A podcast about books, art & life — not necessarily in that order
I keep ibuprofen and deodorant in my desk at the office. At Merrill Lynch, things worked a little differently:
As he was being escorted out the door, according to an H.R. executive, Semerci asked that someone retrieve some money taped inside a drawer in his desk. When the security personnel went to get the money, they discovered it was nearly $10,000, in sequential hundred-dollar bills.
What I’m reading: The Iliad
What I’m listening to: Sir Lucious Left Foot
What I’m watching: Local Hero, the last hour of Spike Lee’s new New Orleans documentary, the debut of Boardwalk Empire, and the finale of The Rachel Zoe Project.
What I’m drinking: Dry Fly gin and & Q-Tonic
What Rufus & Otis are up to: Going on a LONG-ass hike (5+ miles) at Wawayanda on Sunday. Here’s the Google map & specs and here are some pix.
Where I’m going: Nowhere! Deal with it!
What I’m happy about: Our Contracting & Outsourcing conference & exhibition was a big success. This year’s edition was less stressful than last year’s, mainly because I wasn’t worried about speakers failing to show up. Last year, one of the FDA’s speakers told me he’d be “honored” to speak at the event in a March e-mail, and failed to return a single call or e-mail from me until 24 hours before his speech. This time, everyone was on board, and both panels I set up — panels are a much dicier proposition than single-speaker presentations — went off well. Between the attendees and the exhibitors, we had somewhere between 700 and 800 people at the hotel; at least half of them stopped me to compliment us for the event while I was trying to get back to my room to rest at the end of the first day. But that’s a lot better than everyone wanting to kill me, so hey. I mean, beyond all my self-deprecating behavior, the reality is that all those people spent money and/or time to come out to our show because they trusted us to deliver a good conference and great opportunities to do business, and I’m proud of what we’ve been able to build over the course of 9 years. (“Us” is my way of saying, “Don’t think this is just me; we have a great team that puts this event together.”)
What I’m sad about:? The minute-to-minute stresses of the event (we’re a pretty small staff) keep me from enjoying much of it. I rarely got to spend more than a few minutes in any of the conference sessions, and I never did get to meet the FDA speaker.
What I’m worried about: Getting the October issue of my magazine together and out the door in the next 5 days. And how I’m going to top this year’s slate of speakers at the 10th anniversary gig next September.
What I’m pondering: Something the rabbi said before Yizkor the previous weekend, about how the fast of Yom Kippur (and the wearing of kittels) is meant to make us like angels. His homily was a little more . . . trite than in previous years, but I was intrigued by the concept of afflicting ourselves to reflect a higher, not-humand state. Also, an old friend who converted to Judaism said her son wants to know why he has to learn Hebrew, and asked me to write her some sorta answer. I wrote an off-the-cuff one, but I’m still thinking of a fuller answer.
A day after I finished my ramble about how advertising tends not to get mentioned in articles about The Future Of Magazines, I read the following passage in Holy Terror
Selling advertising also helped me become a better editor: It forced me to focus on what kind of readers we wanted and how to get them, to see the magazine as a complete process, with editorial feeding circulation, circulation feeding advertising, advertising feeding editorial, rather than separate parts working against each other. That didn’t mean doing everything the advertisers wanted, though we did a lot, and Andy would have had me do more. It did mean that a certain kind of reader led to a certain kind of advertiser and vice versa. And in explaining the magazine’s editorial policy to advertisers, I was also formulating it for myself — defining it in sharper, clearer terms, giving it direction, identity, finding not only its niche in the market, but also its place in the culture. There was another thing I liked about selling advertising: Success could be measured in dollars and cents, pages and half pages and quarter pages, and like Andy, I was soon counting them and measuring totals against the previous year’s. I liked the feeling of building something from the ground up.
As an editor who is involved in the advertising side of a magazine (trade, not consumer), this entire piece resonated with me. Except my boss doesn’t wear an outrageous white wig and invite me to parties with Bianca Jagger.
Summer’s nearly over, dear readers! Better stock up on some Unrequired Reading!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: August 6, 2010”
I enjoyed this article about Condé Nast’s new digital publishing guru/savant, Scott Dadich. (Well, I was filled with resentment and curmudgeonism at first, especially when I read that he’s only 34 years old, but I got over that quickly and decided to read the piece on its own merits, rather than in terms of my failure.) Mr. Dadich’s colleagues praise him as a magazine visionary, focusing on his work in building a digital version of Wired. That success led to his new role as executive director of digital magazine development at Condé Nast, where he’ll try to repeat that magic and simultaneously re-engineer the publishing workflow. Over the course of the article, I also appreciated his willingness to rethink what a magazine is once it’s freed from its physical constraints, and to convince executives to take him seriously.
