Category: Blog Post

We were a little pressed for time yesterday, since our presence was requested at Minnesota Magazine Day. This is an annual to-do over at the Hyatt, hosted graciously by the Minnesota Ad Federation. It consists of a “magazine grab”—basically a shopping spree for most major titles from Hearst, Fairchild, Conde Nast, and the other big nationals. (Also any locals you haven’t already seen.) If you’ve paid the admission fee, you grab as many magazines as you can manage to carry—which is great for doing research, we’ve found.

Then there is lunch and a little motivational speech or two. Yesterday’s speakers included an executive from the Magazine Publishers of America, and the keynote came from People Magazine publisher Paul Caine. The usual bromides were uncapped. The song was upbeat, in the key of heavy flattery. National magazine professionals love to come to Minneapolis to compliment us on our terrific advertising climate. Indeed, this is a great town for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the presence of some of the nation’s best advertising houses, some of the nation’s most solvent ad-buyers, and not a few enthusiastic readers of magazines. We’re getting a little tired of hearing how great we are, actually. While the local publishing scene gets some respect—smart people here not only read magazines and buy ads in them, they also happen to make a few good titles, too—we think it’s not quite sufficient to our desserts.

Each year, the pep talk rarely diverges from the same script. It’s almost comical to hear about how healthy and vital and beloved magazines are, coming from the mouths of people who sell national advertising in them. And yet, the rule doesn’t usually apply in the opposite direction. You should buy an ad in an Advance Publications property, but Advance Publications isn’t all that interested in returning the favor.

What we mean by this is that the national publishing and advertising communities basically syphon off our money and our creativity without a lot of direct local inputs. Anecdotally and scientifically, it has been proven many times over that good local publications have emotional value to local readers that a national cannot touch. Despite the brilliant local print environment, national advertisers count the Twin Cities outside the top-ten advertising markets in the nation, and therefore do not buy ads in magazines or newspapers here. (Virtually none. They may occasionally make a buy in a title that is part of larger national pool, like Village Voice Media.) Take a look at Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, even Seattle—there are numerous terrible publications in those cities that sell national advertising like it’s going out of style.

It is frustrating that so many ad-buyers still make their decisions on the most artificial bases—a periodical’s reach in terms of raw circulation numbers. The magazine industry is allegedly trying to gather its eggs into one basket in order to promote all magazines—rather like the Milk Board pushing milk. But these sorts of campaigns will disproportionately benefit the largest publishers as long as ad-buyers look no further than the top line of the ABC Audit.

Yesterday, we took note—but not advantage—of the Audit Bureau of Circulation’s traditional donation to the festivities. It is a cash bar. They are happy to offer all the usual medicines, for a nominal fee of course. You’ll forgive us for saying that this begins to look like the equivalent of a “kick me” sign pasted on the ass of an entire industry, but maybe especially the local yokels.

As Mike Mosedale mentions here, not everything is tea, sugar, and circulation growth over at the Newspaper of the Twin Cities. For the cilvilian, the finer points of newspaper Guild-speak are often hard to understand. (You mean professional writers have actually stopped sniping at each other long enough to form a working labor union? My gawd, when did that happen!) But this is a quick overview of the sitch: Editor Anders Gyllenhaal, like so many before him, is a huge admirer of prodigal meteorologist Paul Douglas. Mostly, we assume Gyllenahaal admires Paul’s Q-rating and his cross-media ubiquity , the better to cultivate McClatchy’s long-range plan of making the newspaper just as accessible as possible to the junior high-school students of Minnesota. (Personally, we like the rosy-cheeked and sporty Belinda Jensen better.) Anyway, using Paul Douglas to write a daily weather report is a blatant violation of the Strib’s contract with the guild, which pledges not to use non-guild writers in its news sections, even if they are “experts” in their fields. Despite losing the case already (after “insisting” on “binding arbitration”), Strib management has filed a federal lawsuit in hopes of continuing to violate their contract with the guild. They apparently didn’t get the message the first time, and need to be spanked by Dad when he gets home.

Is the Paul Douglas really worth all of this fuss? We know Minnesotans love to talk about the weather, but this seems like a willful exercise of managerial muscle to no particular end other than aggravating the good people of the newsroom. Why, for god’s sake, can’t Douglas go on promoting himself safely tucked away in the Variety section? How about putting his daily ditty on that Post-it Note behind which they are forever hiding their flag? Better yet, put Paul on the Op-Ed page. No one knows better than he that the weatherman peddles one of the most entertaining, least reliable opinions around.

