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Can Brill's and Inside Get Along?

Tim CarvellPosted Monday, April 9, 2001, at 3:01 PM ET

With the recent acquisition of Powerful Media by Brill Media Holdings, two of the most prominent chroniclers of the goings-on in Medialand are now under the same roof. Powerful Media, launched by Kurt Andersen and Michael Hirschorn last year with tremendous fanfare and $35 million in capital, has agreed to allow the staffs of their Inside magazine and Web site to be combined with that of the much dowdier Brill's Content. The good news for Steven Brill is that there's probably not much overlap in the subscription bases of Inside and Brill's Content: While the two magazines share a subject matter, they could not be more different in the attitude they take toward it. This, in turn, leads to the bad news: It's difficult to imagine a way to reconcile the two magazines' approaches. And it's almost impossible to figure out a way that either of them can make money.

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Let's start with the editorial differences between the magazines. The ideal reader for Brill's Content seems to be a person living far from New York and Los Angeles, who has no idea how newspapers, magazines, radio, and television are produced. Brill's Content's tone is often that of one shocked (shocked!) to find gambling in Casablanca: One recent scoop consisted of the fact that NBC's news affiliates seem to be devoting a disproportionate amount of time to covering the XFL, which is part-owned by NBC. To anyone who has, oh, say, watched television anytime in the last 10 years, the notion that a network would use its affiliates' local newscasts as promotional platforms can hardly be considered a surprise, but Brill's Content patiently builds a case for the breathtakingly obvious ("WNBC's newscasts aired 19 XFL-related segments ...").

By contrast, Inside's ideal reader would appear to be Kurt Andersen. Inside is produced with the assumption that its readers know all about the gambling going on in Casablanca; indeed, it seems to assume that its readers know all the croupiers' names. "Tina Brown Sighting at the Conde Nast Cafeteria," read one headline last year. For anyone in the magazine industry, this is news; for anyone outside of it, it's gibberish. (One imagines Brill's Content's ideal reader--still getting over the shock of those XFL revelations--trying to parse the newsworthiness of one person's lunch.) Tellingly, both Brill's Content and Inside recently ran stories on GQ's "Man of the Year" awards. Brill's huffed and puffed over its discovery that GQ fiddles with the results of the voting on the awards, since some award-winners apparently decline to participate in the magazine's coverage. Inside, meanwhile, ran a scathing assessment of the issue by Simon Dumenco, who noted, for instance, that Giorgio Armani was named fashion designer of the year. "Armani, it happens, is also the sole advertiser within the Men of the Year package--he's taken out a whopping 12 pages--so it's certainly a lucky thing that he won the award, too," Dumenco wrote. Brill's assumes that its readers would be shocked to learn that GQ would tamper with something as sacrosanct as its "Man of the Year" honors; Inside assumes that its readers would be shocked if GQ didn't.

As a journalist, I'm closer to Inside's ideal reader than Brill's Content's. But I'm not sure I understand how either of them can make money. Neither is profitable--and while profits are hardly to be expected in such new entities, their numbers are not particularly promising. Inside's story on the acquisition noted that Brill's featured a scant 33 pages of ads in its February issue and calculated that it has a low sell-through of 20 percent on the newsstand; it further added that "subscribers were hard to come by" for Inside.com's Web offerings. While it's not impossible, the odds wouldn't seem to favor two money-losing publications yielding one moneymaker. Brill reportedly hopes to convert Inside.com into a subscription-based portal for his partner Primedia's trade publications like Folio and Cable World, under the banner of Media Central. (Incredibly, the New York Observer has reported that this news has been met with scorn from Inside staffers. "Trade," one of them told the Observer, "was the word we weren't supposed to use from the beginning." This raises the question: Does Inside's crew really believe that anyone outside the trade cares about where Tina Brown has lunch?) Given that Inside had trouble cajoling readers to pony up subscription fees for its Web site, it seems fair to wonder whether it will do any better when coupled with Media Central.

