it seems another once-proud, ink-stained wretch announces layoffs. Book editors are on the endangered species list, and film critics appear to be next. What, by comparison, is the outlook for magazines?

LISA GRANATSTEIN: I’d say it’s pretty much on par with newspapers. Right now, the industry is really going through a bit of a revolution. Magazines need to change with the times. They are competing not just with cable and network TV but also with the Internet, and more and more, they are finding that their brands are becoming less relevant in print, and they are having to find a way to migrate online and be relevant there, and that’s difficult for a print brand. They don’t have the video capability that TV properties naturally do. There is a lot of technology that they have to build, and it’s been a big challenge, both in terms of drawing readers but also in maintaining an advertising base.

ANDELMAN: As a freelance writer myself, it seems that a lot of the magazines are almost at a disadvantage because a lot of them don’t have writing staffs beyond a few people, so even if they convert to video, they don’t have that loyalty. They hire people one story at a time, one piece at a time, and for the Internet, that’s hard, because you really have to be an everyday presence.

GRANATSTEIN: Right. A lot of magazines have to double up. Writers are writing for the Web site as well as for the magazine. I know in my case, our magazine, Mediaweek, is having reporters file stories daily for the Web site, it’s become a wire service, produce videos, do their own interviews online occasionally, and of course, work for the magazine, and that’s what’s happening across the board. Obviously, the independent magazines, the smaller, regional publications, are suffering much more than the bigger, wealthier major publications such as Hearst or Time Inc. But they, too, are finding it to be a real challenge.







ANDELMAN: And Time Inc. has been selling off magazines and cutting back, right?

GRANATSTEIN: Yes. Absolutely. Just recently, they sold what had been Times Mirror Magazines, then renamed Time4 Media, to a Swedish publishing giant known as Bonnier Group, and that was sold for $220 million. They’re just unloading a lot of titles. They have to pare down. Ann Moore believes in the revolution that is happening, and Time Inc. is becoming less of a magazine publisher and more of a brand maker and looking more at the Internet to grow its brands rather than launching new magazines. I mean, I can’t even remember the last time they actually launched one.

ANDELMAN: Business 2.0?

GRANATSTEIN: Yes, sure. I mean, it was a mystery.

ANDELMAN: It’s been a while.

GRANATSTEIN: Yes, that was a while ago. It used to be, years ago, that magazines, there used to be five, six, or more major launches a year, and now, if you’re lucky, you hear about one or two major ones. The commitment isn’t there to put out a magazine. The costs and the risks are far too high. Ann Moore, the CEO of Time Inc., I believe, is looking more at the Internet properties, at expanding online rather than focusing on the print publications.

ANDELMAN: I guess the biggest magazine launch of late would be Portfolio, right?

GRANATSTEIN: Absolutely.






ANDELMAN: Conde Nast, and that didn’t really win a lot of plaudits. I mean, people didn’t seem very excited by this… It’s like a paperweight. It’s a huge publication, but no one is saying, oh, boy, you’ve gotta run out and get this.

GRANATSTEIN: Right. It kind of landed with a thud, I mean, both in the sense of it being huge with advertising. The publisher, David Carey, who’s from The New Yorker originally, has a real way. He’s quite an amazing publisher. He can really sell, and he sold this, but it has yet to be seen whether the readers are really interested in another business publication.

There was a little bit of buzz, but it quickly died away.

ANDELMAN: Once people actually held it in their hands.

GRANATSTEIN: Yeah. It took a year and a half to get this thing out the door, which is a huge amount of time, and that might have been to their disadvantage. They probably had to spend too much time fiddling around trying to get it perfect, and sometimes you just need to get it out a little faster and then think about what you did, but too much thought sometimes doesn’t help.

ANDELMAN: I guess it’s the difference between are you producing Forbes or Fortune on a weekly basis, or are you producing The Harvard Review on more like a monthly or quarterly basis?

GRANATSTEIN: Right. The key issue is do you really need a year and a half to knock out an issue?

ANDELMAN: Yeah, and well, they’re what, quarterly right now?

GRANATSTEIN: Right now, I think they’re only publishing two issues this year, and then they are going to be publishing monthly next year. So the next one is coming out in the fall. They also have an active Web site, but you know, it’s a lot of time between two issues, but I guess they’ll be doing a lot of research, yet more research to see what went right and what went wrong in that issue and refining it.

ANDELMAN: And while it was a beautiful picture on the cover, it didn’t really say anything.

GRANATSTEIN: It was a gorgeous picture on the cover, but does it scream business? I’m not so sure. I’m not sure what it was really trying to do. Was it arrogance thinking that there was so much publicity out there everybody knew what Portfolio was? Or maybe they thought the name would be enough. I don’t know. I’m interested in seeing how it does on newsstands. It’s a little too soon to tell, but it certainly led to changes at other business publications, which can only be a good thing. There was a lot of maneuvering and redesigning and overhauling at Fortune and Forbes. I think that’s a good thing. It does stir up the pot a little bit.





ANDELMAN: Well, let’s talk about some other specific magazines. If any of these you’re not comfortable with or you’re not that familiar with, we can keep moving down, but I was kind of curious to see what you thought about what happened when TV Guide switched from digest to full size. Did it stem the tide of the circulation losses, or does it just postpone the inevitable for them?


© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Labels: Lisa Granatstein, Maxim, New York Observer, Penthouse, Portfolio, The New Yorker, TV Guide, WonderTime

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