They left out the best part: The two people who actually read the rexblog (and you know who you are) may recall, last week I blogged a story about ReadyMade Magazine and suggested the founders of the magazine quickly accept the offer they claimed to be sitting on their table. Well, today, the same syndicated article turned up in another newspaper and I discovered something amazing (alarming? misguided?): The previous article had edited out a quote from Professor Samir Husni,
who, according to the article, is “one of the country’s foremost
authorities on magazines.” (There you have it, Samir: a blurb for the
back cover of your next book: “One of the country’s foremost
authorities on magazines” — San Francisco Chronicle.)
Talk about a back-handed-compliment (wait, I wasn’t talking about that),
here’s Mr. Magazine’s “missing quote”advice to the magazine
start-uppers:
Samir Husni, a University of Mississippi journalism professor and one of the country’s foremost authorities on magazines, is a fan of ReadyMade’s content, but not its prospects.
“I gave their idea 8 points out of 10, but their business plan 2 out of 10,” Husni said.
“My advice to them is to double the
cover price - which will make their distributor go nuts. This is a
magazine which will easily sell for $7.95.”
I’ll only warn the magazine publisher that Mr. Magazine is not called Mr. Price-elasticity for nothing.
Magazine movie update: According to the NY Time’s David Carr, in the upcoming movie, Shattered Glass, the real star is the New Republic. He thinks it will bring the “small” magazine some publicity and new readers
Quote:
Instead of a grand battle between justice and oppression, the film is
almost a miniature: set in the fluorescent-lighted cubicles of a
generic white-collar office, it focuses on the prosaic innards of
journalism like fact-checking and copy editing. In this thriller —
based on the story of Stephen Glass — the central character is a fraud,
the only weapon in sight is the editor’s skeptical red pen, and the
main thing at stake is the reputation of The New Republic, a weekly
political magazine with a tiny circulation of 65,000. In fact, the
film’s hero — the editor Charles Lane, who realizes that one of his
star reporters has fabricated dozens of stories — comes to this
conclusion only late in the game, when a competing publication is about
to unmask the writer as a fraud.
Carr doesn’t mention that another movie, Kill Bill, has also brought the magazine some publicity and may have caused it to lose some readers.
Speaking of movies about magazines (which is what David Carr does in
his article), For those new to rexblog, you may want to check out our special feature, Movies & Magazines, that lists movies with magazine-related settings or characters. Please feel free to e-mail me others that you can think of.
