Celebrities take hands-on interest in magazines

McCall`s magazine has been publishing for 127 years. Rosie O`Donnell has been hosting her talk show for five.

But when she takes over as editorial director of a relaunched McCall`s this spring, O`Donnell will get top billing.

It might seem a major risk to mess with not just the image, but the very identity of a brand that has been an institution for generations.

Even in these celebrity-besotted times, it`s hard to imagine consumers tuning in to music videos on Emine MTV, or rushing out for a six-pack of Martin Dew soda (as in Ricky).

Yet Rosie`s (or Rosie`s McCall`s - the magazine`s name is still uncertain) has a better shot than it might appear. In the world of women`s magazines, personalities increasingly mean popularity.

Last April saw the launch of what has proved the hottest new magazine in years: O, The Oprah Magazine.

With the massively popular Oprah Winfrey as its founder and guiding light (she appears on every cover), O`s circulation already has eclipsed 2 million.

That follows the formidable example of Martha Stewart Living, a magazine that has become a newsstand icon since its launch by style doyenne Martha Stewart some nine years ago.

Even the Olsen twins of "Full House" fame are rushing the publishing stage: This March, the 14-year-old sister act plans to launch Mary-Kate and Ashley, a lifestyle magazine for younger girls. Overall, celebrity/entertainment magazines have become one of the fastest-growing publishing categories over the past couple of years, says Samir Husni, a University of Mississippi professor who publishes the definitive guide to new magazines.

"This is the hero-worship (aspect) of magazines," says Husni, a.k.a. "Mr. Magazine." "The silver screen and the TV screen brought all these celebrities to our dens. Now the magazines are bringing them into our bedrooms and our bathrooms."

Stewart, whose magazine is just one cog in a multimedia empire, might well be considered the patron saint of this publishing movement.

"It seems everybody has taken a page from Martha Stewart," says Lisa Granatstein, who covers the business of consumer magazines for the trade journal Mediaweek. "She really nailed it."

Winfrey took things one step further by starting a magazine that`s about not so much what she does, but simply who she is.

Each issue of O, The Oprah Magazine features an uplifting essay called "What I Know For Sure," with such passages as: "I believe in the power that not only allows the sun to rise but turns seeds into flowers and dreams into realities." And each issue also features a heart-to-heart chat with a like-minded soul, from Bette Midler to - who else? - Martha Stewart.

Although Rosie`s is still in development, O`Donnell has said it will combine McCall`s staples - beauty, health and food - with stories on such topics as motherhood and women`s causes. "I want (the magazine) to be about the take-charge woman; the mom who knows that there`s more to life than losing weight and getting gorgeous; the woman who wants to make a difference for herself, her children and her world and the woman who likes to laugh," O`Donnell said in a statement when the project was announced. "This will be a magazine that inspires real women living in the real world."

LEFT BEHIND? For McCall`s, one of the so-called "Seven Sisters" magazines (along with Better Homes & Gardens, Ladies` Home Journal, Family Circle, Redbook, Woman`s Day and Good Housekeeping), it`s a bold move. If it works, women`s publishing could see a wave of new celebrity brands. And if that happens, some more traditional women`s magazines could be left to scrap for publicity and readers.

The numbers for old-line women`s magazines are still huge. Among the Seven Sisters, Better Homes and Gardens leads with a circulation of more than 7 million. Even the straggler, Redbook, boasts more than 2 million. There also has been a strong push in the women`s health-and-fitness niche, with fresh arrivals like Sports Illustrated for Women and relatively new titles like Self. And then there are the big fashion-oriented titles: Vogue, Elle and Glamour and the like.

But many of the established women`s magazines have been coping with stagnant circulations, and the category has seemed ripe for something new. "It used to be that when McCall`s was called McCall`s, that was a status symbol," Husni says. "Now, (starting) with Martha Stewart Living," women`s titles have begun to turn more toward celebrities.

"It`s an extension of the cult onto paper," he says.

And once it works for one magazine, it`s a given that there will be plenty of imitators. "That`s our industry," says Husni. "It`s always been a copycat industry."

SAYING A MOUTHFUL The originally planned name of O`Donnell`s magazine - Rosie`s McCall`s - doesn`t exactly roll off the tongue, perhaps reflecting the awkwardness inherent in the pairing of a hot celebrity brand with a somewhat stodgy magazine institution.

