How to impress the rexblog: While several vaporziners have e-mailed me since I first started using the term vaporzine, I’ve had only two phone conversations with irate proto-publishers of pre-launch magazines. Most of the people who discover via Google that their pre-launch publicity efforts have gained them the vaporzine label, take the “honor” with the light spirit it is intended. (Oh, yes, and another time I had a vaporzine publisher call to beg me to remove the item about her magazine launch because she had not told her current employer about her plans despite her name being listed on the magazine’s pre-launch site. I did, of course.) As I clearly explain in the rexblog definition, the word simply refers to the pre-launch status of the magazine. Not to my judgement of the magazine’s chances for success.

Today, I am happy to report that Beautiful Girl Magazine, a “former” vaporzine I mentioned twice recently, here and here, has graduated to someone else’s punditry niche. While I was away from the office last week, the publisher/editor, Scarlett Williams of the magazine for young Christian women mailed me my very own copy. (I guess she appreciated that I said she and her mother seem to have lots of “spunk.” While I’m sorry to lose a vaporzine (wait, no I’m not), I’m happy that Scarlett is holding in her hand the culmination (and beginning) of a lot of work and passion.

Coincidentally, the back cover features an advertisement for a product blogged extensively on the rexblog. And speaking of really strange coincidences, the cover model for this issue of Beautiful Girl says her “fave clothing store” is a store I often suggest is run by masterful marketers who use pornographic customer magazines to sell invisible clothes to unwitting suburban mall teenagers.

Do Christian girls really have Moms like this? I guess so, since Peta’s advertising to them.

I hate to say it, however, but I have a complaint about the launch issue and, strangely, it’s not about the edit, but about an advertiser (paid, I pray). As I flipped through the magazine the first time, I was instantly perplexed about that double-truck advertisement for the animal rights sect, Peta. What gives? I have my doubts that Christian moms will warm up to the two-page spread public service advertisements promoting a left-wing anti-vivisectionist cult that proclaims on its website that moms who wear furs (to church, even?) are homicidal psychopaths? When did Christian girls start rejecting those biblical teachings regarding “honoring parents” and about having “dominion over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” and take up the Mother-hating teachings of Peta — but I digress.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Thanks for the magazine. It’s a great launch issue. I will take it home to the 16 year-old beautiful girl, inside and out, who I know will enjoy it (but will wonder what were on those Peta ad pages I ripped out — just kidding.)

The prescient professor: It must be that season. Magazines that Samir Husni predicted would fail are failing all over the place. A few weeks ago, it was Grace Magazine. And now, it’s College Magazine, about which I blogged last April. College Magazine billed itself as a periodical covering the high school to college transition from the perspective of parents. Topics included saving for college, campus visits and a counselor’s corner column by a former American School Counselor’s Association president. According to an article in the Madison (Wisconsin) Capital Times, “When the magazine launched, Husni said the topic focus of College was much too narrow.” According to today’s report, the magazine publishers threw in the towel because they “were undercapitalized.” Last spring, Samir told the newspaper, “There are more magazines than ever before in the marketplace. You really have to have deep, deep pockets to be able to persevere.” Bottom line: listen to him.

Billionaire hobbies: David Carr and Andrew Ross Sorkin try to make economic sense out of Bruce Wasserstein’s “maddeningly vague” purchase for $55 million of New York Magazine, a property that is discribed as, “financially stuggling.”

The article quotes two magazine industry friends of mine:

Mark M. Edmiston of AdMedia Partners, a media investment bank, said, “Obviously, the price of the magazine is not justified by the facts.” The magazine, which in the mid-1990’s made about $8 million a year in profit, made about $1 million in profit last year on revenue of about $43 million. “This is a crown jewel,” said Scott P. Peters, managing director at the Jordan Edmiston Group, a media investment firm. “This is a publishing pet project and if you are from New York and plugged into the scene, this acquisition provides a lifestyle fringe benefit that others don’t.”

Does anything sound a bit odd about that paragraph? Well, it may sound odd to all but magazine industry financial wonks that the two people quoted work at different companies but one of them works at a company that has the other’s last name in its title. Trust me, it’s just how things work out sometimes.

Does a demographic equal a magazine opportunity? As I mentioned Samir Husni in the previous post, I must admit that I thought of him when I saw this news item today in DM News about a vaporzine for black golf enthusiasts. Samir has pointed out on several occasions that would-be magazine entrepreurs often confuse a category of individuals with a potential magazine audience. My question is this, “While there are millions of African American golfers, are they necessarily a demographic?” And while I can easily predict about a dozen under-reported stories the first three issues of such a magazine could explore, I question whether these topics have sustainable reader-interest over time when what the universal, overriding concerns of golfers of all ethnic, religious and sexual preference backgrounds tend to be limited to topics related to such major issues as: how to lower his or her score and how to free up enough time to play one more day a week. Add to the potential mis-identification of a market niche, an entrepreneur with the desire to find a way to turn their love of golf (or fishing or skiing or traveling to really cool places) into a business and, well, you’ve go something that has sand trap written all over it. Nonetheless, we’re happy to add “Seven Under” to the Vaporzines I’m looking forward to see launched in 2004.

Samir quote update: Exams may be over in Oxford, but Ole Miss professor Samir Husni is never on vacation. Here’s a great quote (perhaps, however, from a recent wire feature) from Mr. Magazine appearing in today’s Relish Magazine, an insert in the Winston-Salem (NC) Journal:

“Playboy is stuck in the ’70s,” Husni said. “The last you heard about it was the Jimmy Carter interview. All of a sudden, the magazine froze in time.” While magazines such as Maxim, FHM and Men’s Health address the contemporary man, he said, Playboy now contends with the perception that “this was my grandparents’ magazine.”