“The only reason magazine design looks the way it does is because it’s the literal, physical limitations of two pieces of paper,” he said.
“With this,” he said, gesturing to an iPad sitting on a couch, “we wiped the slate clean. We have one pane. We have these many pixels. We have this proportion. How are we going to use it and how are we going to tell a story?”
It’s an interesting question he raises, and I’m glad that Condé Nast is going to let him pursue it, but I don’t think it’s the one that’s going to “save publishing.” It’s all well and good to develop a whole new idea of what a magazine is, and add all sorts of content that isn’t available in print to build a different consumer experience, but that doesn’t answer the flipside-question: who’s going to pay for it?
And if you search through that article, you’ll find that there isn’t a single instance of the word “advertiser.”
What the magazine industry allegedly learned from the plummeting ad sales that accompanied the recession, is that they’ve been giving their magazines away too cheaply. For years, they used cheap subscription rates to draw in readers of certain demographics that they could then sell to advertisers. When advertisers pulled back in late 2008 and throughout 2009, publishers were stuck mailing magazines to subscribers at a pittance. When Newsweek went up for sale, the dossier indicated that it had $40 million in subscription liabilities (as in, that’s what it owes subscribers for future copies). It sold for a buck, plus assumption of liabilities and a sincere desire not to fire half the staff.
You know what? The model of advertisers subsidizing cheap subscriptions isn’t changing. Major consumer publishers haven’t buckled down and started raising subscription rates to anywhere near cover price, despite their professed need to build up that revenue source. How do I know this? A few months ago, I subscribed to Esquire (a Hearst mag, not Condé) for two years at the cost of $10. That price doesn’t even cover the postage for more than an issue or two, much less pay for the writers, editors, sales staff, back-office personnel, real estate and other overhead. Sure, that’s anecdotal, but you can find that subscription on Amazon; today it’s at $8 for two years. In fact, here’s an image from an e-mail that I received from Amazon this very morning:
(Note the rates at the top of each column.)
Now, there are magazines out there that don’t discount heavily for subscribers. I have subscriptions to both Monocle (75 GBP/year for 10 issues) and Fantastic Man ($40/year for two issues); the latter puts virtually no magazine content on its website, while the former decided to make a newspaper edition of itself this summer. The only thing further from an iPad version would be if they chiseled an issue in stone. Neither mag is mass market (Monocle does seem to be popping up on a lot of newsstands), but neither one seems to be posting multimillion-dollar losses every year.
I don’t know if Mr. Dadich avoided talking about advertising, or if the writer, John Koblin, or his editor chose to focus on the design/re-think to the exclusion of the advertising model, or if no one thought it was worth discussing.
Mr. Koblin does point out that, following the wild success of the first iPad issue of Wired, the second issue’s sales-figures haven’t been made public. The first ish sold 102,884 copies at $4.99 each. Apple takes a 30% cut from all app sales, so Condé Nast was left with $359,373.81 in circulation revenues, plus whatever ad money it brought in.
That math’s not in the article. There’s a reference to “new revenue streams, much of it from the digital experience,” but that’s the about it for the business side of the business.
I don’t think most journalists like to write about how their own sausage gets made, nor how ad dollars can subtly dictate editorial content. The New York Observer, which published the profile of Mr. Dadich (as well as an interesting story on the recent decision of Khoi Vinh to quit his role as design director of nytimes.com), was allegedly losing $2 million a year before it was bought by a young real estate magnate. And that was in 2006, prior to the advertising apocalypse of 2008-??.
The whole “sexy new model, never mind the money” vibe of the article actually puts me in mind of another Condé Nast property: Vogue. I meant to write about The September Issue when Amy & I watched it a few months ago. It’s a documentary about the making of the 2007 fall-fashion issue of Vogue, which clocked in at 840 pages. The movie does a wonderful job of showing the tensions and rivalries that exist at Vogue, and beautifully sets up Grace Coddington as a sort of “better sister” to the iconic Anna Wintour as they work on the biggest issue in history.
Here’s my big problem with the movie: You can’t put out an 840-page magazine unless your advertising staff posts mammoth, record-breaking sales. We get a brief scene of a pep talk by publisher (which basically means “head of sales,” for readers not involved in publishing) Tom Florio in the beginning, but zero mention of all the pages of ads that have to be sold to justify that giant page-count. That’s a story too, and its omission speaks volumes (to me, a paranoid).