As for Brill's Content, it will incorporate some of the staff of Inside.com and Inside's print magazine and be relaunched as Inside Content, a business magazine for media professionals. If the magazine's editors can somehow reconcile Brill's squareness with Inside's hipster feel, they'll deserve a medal. But even that feat might not be enough to make Inside Content turn a profit. Because here may be the biggest problem facing Steven Brill these days: Perhaps there simply isn't a market large enough to support a glossy magazine devoted to the media. In retrospect, this isn't a particularly surprising conclusion: Nobody thinks that, say, the automotive industry can support anything more than a handful of trade papers and magazines. It's difficult to imagine anyone sinking $30 million into a Web site where an intrepid team of reporters ferrets out news on the daily schedules of Ford's and Chrysler's mid-level executives. But, in all the coverage of the launch of Inside, few journalists pressed the founders on this point. We simply assumed that the details of our daily lives were worth that level of scrutiny. The somewhat humbling lesson of Inside.com may just be that we're not really all that interesting to anyone but ourselves.

Tim Carvell is a senior editor at eCompany Now. In the interests of Brillian full disclosure, it should be noted that his magazine competes with the Industry Standard, which was a partner on the launch of Inside's print magazine. And Slate, like Inside.com, is a money-losing Web site.

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Tim Carvell is a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly.

COMMENTS

Reader Comments From The Fray:

[Notes from the Fray Editor: Tim Carvell came into The Fray, below, to make it clear that he was not trying to insult Brill's readers, and he also engaged in discussions with several readers--try here for a good one. Michael Murray had a nice twist: "If [Brill's and Inside] drive away all their customers perhaps they intend to reach the break even point. A laudable goal for the both of them."]

I suppose I should clarify my point on Brill's Content, since I think I may have combined two points--the fact that the magazine's not for people who work in the media, and the fact that I don't think it's a very good magazine. To explain: I don't underestimate the intelligence of its readers--as a matter of fact, I think they're a good deal brighter than Brill's Content seems to think they are. The magazine's tone, in every article, seems to be one of, "Let me introduce you to this concept of which you are, presumably, completely unaware." And then the concept turns out to be, say, that stars have publicists, or that talk-show interviews are rehearsed beforehand--stuff that most people either know or can grasp pretty quickly, but that Brill's feels the need to patiently explain as if to a not-very-bright child, all in a tone of moral outrage.

--Tim Carvell

(To reply, click here.)

Can Inside make money? No. Can Brill's make money? No. Can Inside Brill's make money? No and again no. Never have, never will. They are both and now together just places for the various upper reaches of what passes for management to check in for their lunch appointments. They also give them all titles and jobs--so they can dress and impress in the rest of their lives. That is their sole function. Money and profit are utterly irrelevant. When these two projects choke and die as they will, the folks behind them will simply move on to something else.

If they were sincere, they'd find their proper profits quickly enough. Just take a lesson from the porn sites. Three pages. A free tour. Then sign and give up some money in front or get out . Lesson: If you want to take money from content, ask for the money up front and don't deliver it until you get paid. Of course you might have to have fewer people coming around to watch and read your content, but hey... adjust your overhead accordingly.

--Gerard Van Der Leun

(To reply, click here.)

Brill's and Inside are both trying to save face. Neither can easily afford to publish a money-losing print magazine and yet both require one, to maintain their own media images. A merger sounds better than a failure. A print version of a magazine, in the internet age, serves the same purpose as an imposing facade does on a bank

--David W. Rochlin

(To reply, click here.)

[For rich men] it's not always about "making money."
1. Any business person focused purely on profits steers far clear of magazines, as anyone in this business knows too well.

2. Anyone who invested in Inside was not expecting a great return on profits. I happen to really dig the magazine and website, but if I were an investor it would be for the dinner parties and possibly benefit to my other businesses. Publishing is for the young rich and the sons of the rich, period.

3. Brill is a rich guy who enjoyed a long monopoly on being the righteous scrutinizer of the media, and I like that magazine too, despite its frequent silliness and frumpiness. But what company in their right mind would advertise in this fountain of skepticism? Brill is rich and his magazine is one of six or seven I subscribe to. I will happily subscribe to Inside Content. But it is obvious that Brill is focused on his reputation, self-image and contribution to society--just as a rich man should.

--Jake

(To reply, click here.)

(4/11)

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