Not Enough Room at the Newsstand?

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With celebrities beaming on the covers and tales of the good life inside, upscale magazines are arriving on newsstands with no apparent end in sight.


Tu Ciudad, VLife, Item, Golf Living and C, all either based in Los Angeles or having a major presence here, have debuted with slick covers and distribution that’s targeted to the area’s most affluent residents.


Although the titles differ in content and intended readership C is mostly aimed at women, while Tu Ciudad has a Hispanic bent what they do share is a thirst for up-market advertisers.


They join an already-crowded field that includes Distinction, Angeleno, Los Angeles Confidential, Brentwood, Venice and Santa Barbara. (The latter has evolved from a city magazine to a more regional title exalting the coastal lifestyle.)


Newsstands long have featured stacks of glossy titles beckoning readers with photographs of million-dollar homes and haute couture style. But the luxury magazine segment is exploding as never before, causing some analysts and advertisers to wonder whether the bubble could be about to burst.


“Every time we see a big growth in a magazine category, eventually a lot of them don’t make it,” said Debbie Solomon, senior partner and research director at MindShare USA, a unit of WPP Group PLC. “There’s only so much room for magazines in a certain category you only have so many readers and advertisers.”


Solomon likened the boom to the 1990s explosion of tech-related titles such as the Industry Standard and Red Herring, which swelled to phone-book dimensions amid the dot-com frenzy. Both magazines failed (although both have been resurrected in different formats).


Does the same fate await the luxury crowd? Publishers and editors of the individual magazines insist that there’s room for everyone or at least their own publications no matter how crowded the upper ends of local newsstands become.


“It’s very crowded in each individual city,” said Richard Phillips, the co-publisher of Item, the latest issue of which carries ads from an Arizona resort, the Grove shopping center in Los Angeles and the Venetian casino-resort in Las Vegas.


“What’s funny to me is that if you look at a city like New York, it has only two or three titles that are devoted to New York, but if you come to Phoenix or Los Angeles, there’s like 17 glossies in each city. It’s super-saturated.”



Offering discounts


Phillip Troy Linger, the publisher of Brentwood, one of the more venerable luxury titles in L.A., agreed that the market is “incredibly saturated,” but added that “it’s ultimately the editorial content in the magazines that’s going to determine their longevity. We’ve been here 11 years because we have something that people like.”


Many of the newer publications offer steep discounts on advertising and subscriptions in order to build circulation and ad pages in their initial phases even though the practice practically guarantees that the magazines will lose money.


Solomon said some advertisers take advantage of the fire-sale prices, but then move on to other titles when the discounts expire. “The magazines are conditioning people to look for better prices,” Solomon said.


Publishers with several of the L.A. magazines insist that they’re not giving away ads or subscriptions, but acknowledge that they offer introductory rates.


C, which is based in Santa Monica, charges $15,450 for a full-page ad, but the rate is discounted to $14,680 for advertisers who bought space in the first issue. C’s publishers say they expect to lose money for at least 18 months, and possibly as long as two years, but that their primary investor (whom they declined to name) is prepared to ride out the losses.

Among the other entrants:

  • Tu Ciudad is an English-language magazine aimed at upscale Latinos that is published by Emmis Communications Corp., publisher of Los Angeles magazine. The bimonthly Tu Ciudad has an initial press run of 100,000 (much of that distributed free).
  • VLife, once a supplement to the Hollywood trade Variety, became a standalone publication available on newsstands. Targeted at the affluent with a strong interest in the entertainment industry, the monthly VLife has plans to grow to a circulation as high as 250,000, according to its publishers.
  • Item, which started as a lifestyle magazine in Phoenix, branched into the L.A. and Las Vegas markets, promising to bond the three cities with features on lifestyle, shopping and travel. Its monthly distribution is 40,000.
  • Golf Living, which wants to treat the game as part of an affluent lifestyle as much as a sport, was rolled out by Tribune Co., which also publishes Distinction and the Los Angeles Times. L.A.-based Golf Living has an initial press run of 100,000.



‘Simple demographics’


Samir Husni, a University of Mississippi journalism professor who tracks magazines, said that while the industry is littered with casualties, the outlook for luxury titles is fairly promising. That’s because high-end advertisers are always seeking outlets to reach high-end readers in this case, household incomes in the $100,000 to $1 million-plus range.


“I wish I could tell you the bubble will burst soon, but I think it is just beginning,” Husni said. “For some years to come, unless we have a complete catastrophe in this country where all the luxury advertisers disappear, I think we’re going to see more of these titles. It’s simple demographics.”


From their airy and pastel-hued offices on the second floor of a Santa Monica office building, the publishers of C magazine see the California that they and their advertisers dream of.


It’s this vision that convinced Jennifer Smith Hale, a 30-year-old Michigan transplant who bought Santa Barbara magazine in 1999, to take on a new title. (Her father, Robert N. Smith, operated owned 25 television stations before he died in 2003, passing along the business to his children.)


“I wanted to create a national magazine with a California concept,” said Hale, who commutes from her Malibu home to the offices of Santa Barbara magazine and C. “California is such an affluent state with so much style, so much sophistication, yet there’s no one publication that really covers that part of California.”


Its initial press run is 150,000, with most copies distributed for free at upscale hotels, doctor’s offices, spas and beauty salons frequented by its target reader: professional women between 25 and 49 with household incomes of $150,000 and up.


C has formed a business partnership with Time Warner Inc.’s distribution arm to sell the magazine at bookstores and newsstands nationwide, although at first most readers are likely to be from California. If the magazine takes on national dimensions, its circulation could rise to 400,000, according to Hale and Michael Coady, the magazine’s president and editorial director.


But that’s a ways off. Initially, many publishers expect to give away as much as 90 percent of their copies, with the hope of enticing readers to fill out subscription cards. The free magazines are less attractive to advertisers, who aren’t sure they’re even being read, but they’re necessary to build longer-term readership.


“Most (publishers) would like to get a mostly paid circulation, but they set a precedent when they give it away for free,” Solomon said. “It’s a tricky proposition to do it that way.”

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