So don’t get me wrong: I think it’s great that Condé Nast is trying to rethink magazines for the tablet computing era. I hope Mr. Dadich manages to develop non-traditional ideas for more magazines as they go digital, while keeping them from simply cannibalizing the content of their websites. Also, it’s awesome that design guys are getting their due.
But at some point the sales guys are going to have to figure out a way to get advertisers and their agencies on board, or all that groundbreaking technology and design in the world will go for naught. After all, as messed up as it sounds, the biggest business success in the past 10 years has been Google, a company that makes nearly all its money by . . . selling little text ads on search results.
Reading material
New York Observer: “The Savior of Condé Nast: Scott Dadich Is The New It Boy of the Mag World”
New York Observer: “It’s Not You, It’s Me: Design Director Khoi Vinh Leaves The Times at Paywall Altar”
Slate: “So, You Bought the New York Observer: Unsolicited advice for new owner Jared Kushner”
The Awl: “Nick Denton: On the Web, Female Trumps Male, Youth Trumps Age”
All this talk about Barnes & Noble potentially going private put me in mind of this great SNL bit about the founding of the company (stick with it):
What I’m reading: Imperial Bedrooms
What I’m listening to: We Are Born
What I’m watching: 44 Inch Chest (it’s no Sexy Beast), Michael Jackson: This is It, and Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage. The MJ pic was okay, but that Rush documentary was A-W-E-S-O-M-E. Go grab the DVD on Netflix. NownowNOW!
What I’m drinking: DH Krahn’s & Q-Tonic.
What I’m smoking: I had an Arturo Fuente Single Chateau during our company picnic on Friday (I had to get work done and showed up around 4 hours late, but I still got to spend 2-3 hours at the picnic). It was the first cigar I smoked in years and, boy, was it good.
What Rufus & Otis are up to: The usual: discovering a snake, charging a deer, and otherwise just trying to stay cool.
Where I’m going: A couple of July 4th weekend parties.
What I’m happy about: The end of my big-ass Top 20 Pharma / Top 10 Biopharma issue is in sight! Only 3 more profiles to write, after which I’ve gotta lay out all the pages, but it’s actually coming together! I think I’ll actually be able to finish it by Thursday! Whew!
What I’m sad about: The state of the pharma industry.
What I’m worried about: What effect the above is going to have on my livelihood in the next few years.
What I’m pondering: Why Rush isn’t in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. That’s a goddamned embarrassment.
I’m back from Chicago (via Madison and Milwaukee)! Time for a load of Unrequired Reading, dear readers!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: June 11, 2010”
I’m off to Louisiana! Down in the Treme, just me and my baby! (okay, we’ll be nowhere near Treme, but still.)
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: June 4, 2010”
[This is the fourth in a series of long-ass rambling posts about my travels in Chicago and Toronto from May 3-9. Part 1 is over here and part 2 is over there. Now, where did I put part 3? Oh, it’s right here!]
Where were we? Oh, yeah: I had gone to bed at midnight, head pounding, anticipating a hangover to rival Informex in Las Vegas 2004. That time, my publisher, a sales-pal of his, and I started drinking sangria around 4 p.m. when the show ended, and kept going until around 11. That was the time I discovered you could be hungover while still drinking. The cab-ride to the airport the next morning was no doubleplusungood. However, the early-morning flight back to Newark was filled with TV executives, and they were all coke-burnouts, so my omnipresent sunglasses and greenish pallor went unremarked.
This time around? Sure, I’d taken the ibuprofen & Gatorade combo that served me in pretty good stead back in grad school, but I didn’t have high hopes.
And then I opened my eyes at 6 a.m. and felt perfectly fine. I was puzzled. I immediately ran my hangover-diagnostic, rolling my eyes up, down, left and right, waiting for the brain-crippling pain to strike. But it never came. I cautiously got out of bed, expecting to find that
Astonishingly, it turned out to be none of the above. A miracle had transpired, right there in my overpriced hotel room in Chicago! I’ve long sworn by the notion high-end gins as being less damaging to one’s health than a Bombay Sapphire or Tanqueray, but the two Hendrick’s at dinner were pretty sizable and (for me) quickly consumed. I didn’t recall pacing the North Shore & tonic over any appreciable length of time. And I’d neglected to mention the beers earlier at the conference, a couple of Sam Adams bottles courtesy of the nearby Massachusetts pavilion, because I didn’t want you to think ill of me.
With relative vigor, I strode into the bathroom and peed for about five minutes straight, during which time I checked my iPhone, which I’d left charging on the counter. It was there that I’d received the bad news to counter my awesome start to the day.
