Shifting Strategies

A fire alarm went off as Cathleen Black, president of Hearst Magazines, began speaking to a group of magazine executives at the University Club recently. Delivering her first “state of the state of publishing” address in five years. Ms. Black, a smooth and effective speaker, kept right on with her prepared words, pausing only when a voice on a loudspeaker finally declared, “There is no emergency.”But Ms. Black’s subject, if not quite an emergency, was the many serious challenges that now face the magazine business. It is a time when costs are rising, newsstand sales are slumping, and the advertisers that magazines depend on have, as she said, “digital stars in their eyes.”Ms. Black has been president of Hearst Magazines for the past 11 years. Before taking this position she was the first woman to be named publisher of a weekly, New York magazine, and served as both president and then publisher during the early years of USA Today. She also was head of the Newspaper Association of America, the industry’s largest trade group. Fortune, not published by Hearst, has for the past six years listed her as one of the “50 Most Powerful Women in American Business.”During her years at Hearst Ms. Black has launched several magazines. O the Oprah Magazine has been her greatest success, and CosmoGirl, the teenage sister of Cosmopolitan, Hearst’s most profitable magazine, has also done well. She has also helped revitalize some of Hearst’s older titles. Once on life support, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, and Redbook were among the company’s top revenue performers last year.But she has struck out, too, with Lifetime, as well as Shop, Etc. and Weekend. In the magazine business, which once measured shelf life in decades, if not centuries, publishers nowadays are far more likely to pull the plug on publications that are not fulfilling expectations. Altogether 22 magazines folded in 2006.“The trick is learning to launch without the tremendous costs of the past,” she told the audience, “perhaps using the TV programming model.” Ms. Black said she envied the British, whose magazines are launched with far smaller editorial and advertising staffs, and more realistic expectations from advertisers. In fact, she said, even long established magazines in Britain have far less staff. “They produce beautiful magazines with much fewer editors. I keep asking, ‘How do they do it?'”Hearst, often with local partners, now publishes 200 international editions. There are 56 editions of Cosmopolitan. George Green, president of Hearst Magazines International, once said, “We’ve learned one thing — that young women all over the world are insecure. And young women all over the world want advice.” The most profitable market is Russia, where Cosmo sells 1 million copies a month. Hearst’s most recent international launch is an edition of Harper’s Bazaar in the shopping mecca of Dubai.Ms. Black recalled that in her speech in 2002, when the ruins of the dot-com economy were smoldering, she mentioned the word “Web” only twice. Now the focus is on the changes that the Internet had forced upon the magazine business. “Consumers are on line … advertisers want to be there, so we want to be there,” she said.She also noted that magazine editors must think of their audience as “consumers” not readers. “The job description of an editor in chief has completely changed in these five years,” she noted. “Now they are the managers of a brand.” Today the editor of a magazine’s Web site often does not report to the magazine’s editor-in-chief and frequently must make quick, independent decisions about content. “The editor of Cosmo said she didn’t mind that as long as it had the smell of Cosmo,” Ms. Black said.“We will always be a print media. But every one of our print titles is also going to have a dot-com attached.” The company’s current Internet strategy is to improve those magazine-related Web sites, use them to drive circulation and achieve leadership is site traffic, which she compared to newsstand sales. And of course, “We want to make money.” To do this, her sales team has to convince advertisers that magazine Web sites are not “value added” to a magazine ad-page deal. “‘Value added’ are two words I hate,” she said.She also conceded that Hearst’s online strategies could change — quickly. “It could be different in 18 months.”

Shifting Strategies

Shifting Strategies

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