Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 23, 1993 TAG: 9305210012
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICK HAMPSON ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
How do they know? Because they're reading it, and so is the other young sophisticate in the next seat on the shuttle to Boston. Because it's the talk of the dinner party. Because it disappears mysteriously from the office mailbox.
Because it's edited by Tina Brown.
There are people in Manhattan who believe that if Tina Brown were named editor of Boys' Life, then Boys' Life would be the next hot book. She rescued a floundering Vanity Fair 10 years ago, and now seems to be reviving The New Yorker.
It has been less than a year since the 39-year-old British native moved over from Vanity Fair, but it already is clear that she brought the heat with her.
The hot book is defined by the intangible quantity known as "buzz," and at The New Yorker Tina Brown has been able to generate deafening buzz merely by changing the stodgy weekly.
She has run a cover illustration of a Hasidic Jew kissing a black woman and Richard Avedon photos of a topless actress. She has instituted color sketches, bylines and a decipherable table of contents.
Is there substance behind the sizzle? The magazine still runs very long pieces - 20,000 words or more. But the traditional editorial diet that in many minds was symbolized by an endless piece on the Law of the Sea Conference has been expanded to include fare such as a dispute over public art in the South Bronx (the magazine award winner) and the fate of the venerable Beverly Hills Hotel.
Some don't like it hot, including hundreds of subscribers who have canceled. Harper's editor Lewis Lapham is one who has accused Brown of making The New Yorker too topical, too fashionable - which must sound to the Brown like faint criticism indeed.
Since her arrival, newsstand sales have doubled, and advertisers have happily watched the age of the average reader drop from 47 to 42. Ad pages were up 16 percent in the first quarter.
Meanwhile, at Vanity Fair, ad pages were down 15 percent, partly because designer Gianni Versace moved with Brown to The New Yorker.
Although both The New Yorker and Vanity Fair were unsuccessful finalists in the National Magazine Awards category for general excellence (in different circulation groups), The New Yorker won awards for fiction and feature writing, while Vanity Fair was shut out. In 1992, Brown's Vanity Fair won for design, while The New Yorker was shut out.
(Since the inception of the awards in 1966, The New Yorker has won 15. Vanity Fair, which was revived by Conde Nast in 1983, has won four.)
On May 10 Vanity Fair's president, Ronald Galotti, was forced to resign, and The Wall Street Journal has reported that "some industry executives have put Vanity Fair on the endangered species list."
That seems an odd consignment for a monthly that has a circulation of more than 1.1 million (almost twice the weekly New Yorker's) and that turns a profit (The New Yorker still is said to be losing millions a year).
Vanity Fair's circulation is up 8 percent this year, and the first six issues under new editor Graydon Carter each sold better than the same monthly editions in the previous year edited by you-know-who.
But magazine profits stem primarily from advertising, and "Vanity Fair's image at [ad] agencies has gotten a bit frayed," according to Inside Media, an industry publication.
One problem is the magazine's high ad rates, which some recession-battered companies find hard to swallow. Another is that unlike more specialized magazines - Scuba Diving, Pain Digest - feature magazines such as Vanity Fair must constantly fight to hold onto their relatively fickle constituencies.
Some, accordingly, have suggested that S.I. Newhouse Jr., whose family owns both magazines, effectively robbed Peter to pay Paul when he changed editors. He has said he is pleased with both magazines.
Advertisers may simply be waiting to see how Vanity Fair does under Graydon Carter. "Tina's a tough act to follow, [and] this is a cutthroat advertising market," says Marc Bosclair, a reporter for Magazine Week.
While Brown has been able to make news by making changes, Carter inherited a successful editorial formula based on celebrity (Hollywood stars), royalty (Princess Di) and perfidy (gangsters and financiers). His initiatives, such as hiring Susan Faludi, author of "Backlash" and Bryan Burrough, co-author of "Barbarians at the Gate," have not created much of a buzz, except possibly among the writers' accountants.
Nor does he seem to have Brown's knack for choosing a cover; she racked up Vanity Fair's two highest-selling newsstand issues with a naked, pregnant Demi Moore in August 1991 and a naked, body-painted Demi a year later.
Which is not to say that Vanity Fair has settled into the Ice Age. In the May issue, for instance, architect Philip Johnson discusses with apparent frankness his homosexuality and his youthful infatuation with fascism.
And April's cover, which featured actress Sharon Stone clutching her otherwise uncovered breasts, has been stolen from more than a few mail boxes.
Whatever its title, the hot book - the one that sits atop the night-stand pile, that juts from a thousand briefcases - has as much to do with the buzz in Manhattan as it does with the objective quality of its editorial content.
There always has been such a magazine - Esquire in the 1960s under Harold Hayes, New York in the '70s under Clay Felker, Manhattan inc. in the '80s under Jane Amsterdam. In the late '80s, there were at least two: glossy Vanity Fair under Tina Brown and acerbic Spy under . . . Graydon Carter.
Osborn Elliott, former editor of Newsweek (hot in the '60s), says heat has a certain payoff: "If you're out ahead of the pack, it gives the ad salespeople something to talk about."
But it guarantees neither success nor survival. "Egg was a hot book. Fame was a hot book," notes Paula Brooks, an advertising agency executive. "Now they're dead books."
by CNB