My pal Tom, who was planning to join us in Toronto for the weekend, had to cancel his trip. His mom (and travel partner for this junket) had taken ill the night before the flight to Canada, and he could neither compel her to risk her life on a plane or abandon her, what with it being Mother’s Day weekend and him being a decent human being. Beyond my worries about his mom’s health, this bummed me out because I was hoping to spend some time shooting the breeze with Tom during the trip. Also, he was supposed to moderate an all-star panel of cartoonists at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival during the weekend, and I knew how much he was looking forward to that. And then there was the panel we were supposed to moderate together . . .
He’d e-mailed 40 minutes earlier with the bad news and asked me to call. It was 4 a.m. local time for him, but I followed his orders. He told me that his mom had been able to rest once Tom had convinced her that she wasn’t “ruining everything” by getting sick. I’m sure the anxiety over a canceled trip exacerbated the health problems she was having. Tom was sad about having to miss TCAF, as well as dining & conversation with me and Amy.
A week earlier, he asked me if I’d be interested in co-moderating a panel with him during the festival. It would consist of the two of us interviewing one of my favorite cartoonists, Roger Langridge. Tom figured that I could focus on Roger’s earlier “alternative” work, while he would tackle Roger’s most recent project, an ongoing comics adaptation of The Muppet Show. I was thrilled to have been invited, but by the end of our conversation this morning, I had volunteered to conduct the interview solo. It’s funny how these things happen. Once we were off the phone, I wrote down in my notebook, “Pick up Langridge books!” I was only going to be home for about 10 hours between flights, and would likely forget something important; I’d need to read through some of Roger’s comics to put together some good questions for him.
Meanwhile, I still had another day of BIO ahead of me! The only appointment on my calendar had fortunately rescheduled from an 8 a.m. breakfast conversation to a 1 p.m. stop at my booth. Hungover or not, I was happy not to have a conversation about bio-manufacturing market issues before I’d metabolized my morning coffee.
Also, it’d give my skin time to settle down. Between the harsh soap of hotel sheets and pillowcases, and the need to shave every morning (I usually go 2 days between shaves), my face can get pretty scratchy and irritated in the morning. There are many little aspects of business travel that make it a pain.
So I packed, cleaned up, put on “final day” clothes — suit-jacket, dress shirt and tie and khakis, rather than a full suit — and headed out for the show. The stop for the shuttle-bus was gone, as our corner of E. Illinois St. was blocked off for some sort of Top Chef competition and taping. A cardboard cutout of Padma Lakshmi leaned against a production truck. I wondered if I could get it onto the airplane that evening. The new stop turned out to be around the block, and I shared the trip with another pal from the same Belfast-based company. His accent is easier for me to understand than Philip’s, but he’s a quiet-talker, so I was back at square one.
For some reason, the conference organizers had decided that the final day of BIO should run a full 9:00-5:00 schedule, a bizarre move considering that
My flight home was 7:15, and I already anticipated that I would have to get out of a traffic-stranded cab, grab my suitcase, and start running down the highway to get to O’Hare in time. Fortunately, my boss realized that it was a little unfair to have me on setup and teardown duty with my mini-vacation schedule. He paid the show organizers to take down the pop-up, pack it, and ship it back to us. This meant I could bolt by 3:30 or 4:00. I was relieved.
“It’s a pity you didn’t come to dinner with us last night,” my boss said. We nicknamed him Captain Zagat because of his devotion to finding great restaurants wherever we go.
“Where’d you eat?”
“We went for Italian,” he said. I looked puzzled; what with him being a goombah from NJ and all, I didn’t think he’d bother with Italian anywhere but home. “Yeah, yeah, I know. This is probably the first Italian restaurant I’ve gone to west of New York. But it was amazing! The only problem happened at the end. . .”
The dinner party was just my boss, my sales director, and my associate editor. The latter two headed off for the ladies’ room while Cap’n Z. settled the bill. The owner came by the table to talk to him, and he told her how this was one of the finest Italian meals he’d ever had. She chatted with him for a second, then suddenly ran away from the table.
He wondered what he’d said to cause that reaction. Then she came running back, carrying a glass of water from a nearby table. Apparently, when my sales director had gotten up, she’d tossed her cloth napkin on the table and it landed on a candle. The owner was able to douse it before the fire spread, but my team was pretty embarrassed.
I was glad I went with My Dinner With Sid instead.
