Years ago, my father told me a little rhyme he learned growing up in Mississippi. “If you are white, you’re alright. If you’re brown, stick around. If you’re black, get back.” This little ditty seems to capture what happens when Minnesota publishers of white mainstream publications put black people on the cover of their magazines. They simply do not sell as well.
In April 2002, The Rake put a Somali woman on the cover to highlight a top story about strained relations between blacks and Somalis. According to The Rake editor Hans Eisenbeis, the issue had nearly twice as many returns as the previous issue which had Bob Dylan on the cover. “That issue was one of our strongest issues editorially. The writing was great. But people just did not pick it up. Tom [Bartel, The Rake’s publisher] warned me that putting a black person on the cover could be a problem.”
Bartel admits that when he owned City Pages, he found that putting dark faces on the cover torpedoed the pickup rates. “We tried it enough times to know that we were taking a risk.” According to Rebecca Sterner, a Minnesota-based publishing consultant, “magazine covers with black faces just don’t sell as well. This is not just a Minneapolis problem. It is a national problem.”
Illustrating her point, Sterner spoke about a major national magazine that featured Cosby Show kid Raven-Symone on its cover. The photograph was “gorgeous.” Yet the issue bombed. “The magazine was very frustrated. They thought the issue would fly off the racks.”
Sterner believes there are two explanations—one harsh and the other a bit more politically palatable. “One could simply say these things happen because we are a racist society. The more charitable view is that people are more comfortable buying a magazine when they can identify with the cover subject.”
Brian Anderson, editor of Mpls-St.Paul magazine, insists that “it is the topic, not the person” that moves the magazine. However, he was not willing to categorically state that his staff did not talk about race when designing covers, conceding that the color of cover subjects is a “factor” in how well a particular magazine sells.
One thing is certain. Local publishers are very skittish discussing race and magazine covers. Publisher Bartel says “it’s a dirty little secret” in the publishing business. Yet, no one other than Bartel was willing to say so on the record. “Publishers do not want to appear to be racist. And they do not want to appear to accuse their readers of being racist either.”
I matched the covers of Mpls-St.Paul magazine and Minnesota Monthly with the actual newsstand sales numbers as verified by the Audit Bureau of Circulation for the past two and a half years to see if sales dropped when black people were on the cover. Most of the time they did, sometimes dramatically. For example, Mpls-St.Paul ran its annual “Top Docs” issue in January 2000, selling 19,165 newsstand issues. The next month’s cover featured African American Tonya Moten Brown, U president Mark Yudof’s right-hand person. Sales dropped 60 percent. According to Anderson, this drop was to be expected because the “Top Docs” issue is always such a big seller for them. Yet the next year, the issue following “Top Docs” actually did better than “Top Docs.” Hmmmm.
Minnesota Monthly’s statistics tell the same story. In January 2001, the magazine put Paul Magers and his dog on the cover and sold 5,879 newsstand copies. When black Viking Robert Smith graced the next cover, newsstand sales nosedived nearly 40 percent.
MSP editor Anderson still maintains that topics and notoriety are the deciding factors on who makes the cover cut. “If I have the opportunity to put Randy Moss or Kevin Garnett on the cover and it made sense, I would do it.” Unfortunately, Anderson misses the point. I certainly do not doubt that he will put a black person on the cover of his magazine again. But the numbers do not lie. The explanations and the rationalizations are endless as to why they do not sell as well. However, when it comes to selling magazines—as with nearly everything else in our society—race matters. Pretending otherwise does not make it so.
Clinton Collins, Jr. is a Minneapolis attorney and commentator.
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