the newspaper business

Is your newspaper producing a slick magazine?

If not, why not?

We are involved in two: From House to Home (FHTH) and Better Health and Living (BHL) both produced by PSA Magazines. Ours have limited local editorial content: but ALL local advertising.

We have produced a couple “magazines” as special sections, but they aren’t regular publications.

Advertisers love them and we think readers do too. After all, it’s a free bonus with their newspaper. We can tell our advertisers love them because we run FHTH quarterly and it’s 80 pages chock full of ads. BHL is sold out for the year since January.

So tell me again why your newspaper isn’t producing a magazine?

The first issue of USA Today’s Open Air magazine was in Friday’s newspaper.

It’s pretty, has pretty pictures, and I’m sure the writing is good. I can’t judge the writing because I didn’t read any of the stories. I scanned some of the shorter stories, but generally the magazine had stuff that I already had read: either in USA Today, or some other magazine.

Here are their feature stories:

• High-class hiking
• Spring break grows up
• Triathletes with a cause
• Reader photo
• The thrill of skeet

The feature stories were very generic. Name a high traffic tourist area and it was covered in the magazine, but only lightly covered. Some interesting personalities gave their insights to the tourist attractions, which was a different twist. The other features were the requisite “feel good” feature (triathletes) and unusual (skeet shooting.)

At sixty eight pages, about half ads, I’m sure it is highly profitable - and didn’t cannabalize from the regular newspaper.

I had to go to the website to find that it will be printed quarterly. It launched with no consumer marketing to back it up.

BTW: the ad for beef (above) is the most unintentionally gross ad I have seen. At first glance it looks like a river flowing through gorge. But it’s a very close up of a steak and the “river” is juices, with mushrooms the size of boulders. Gross.

All in all, very average for a magazine from a content and photography standpoint. From an ad standpoint, a winner.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 8th, 2008 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.