A FEW WEEKS BACK,
the proverbial presses came to an abrupt halt in the
Madison Avenue offices of Swing magazine.
Just as the publication's fourth anniversary issue hit newsstands, its
founder and editor-in-chief, David Lauren, gathered his
staff to inform them of the imminent shut-down. The attempt to bring on
more investors had failed, he said. The New
York Post, which broke the story, described Lauren's delivery of the
news as "tearful." Indeed, if one peruses the
editor's final missive to his readers there can be detected a sort of
wistful, searching note, which prefigures the reckoning
that would soon come Lauren's way. "As I wonder what the next five years
will bring," he writes, "I am comforted and
energized by the confidence I have gained by producing Swing... I
believe the magazine has fulfilled its mission: to
be a young person's guide to life."
Regardless of whether that mission had been accomplished (the recently
revised Boy Scout handbook might also make the same claim), the crusade
itself might be blamed for Swing's
undoing. I should know: I helped David Lauren launch Swing in
1994 and served for two years as the magazine's
managing editor. Swing's tagline, "the magazine about life in
your twenties," informed each and every move we
made from the outset. But this demographic fixation is visible
throughout the magazine industry, and Swing gives us
an acute portrait of the perils of creating magazines around a
statistical profile first, and only later filling out its sensibility.
Take the magazine's annual "Most Powerful" feature -- the most notable
thing about it was the way it so arbitrarily excluded
anyone who had dared to commit the cardinal sin of turning thirty.
DEMOGRAPHICS SHOULD
be the province of marketers and advertisers, not
magazine editors. An editor need be much more concerned with
psychographics-- attitudes, beliefs, social trends. One
strength of the magazine (print and web-based) is
reflecting and articulating a particular worldview. Other forms of media
are more expeditious in terms of news delivery or
more suited to the dissemination and analysis of raw data, but the
magazine remains one of the best ways of presenting a
shared psychic landscape often indifferent to age groups. (Think of the
mix of college radicals and aging hippies reading something like The
Nation.)
Swing, on the other hand, targeted an age bracket. It said from
the outset, "We're a magazine about what it's like
to be a certain age, which we think by extension is how you should first
and foremost identify yourself." And thus came
about Swing's second and third issues, whose respective cover
stories sought to set the record straight on the
twentysomething experience of "Christmas" and "Love." As if you could
isolate what was different about love for a
nineteen-year-old and a twenty-year-old, or how someone who is
twenty-nine necessarily experiences a different kind of
Christmas than a thirty-two-year-old. Imagine if you'd seen the cover of
that Christmas issue, which featured a rosy-cheeked,
Rockwell-like Mr. Claus -- with a leather jacket and cell phone, dude!
-- and the patently meaningless cover line: "Santa Unplugged."
But the error isn't as simple as poor editorial vision -- it was the
misapplication of a marketing strategy that is already decades
old. The concept of generationally specific media and products has been
promulgated by the advertising industry and its
clients since the '60s, notes Baffler editor Thomas Frank in his
book The Conquest of Cool, when Pepsi
first concocted the "Pepsi generation." Later, Swing's first
"editorial consultant," vaunted New York
Magazine founder Clay Felker, would unabashedly suggest the term
"Youngbloods" as the new name for the magazine.
Since the magazine had already launched, they settled on "Swing
Generation." (By the end of its lifecycle, the word
"Generation" had permanently fused with the logo "Swing" on the cover.)
Swing isn't alone. Beyond the advent of the trade magazines
(which are almost expressly outlets for advertising), the
'90s plays host to many magazines seeming to serve the interests of
advertisers rather than a bona fide audience of
like-minded readers. Most notably in John F. Kennedy, Jr.'s
George, a "new kind of political magazine" dolled up to
look like a fashion glossy. As Suck wrote of its lamentable
"Women in Politics" issue, it's not "about
appealing to women or even about women, really... It's about appealing
to advertisers who would like to appeal to women.
And it worked."
The thing is, such a ruse rarely lasts. In the case of Swing, the
edifice started to collapse when it became apparent that
no one was really buying the magazine. Usually, magazine start-ups are
eager to get the first eighteen months of publication
behind them so that the auditors can come in and confirm the circulation
numbers that the magazine has been promising to its
advertisers. Swing let over three years pass without calling in
the 85-year-old Audit Bureau of Circulations. During
this period, while Lauren claimed (without any evidence) a readership of
100,000, The New York Observer ran a
devastating "Off-the-Record" piece on Swing's circulation.