"That`s a lot of apostrophes. It`s a mouthful," says Granatstein, adding that the likely reason the publisher included the McCall`s name was that "they don`t want to lose all their McCall`s readers.

"They have a huge circulation, and to throw away a (127-year-old) name is a risk," she says of the existing magazine, whose circulation is just over 4 million.

A couple of previous name-branded women`s magazines have popped up in the past decade or so: Lear`s, from Frances Lear, the late ex-wife of TV producer Norman Lear; and Mirabella, started by longtime magazine editor Grace Mirabella.

Both have since folded. Husni says he believes their names were meant to appeal more to the media than to the public.

There has been one recent example of such branding among men`s magazines: George - which, despite its name (a tribute to our first president), was really about the magazine`s founder, John F. Kennedy Jr.

That magazine surprised many observers by surviving for more than a year after Kennedy`s death in 1999. But its publisher announced recently that George is folding.

What new magazines like Rosie`s do to the health of competitors remains to be seen. But it would be hard to argue that the magazine business in general has suffered from these new incursions, or from the onslaught of saucy new men`s titles like Maxim.

While the number of new magazines last year was down, says Husni, there still were 864 titles launched, and overall readership is up. "I think the major trend that spans the last five years is that we have more magazines than ever," he says. We`ve had the prophets of doom and gloom, and yet we have something like 5,500 consumer magazines now."

In "every aspect," Husni says, "the business looks healthy."

(SIDEBAR 1.- Women`s Impact on Man`s Magazine) In the spine of each issue of the men`s magazine Maxim, a slogan reads: "The Best Thing to Happen to Men Since Women."

Whether or not you happen to agree with that boast, here is something that`s hard to argue with: Women`s magazines just may be the best thing to have happened to Maxim.

Maxim, a British import that was brought stateside in 1997, has proved to be one of the two most successful magazine launches of recent years. (The other is O, the Oprah Magazine, which debuted last April.) And it has accomplished that by mimicking what women`s "service" magazines have done for years: Provide tips and advice on everything from fashion to fitness to sex.

"We think of ourselves as a service book, essentially," says Keith Blanchard, Maxim`s editor. "We want to make our readers` lives better in every way we can, in order to secure their loyalty for life."

The genius of Maxim`s business model - what has sent the magazine rocketing past 2 million in circulation - is what Blanchard calls a "Trojan horse" strategy: couching the nuts-and-bolts service stuff amid a profusion of raunchy humor, snarky articles and photos of barely clad babes. Guys, Blanchard argues, "don`t like to take advice. If we had a magazine called `Better Sex Tips,` guys would never buy it."

For better or worse, Maxim gives these readers what is in many ways a male version of Cosmo. Besides a photo of a leggy model in spike heels, the January cover also features the cover lines "Sex 911"; "Get Fit Now! (Right After This Moon Pie)"; and "Women `Fess Up: 50 Female Mysteries Solved Once and For All." The difference is that inside the magazine, the info is presented with a kind of wink-wink, "We`re too cool to care" attitude. The "Women Fess Up" story, for example, offers "the definitive answers on all sorts of mysterious chick crap," from "Sex and the City" to the British royal family. And yet take away the attitude, and this is a standard-issue advice piece - not unlike one you might find in Elle or Glamour.

"Women don`t necessarily need to have service fed to them in a jokey way," says Lisa Granatstein, a senior editor for the trade journal Mediaweek. "They can take it straight up."

By contrast, she says, in Maxim, men "make fun of themselves and their inadequacies. It`s sort of a roundabout way of (providing) the information that women get."

Maxim`s success has spawned a slew of imitators, from FHM to Gear to a new entry called EGO. But it actually wasn`t the first men`s title to venture into the service niche.

Men`s Health - a more nakedly service-oriented publication - debuted about 15 years ago. It remains popular, with a circulation of some 1.6 million.

But its numbers dipped 1.1 percent in the second half of last year (the most recent period for which those figures are available). In that same time, Maxim`s circulation rose an astounding 126.7 percent, almost four times faster than any other magazine.

Other established men`s magazines - GQ, Esquire, Men`s Journal - are holding steady, but all have circulations well below 1 million. In fact, the only men`s title that tops Maxim is the venerable Playboy, which is also one of the few mainstream, big-circulation men`s publications that shows more skin than Maxim does.

That may be no coincidence. Samir Husni, a magazine expert at the University of Mississippi, believes much of Maxim`s success is due to its strategic deployment of a string bikini`s worth of discretion. As a result, he says, men are less embarrassed to buy Maxim than they are more explicit magazines.

