Spunky Magazine Editors Buck Odds With Some New Magazines
By MATTHEW ROSE Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Maer Roshan probably could have landed a cushy editing job at a top publishing company after his employer, Talk magazine, closed its doors in January. Instead, the dapper 35-year-old is out touting a business plan for an irreverent general-interest magazine.

On a page headed "Key Issues," the one at the top of the list reads: "Isn't this a bad time to launch a new magazine?"

The advertising market is still deep in recession. Sales on cluttered newsstands continue to fall. Subscribers are harder to come by than ever. But Mr. Roshan is confident he can buck the odds and pull together the financing necessary to launch his new magazine, Radar. He has pulled together several cover mock-ups and prototype pages, as well as a 74-page business plan. He is close to finalizing partial backing from American Media Inc., the publisher of the Enquirer, the Star and other pulpy supermarket tabloids.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the No. 2 editor at the now-defunct Industry Standard is starting up a food magazine, tentatively called Chow. In New York, Alan Light, most recently editor in chief of music magazine Spin, hopes next year to launch a music magazine for adults, which he is calling, at least for now, Good Music. Other ideas being pitched to publishing companies by magazine veterans include Fuel, a stylish automotive magazine for young men, and Fix, a magazine about addiction.

"It's true in many ways, working on a magazine is like blacksmithing -- there doesn't seem to be a lot of need for it right now," says Jane Goldman, the former Industry Standard editor, whose fresh spin on the food magazine is to pitch it to people younger than the competition's readers.

A mix of quixotic optimism, entrepreneurial spunk and the eternal hope of stumbling on another InStyle or Maxim keeps publishers cranking out new magazines, even in a bleak economy. While not quite matching the record pace set in 1998, 540 new magazines came to market in the first nine months of 2002, according to a University of Mississippi tally -- beating the 519 titles launched in the year-earlier period. The number of launches grew despite a pullback by corporate publishers from new ideas, especially those with circulation under one million.

Anne Kreamer, who launched Nickelodeon magazine for Viacom Inc., and John Ellis, the media and technology columnist, are looking for publishing partners for a monthly called Fix, which would offer support for people trying to kick a range of unhealthy habits. The nation's 20 million alcoholics, 12 million prescription-drug abusers, 14 million users of illicit drugs and 23 million cigarette smokers trying to quit are a ready-made audience, Ms. Kreamer says. The pitch, "in Hollywoodish terms, is InStyle + Oprah + AA = FIX," she says in an e-mail; advertising would come in part from the pharmaceutical industry. "There is a fusion of great need that has never been marketed in a mass way," she says.

A former Details magazine editor, Tim Moss, says he decided to go ahead with his idea of a "wickedly stylish, fun" car magazine while having drinks in an East Village bar. He still thought it was a good idea the next morning. Car makers, after all, spent $1.23 billion on magazine ads in the first nine months of 2002. "A good idea is golden at any time," Mr. Moss says.

Putting a positive spin on a downward spiral, entrepreneurs point out that McGraw-Hill Cos.' BusinessWeek was launched six weeks before the 1929 stock-market crash and AOL Time Warner Inc.'s Fortune, four months after.

Mr. Light wants to launch his music magazine in the first half of 2003. "It would have been easier to get the cash in boom times, but that would also have been built on an advertising premise that would have been yanked out from beneath us," he says. "It is twice as much a vote of [investors'] confidence that they put any of their money in at a moment like this."

Of all the projects percolating, Mr. Roshan's may be the boldest. A fixture on Manhattan's magazine circuit, Mr. Roshan was deputy editor at Primedia Inc.'s New York before being tapped as Talk's editorial director. Radar is intended to be a biweekly, covering news and culture, a combination of Vanity Fair and the defunct Spy, in the style of the gossipy tabloids.

General interest magazines have struggled in recent years because they don't have a natural base of advertisers, who prefer to buy ads in magazines with obvious readers. Drug companies like to advertise in health-related titles, clothing companies in fashion magazines. Mr. Roshan says Radar's subject matter will be broad-based, but it will have a narrow reader target of young urban professionals, a desirable advertising demographic. Starting circulation will be about 200,000.

"One thing I've learned is to completely ignore the conventional wisdom about magazines," Mr. Roshan says.

The recession, curiously, has helped would-be publishers by creating a large talent pool of unemployed writers and editors. Mr. Roshan says he receives 100 resumes a week. He has hired Paul Fish, the former U.S. commercial director of Dennis Publishing, U.K. owner of the successful men's magazine Maxim, to be his chief financial officer.

The pending agreement with American Media would help Radar circumvent the difficulties start-up magazines usually face getting newsstand distribution. Under the agreement now being finalized, American Media is expected to provide back-office services including use of its formidable newsstand-distribution operation, in exchange for an equity stake. The company has paid for initial research but isn't planning to commit any cash to Radar, both sides say.

Mr. Roshan has commitments from other backers for half the roughly $15 million in launch costs; he is hoping to publish three test issues beginning in March. "It still might not happen." he adds. He and Mr. Light often meet for what Mr. Light calls "Magazine Launchers Anonymous" meetings -- "to check that we are not completely out of our skulls," Mr. Light says.

Tina Brown, former chairman of Talk Media and Mr. Roshan's former boss, think Radar could be successful, given what she perceives as a gap in the market for "sophisticated commentary." Still, Ms. Brown says, magazine publishing has changed so much since Talk's hyped debut in 1999 that she's begun to rethink the entire idea of a splashy magazine launch. "The big, traditional, commercial magazine launch is a very antediluvian beast," says Ms. Brown. "If I was to do Talk again, I would do it on the Web."