Utilizing a variety of publicly-available post office
records, The Observer established that some issues of
Swing were bought off the newsstand by fewer than
10,000 people. In response, Lauren finally contracted with ABC
to audit his magazine's circulation. The audit
was never completed, which insiders attribute to Lauren's
dissatisfaction with the results.
THERE WAS,
for a few years at least, an antidote to these kind of
business-plan-oriented, youthful magazine launches. Might, a now
defunct satire mag, launched in 1994, the same
year incidentally as Swing. In theory and practice, Might
defined itself as the opposite of Swing.
Might fired salvos at precisely the sort of simplistic (and often
sanctimonious) generational bromides upon which
Swing seemed to be founded. Indeed, one of Might's
brilliant (meta)critiques of the mid-'90s
"twentysomething" hoopla consisted of reprinting, in its letters to the
editor section, a succession of David Lauren's own
yearbooky editor's notes from Swing. Removed from their usual
context, the letters appeared ridiculously shallow
and naive.
Led by founder David Eggers, Might's editors also took delight in
lambasting the bottom-line obsessed, pandering
ways of the "magazine business" as a whole: tired story formulas
("What's Hot, What's Not" or "Ten Best" lists),
pretty-people-only photo spreads, celebrity-ogling, and movie/book/TV
tie-in blowjobs. But despite its intelligence and
critical acclaim, Might folded in 1997 due to a lack of funding.
It's not that success was an impossibility. In 1967,
Jann Wenner launched Rolling Stone with $7,500 and
black-and-white ads for roach clips.
Nowadays, with the Web, it's a slightly different story. This is not to
say that it's lucrative to publish magazine-style content
online (because it isn't) or that you generally don't wind up spending
more than you earn to do so (because you do). But at
least online you know exactly who your readers are and what they're
reading. Unfortunately for Eggers and his crew, the
Web made its splash a little too late. In a bit of Might-inspired
irony, the magazine's forebears jumped into
high-profile jobs at the very corporate magazines they'd spent the
better part of three years excoriating. One of
Might's editors, Dave Moodie, signed on to become the features
editor of Spin, while Eggers himself joined Esquire as
editor-at-large.
Not surprisingly, Eggers could barely last a year at Esquire,
with its
soulless, cookie-cutter method of producing mostly vapid magazine
content.
So Eggers bailed and started McSweeney's, accurately described by
Salon as a true "antimagazine," in the
sense that it's a black-and-white and graphics-free journal-format
publication. Like Might,
McSweeney's is a strident statement of anti-commercialism in the
face of hyper-commodified industry. Interestingly
enough, Eggers saved his most savage skewering for the mag's new website
Mcsweeneys.net. There, in a serialized
nonfiction novel The Service Industry, Eggers rebukes the
machinations of magazine business as nothing more than
"fumbling in the dark."
Eggers exorcises his demons as he relays the behind-the-scenes workings
of
Man: The Magazine for Men and Her: The Magazine for Her.
In an episode about Her, a story by an
idealistic female reporter (about deranged ex-boyfriends stalking and
murdering their girlfriends) is in danger of being killed
because the photos of the victims aren't attractive enough.
"They're monsters," says Her's editor, Delores Wyman, when she
takes a gander at the snapshots of the deceased
young women dutifully collected by the reporter. "They're dogs...
There's got to be some better looking victims, right?"
What's saddest about this episode (for me at least) is how it recaptures
a particularly ignominious moment from
Swing past -- one that can serve as a cautionary tale for anyone
mixed up in the business of concocting lifestyles for
imaginary readers. Early on, we published a piece about young people who
flee our crowded urban centers and set-up small
subsistence farms in an attempt to live a simpler sort of life. Not
content to run photos of the actual upstart agrarians we
covered, David Lauren insisted that we commission a photographer, a
stylist and a gaggle of beautiful young models to go to
a boutique farm in New Jersey for a lavish photo shoot. The results
seemed fit for a Ralph Lauren ad, not a piece of
journalism about twenty-five-year-old lettuce farmers who live in
decaying trailers. Once the issue hit newsstands, we
received more mail about the farming story than we had about any of our
other stories combined -- all extremely trenchant and
unquestionably derisive. We'd crossed the line. There was no going back.
Matt Goldberg is the editor of "Tripod's Tools for Life." (Hyperion,
1998) His work has appeared in The Village Voice, Fast
Company, Premiere, and Swing, which he co-founded in
1994.
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