As is my wont, I meandered around the exhibit hall on and off throughout the day. Most of my advertiser pals were happy to shoot the breeze, since most attendees had already blown town. I was trading travel plans with a pal of mine. He was headed back to the Pacific Northwest the next day, so I gave him the location of the lounge I hit the night before, along with the name of that amazing gin.
I told him, “At some point, I thought it was smart to get a flight home that lands at 10:30 p.m., then get a flight at 11 a.m. the next morning for Toronto.”
“You’re dumber than you look,” he remarked.
His new CEO, a smooth businessman near my age, was in earshot, and asked, “Why are you visiting Toronto?”
I thought for a moment about how to answer this. I could’ve just gone with, “I have family and friends up there, and my wife loves the restaurants.” After all, this guy represented one of our major advertisers, and I didn’t know him well enough to judge how he’d react to finding out the editor of one of the major pharma B2B magazines is also an indie-comic geek.
On a whim, I said, “There’s a comics and cartooning festival going on up there, and I’m moderating a panel.”
He brightened. “Really? There’s a fantastic comic store in Toronto that you have to visit!” he exclaimed.
I was flabbergasted, but was able to say, “You mean The Beguiling?”
“No, no! That’s good, too, but you have to get to The Silver Snail! It’s on Queen Street! It’s amazing!”
I told him I’d check it out, depending on how much time I had. He was heading out from the show, shook my hand, and left.
My pal stared at me, and said, “I don’t believe that just happened.”
“Neither do I! He likes comics?”
“Dude. That’s so bizarre.” He gathered up a few coworkers to tell them about the exchange, and all of them were incredulous. Between that and the discovery that my pal Sid went to college with my future sister-in-law, this trip sure kept me on my toes.
My 1:00 p.m. appointment rescheduled for 3:00 and, while it went well, we were often interrupted by the noise of people tearing velcro displays down, or sealing boxes with packing tape.
Around 3:30 the marketing director asked, “What time are you heading out?”
“As soon as we’re done talking,” I told her.
“Oh, my gosh!” said the VP of business development. “Why don’t you head out? We’ll talk more once we’re back in the office!” We traded cards and they left for their booth.
Here are the two biggest lessons I’ve learned in my <gasp!> 15 years covering trade shows for business magazines:
The first is pretty obvious: you’re spending hours and hours walking through a lightly carpeted convention center hall. The second? Think of how dopey you look when you hand someone your card and then realize it’s another person’s card. You end up fumbling through a stack of jumbled cards, trying to find one of yours. It’s unprofessional and easily preventable: just keep your cards in one pocket, other people’s cards in the other. Don’t say I never did anything for you.
(Note: you could go with a fancy-looking card holder, but nobody trusts someone who uses one of those.)
Around 3:45, I closed up the booth, putting the remaining magazines out on the table, and headed for the cab stand. There was no line, which worried me. As it turned out, that was because every single person at BIO was already in a cab on the way to O’Hare. Seriously, the traffic was insane. I marveled at the idiocy of stretching the last day to 5:00 p.m., and was thankful that I wasn’t going to be there for it.
The 20-mile drive to O’Hare took more than hour. I put on my iPod, listened to The National, in anticipation of their new record, and watched the scenery, such as it was. The only noteworthy sight (well, the only thing I can recall) was a strange billboard for the Chicago Cubs:
It’s not opening day.
It’s opening year.
YEAR ONE
Year One? Eek! Apparently Pinella was overthrown by Pol Pot, the Cubbies are playing at Wrigley Killing Field and Carl Zambrano’s stint “in the bullpen” is just another version of the re-education camps. I can’t imagine what they’d do to Steve Bartman.
Anyway, the airport was uneventful. When I checked in at an e-kiosk, I was offered $200 to defer my flight till next morning. For a split-second, I thought, “I could change tomorrow’s ticket on Porter to a Midway-to-Toronto, and Amy could drive herself to Newark in the morning.” Then I thought, “Only if they add a zero or two to that offer.” They didn’t, so i spent some time in the Red Carpet Club (United’s version of the President’s Club), saw the news about some wild stock market gyrations, read some of that Mitchum biography, continued to marvel over my lack of a hangover, and chose not to tempt fate by having a Hendrick’s & tonic at the club bar.
I got in to EWR safe and sound, hit the ground running (well, relaxedly strolling) and walked in the door at home at 11:30 p.m., greeted by wife and tail-wagging, face-licking doggies, the latter of whom had no idea I was going to be out the door 10 hours later.
Next: Ame and Squalor Victoria
May 3: Bloodshot Eye of the Tiger
May 4: Skokie, the Germans, and the Lost Ugandan
May 5: “Jumpin’ with my boy Sid in the cityâ€
