Yesterday Radar magazine closed–again. And true to established pattern, editor Maer Roshan is not conceding defeat, he’s just back to trying to find another financial backer. Roshan has managed to be gainfiully employed in launching his magazine for three years now, while putting out a total of five issues. Nice work if you can get it!
There’s no question that one of the more idiotic things a person can do with his money is try to launch a stand-alone glossy national magazine, but it was never clear to me how they thought such an erratic, periodic publishing schedule would ever fly. Never has an editor got more press and more buzz for doing so little as Roshan has now for thirty-six months– excluding his former mentor Tina Brown, of course.
It seems to me that what Radar really needed was some sort of unique business model as selling proposition to advertisers, and the “we’ll-publish -whenever-we-get-enough-ad-pages-put-together” approach was apparently not unique enough to convince ad-buyers to drop the 15 to 20 grand per page that Radar was asking. Cool counts for a lot among readers, and to a lesser degree, among advertisers. But I’m convinced that ninety percent of cool is the rather mundane job of showing up, punching the clock, and publishing on a regular basis. Nothing says “we’re a legitimate business, dammit” like doing what other magazines do–that is, publishing at least once a month, bimonthly in a pinch.
But regularlity is not just a good business practice. It’s necessary to establish a creative rhythm and continuity. Hell hath no fury like a writer who has been sandbagged. A magazine that is published quarterly at best doesn’t have much chance of inspiring the people it most needs to inspire: those who are responsible for creating it. When I first looked through Radar (which never managed to send me any copies, although I’d dutifully subscribed), I thought it felt like a magazine put together by a managing editor. It contained a lot of well executed material without any obvious overarching vision or voice. But now I think that may have been a function of never having enough pages or enough issues to fully realize whatever vision was sown there.
Then too, financier Mort Zuckerman is coming in for some heat from the likes of Keith Kelly at the New York Post. This is justified. Zuckerman and a partner had committed $20 million to get Radar off the ground, but decided to pull the plug after spending just half of that. An insider at Radar said that Zuckerman left $1.3 million “on the table” in withdrawing their backing in the midst of production on the next issue, which was pencilled in for late January street date. The Post’s Page Six also suggests that Zuckerman caved to the lobbying of powerful friends who did not wish to be written about in such an irreverent periodical. If there is a grain of truth to that, it would have been slathered into oblivion by the vaseline of massive ad sales–if those massive ad sales had ever materialized. For disappointed staffers and contributors, that kind of gossip is a ready-to-hand self-servicing lube; it is shorthand for saying “we were doing our job TOO well. The man shut us down.”
A person has to wonder what Roshan and his minions were doing with all that money and time. I know lunches in Manhattan tend to be long and expensive, but it’s hard to believe that the rest of their time could be adequately occupied with self-googling and Gawker. It is, of course, terribly bad form to criticize Roshan. He’s a good, smart, popular editor who obviously knows a few powerful people around town. But the real reason one’s conscience is troubled by razzing the Radar folks is that we all secretly know what a magazine like that represents–hope. When a smart young editor gets the backing of big money to create a nifty magazine from scratch for himself and people like him–well, it gives everyone in the business a little spring in their step and joy in their hearts. Not every magazine in the world has to model itself on LuckyCargoDomino, and not every editor has to pretend he isn’t publishing a catalog.
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