"I always knew that audience existed - that audience who wanted to read Playboy, but was shy about it," Husni says.

"Maxim put a little bit of clothes on Playboy." (SIDEBAR 2.- Different Chapters in Magazine World) San Diego Union-Tribune staff writer James Hebert covered the warped world of magazines for eight years in the column "Magazine Scene." A few highlights, lowlights and unclassifiable magazine moments:

Fall `92: Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown jumps to The New Yorker, becoming the venerable weekly`s fourth editor. Traditionalists predict catastrophe; optimists predict fewer 30,000-word treatises on soybeans.

Also: Ray Gun debuts. Designed by David Carson, the influential music mag ushers in an era of vertigo-inducing typography. Carson later jumps to Surfer; an editor there, Ben Marcus, invokes the design term "Carson-ogenic."

Winter `93: Wired magazine launches. We call it "a brash, splashy fantasia of virtual reality, mind-blowing gadgetry and wild ideas." Most mind-blowing of all: The magazine may "someday" offer an online version. Imagine that.

Also: McCall`s runs a story titled "How to Protect Your Kids From Madonna."

Summer `93: Two enterprising Harvard students start a men`s magazine called Inside Edge. Its dating column offers tips like the following rhyme for memorizing a date`s address: "Julie`s house is 23 / She is going to sleep with me!" Mercifully, the magazine is soon 86`d.

Summer `94: A magazine called Secrets Exchange debuts, promising anonymous airings of readers` intimate revelations. Among them: "My Wife Thinks I`m Having an Affair - But I`m Really Going Bowling!". Our take: it`s "a nice oatmeal cookie for a culture choking on Oprah."

Also: Loose-cannon humor writer Joe Queenan, on assignment for Movieline, views 29 films about nuns. He discovers that nuns with guitars "are truly the single most frightening sight in the solar system."

Fall `94: In a first-person Rolling Stone piece about giving up the drug Prozac, a writer observes: "Everything around me seemed a little bit flat and one-dimensional, but I could live with that. What the hell, I grew up in San Diego." Spring `95: In a perhaps ill-advised moment of whimsy (inspired by an ad in Harper`s), Magazine Scene dreams up some titles of potential magazines about spanking. We learn our lesson: Several callers subsequently inquire about where to find the magazines.

Fall `95: JFK Jr.`s magazine George launches, with Cindy Crawford on its cover. Despite doubts about the interest in a Washington-meets-Hollywood magazine, George will last more than five years.

Also: The literary/photography quarterly DoubleTake debuts, suggesting there may be a place for good taste in magazines after all. Spring `97: The men`s magazine Maxim launches. Forget what we said about good taste.

Summer `97: The matchless Might magazine publishes its final issue, and is smart-alecky to the last. The final editorial is titled "Magazines Are For Suckers." A fine-print subscription notice reads: "Um, there will probably be a problem with everyone`s subscription. Because, um, there probably won`t be anymore, er, issues coming to you. Heh, heh."

And a final jab: "Printed in the USA, where dreams come true for only the crooked, and success occurs only where virtue fails." Editor Dave Eggers goes on to serious book-writing success with "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius." The status of his virtue is uncertain.

Nov. `98: We get our first look at Chinmusic!. It may be the most inspired publishing concept ever: a magazine about baseball and punk rock.

Spring `99: The new Brill`s Content gets on The New Yorker`s case over a made-up "staff member" named Owen Ketherry, whose supposed job is to write back to those who send letters to the magazine. (The name is an anagram for "The New Yorker"; the responses are actually written by various staffers.) Editor David Remnick (who took over from Brown in `98) says of the Ketherry fiction: "I don`t think it`s a lie. It`s an institutional rubric."

Summer `99: Tina Brown`s new project, Talk magazine, debuts. An odd mix of the provocative and the puerile, it strains to find readers who aren`t among those featured in its party pics. Spring 2000: O, The Oprah Magazine debuts. Three minutes later, it is pronounced the most successful new magazine in eons.

Summer 2000: A press release announcing a new online magazine arrives crumpled inside its own miniature trash can. The magazine`s name (as well as its subject matter): Failure.

Considering the number of magazines we`ve seen surface - and disappear - over the course of eight years, nothing could make more sense. (c)Copley News Service

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Author: James Hebert