A walk is as good as a hit.

Never make the first or third out at third.

A bloop single looks just like a line-drive in the box score.

You can’t steal first.

Homerun hitters drive Cadillacs.

Respect the game.

Bust your tail and have some fun.

Good pitching beats good hitting.

Pitching is ninety percent of the game.

Chicks dig the long ball.

Throw strikes.

Get it over.

Let the guys behind you make the plays.

Keep your head in the game.

Hit it where they ain’t.

Swing hard and hope you hit something.

If the double-play is a pitcher’s best friend, then the three-run homer is a groomsman.

You better check your ego at the door.

It’s a team game.

There’s no I in Team. There is a U in Us.

Take it one game at a time.

That’s why they play the games.

A buck-eighty will get you a cup of coffee and a slap on the back on your way out the door.

Baseball is a funny game.

It ain’t cheating if you don’t get caught.

This game will humble you in a hurry.

The game will eat you alive.

Mistakes will kill you.

Don’t try to do too much.

Keep it in front of you.

Stay within yourself.

Youneverknow.

It ain’t over until it’s over.

Leave it at the ballpark.

The totals on the board are correct.

We adore David Carr, one of our own who left the Twin Cities Reader to edit Washington City Paper in the midst of a long boom of greatness there that produced folks like Jack Shafer and Brett Anderson. Carr now writes sober and precise media stories for the New York Times, although he is no longer officially on the media beat. But we must say that we never expected him to drink the Kool-Aid when it came to Tina Brown. After giving us a clear signal as to how this happened (he admits in a parenthetical disclosure that he has been a guest on Tina’s now-defunct cable-TV show “Topic A”), he trots out an astonishing string of sycophantic silliness that seems to propose that Ms. Brown invented the modern celebrity. Now, we have as much respect for Tina Brown as the next guy, but let’s be reasonable here. Tina did not create celebrity, nor even very many celebrities—she merely identified the crest of their ephemeral waves. As he says, her knack for timing was uncanny (actually, it was more a consequence of holding deadlines until they were insanely late, driving all of her sub-editors rabidly insane), but we think Carr went way, way overboard here. Hey, we think she’s cute and smart and MILFY too. But never having got an audience with her royal pain-in-the-highness, we feel our vision is somewhat clearer than our Manhattan friend’s.

In Carr’s 1,200 word hagiography, we extracted a few reconstructions and reformulations of the Queen Bee’s virtues. This thing has more glowing appositives than the Manhattan Yellow Pages:

“Ms. Brown, who all but invented the escalator that makes people famous in nothing flat…”

“Tina Brown’s streak as America’s premier magazine editor demonstrated that she understood American culture in a way few natives did.”

“Ms. Brown, who knows more about the thermodynamics of hype than almost any person alive…”

“As the chief architect of a formula where celebrities and media outlets colluded to create a fizzy, fabulous world, Ms. Brown has no one to blame but herself, of course.”

“Ms. Brown, who can be good at math if not budgets, knew the score.”

“A Middle Atlantic media phenomenon, Ms. Brown edited the British Tatler magazine at 25, crossed over and revived Vanity Fair at 30, dusted off The New Yorker at 38, and at 45 created Talk. Boy, did she create talk. She imported a British disposition about celebrity, turning gossip and glitz into a not-so-dirty pleasure, with a knack for turning magazines into crucibles of heat.”

“Despite the money lost during her tenures – she spent millions to make Vanity Fair profitable and racked up $70 million in losses or so at The New Yorker – she was a necessary figure at both magazines.”

“The start was rugged – she frequently looked surprised when the camera came her way – but Ms. Brown, who once was lauded by her husband for “ratlike cunning,” gradually got the hang of it.”

“Ms. Brown had an uncanny knack for deadline alchemy.”

“The unchallenged queen of the A-list seems to be flailing in a B-list nation.”

“Ms. Brown, who had long been the Simon Cowell of American…”

“Once something of an alien and unspeakably fabulous, Ms. Brown has become, oddly, one of us.”

“Ms. Brown is still the best-connected editor in New York. Someone should give her a magazine.”

At last, we seem to have arrived at Carr’s point. We get it! A referral from a friend—well, why didn’t you just say so?