Last Updated: January 26, 2000
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Sunday magazines
Say a prayer for the Sunday magazine, a meandering
journey for the mind that's sailed into some dangerous waters
At Sunshine magazine in Fort Lauderdale, they're off chasing hurricanes
- not through the back yards of Florida but from the west African lands
where the ill winds form. In Philadelphia, a plot thickens each Sunday
as local writers take turns in the Inquirer on a six-part serial mystery
called "Murder at the Republican Convention." In the Hartford (Conn.) Courant,
a troubled woman opens her life to readers and tries to explain why she
faked threatening letters to her school. This is the world of the independent
Sunday newspaper magazine. Part temple, part playground, it's where writers
stretch and readers curl up. It's a diminished, even endangered, world,
full of spirit and short on cash. It probably won't be around forever.
For most of the century, Sunday newspaper magazines have been a day-of-rest
ritual perhaps rivaled only by church. Like church, they have offered reflection,
soul enrichment and sometimes not a whole lot of laughs. They run counter
to the conventional understanding about the rushed pace of life in America
today and the modern appetite for information.
"I think Sunday has changed for everyone," says Robert Taylor, editor
of In Sync magazine at the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times outside San Francisco.
"There is very little that forces you to stay home on Sunday.
"Still, as a focused, colorful, helpful package - I don't know why newspaper
magazines can't be as valuable to our readers as so many magazines on the
newsstands are. Finding a niche and filling it is still everyone's real
problem."
There are fewer than 35 independent Sunday newspaper magazines left
in the country, says the Sunday Magazine Editors Association, also known
as Sunmag. That's down by about half from the early 1980s.
Sunday survivors have, in a few cases, gone monthly while many of the
larger ones have added syndicated supplements to the mix. These days, USA
Weekend is carried in 561 papers with a circulation of 22 million and Parade
is in 337 papers with 37 million circulation.
Change, death and rebirth
Facelifts and deeper changes have been the order of the decade for Sunday
independents, at some papers demonstrating a dogged commitment to the long
form; at others representing a final attempt to hang on.
Sunday editors cast their eyes across the circumscribed landscape, where
every success and failure now resonate louder than before.
There's a Sunday magazine rebirth at The Beacon Journal in Akron, Ohio;
a death at The Denver Post. The Philadelphia Inquirer's lively - yet still
unprofitable - magazine heartens editors who cling to the belief a commitment
to quality can mean a vibrant product. Yet they are still shaken by the
loss of The Miami Herald's Tropic, a once verdant garden for Sunday journalism
that was given new sparkle only to quickly fold at the end of last year.
"It mystified all of us who were sort of looking at that (Tropic) as
an example of something to show to our own publishers," says Steve Courtney,
president of Sunmag and deputy editor of the Hartford (Conn.) Courant's
Northeast Magazine.
Courtney reports a "resurgence or reinvestment in a lot of Sunday magazines."
On the other hand, he says: "The numbers show that people feel they're
somewhat on the edge."
Sunmag estimates only 20 percent make money - by conventional accounting,
a failure. One bane of the business is that Sunday magazines labor under
profit-and-loss statements distinguishing them from the paper at large,
where you may never really know what sections are paying their own way.
Their necks, simply put, stick out of the soup.
But practitioners of the Sunday magazine assert that their product has
always had a higher calling.
"We're sort of affirmative action for the longer story," Courtney says
with a chuckle. "There's a trend now here where people have so much information
- so much bombarding us. What's most valuable now is the time to sit down
and think about something for a little while."
Yet when advertisers don't respond, that glossy package can seem expendable;
that prestige, a conceit. "Publishers who don't have the vision to see
that a certain richness in a Sunday paper can be ultimately successful
to them might see it as a place to cut," he says.
Newspaper industry watchers attribute advertisers' lack of interest
to simple economics.
"From the standpoint of the national advertising agency, it's more economical
to deal with a handful of publications than it is to deal with dozens,"
said Leo Bogart, former head of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau.
John Morton, a newspaper analyst, added that department store consolidation
and preprints have also contributed.
"Local store advertising decisions are now often made at the national
headquarters. In that case, advertisers are attracted to preprints or something
mailed to local people."
This allows advertisers to control paper quality, printing and distribution.
Uniqueness diminished
Editors note one more thing: Magazines are no longer a splash of color
in a sea of black and white. "The challenge started when newspapers got
color in the main book," says Ellen Stein Burbach, editor of The Plain
Dealer's magazine in Cleveland. Advertisers "then had an option. All the
department stores were in the Sunday magazine - nowadays they can buy a
big broadsheet ad in color."
Moreover, competition from television wrought two changes in the industry
that on the surface seem at odds with each other.
First, the demand grew for short, snappy newspaper writing. At the same
time, storytelling and analysis of the kind that were once the province
of many magazines were driven into the main Sunday paper, or on to the
weekday front page, as a way to offer readers something they could never
get from TV.
In that sense, the newspaper itself has become a bit more like the magazines
once tucked into so many of them. But magazines are not without advantages
that editors are doing everything to exploit.
The superior paper and reproduction of most of them make magazines still
the flashiest vehicle for photojournalism. Many are concentrating intensely
on local and regional news, drawing readers directly into their content
through contests and other write-in features, and still offering space
for the well-told story that just wouldn't fit anywhere else.
In Cleveland, what began as a follow-up to local grumbling over a canceled
rock concert turned into Gen Bored, an exploration of the tedium of teen-agers
who can't find much in the community to do.
"I think Sunday magazines need to be very regional," says Burbach, aiming
her advice at all but perhaps the largest newspapers like The New York
Times and The Washington Post.
"Somebody in Florida could read my magazine and say they don't get it.
Someone from northeast Ohio understands."
Her magazine is getting spruced up: staples, web press production, more
color and a new name to be chosen with the help of readers. Splashy garden
and travel features, richly illustrated, are part of the mix.
Engaging the reader directly may be more urgent than ever for some magazines
but it is hardly new. Burbach reads from a 1907 edition of the old Cleveland
Leader, its illustrated 16-page magazine reporting on a contest by the
Chicago Tribune challenging cities to come up with the "most beautiful
working girl in America."
Della Carson, a $12 a week stenographer, was Chicago's nominee. She's
beautiful, concedes the Cleveland editor, with perhaps a touch of competitive
hometown pique almost a century later. But Della's hair is this "crown
of poofy Brillo stuff."
Local focus
A few years ago, one magazine editor characterized her decision to focus
on issues closer to home with the edict: No more covers on Chad.
As it turns out, American journalists have gone back to Chad, but to
get a story of clear local interest. The Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale
sent a reporter and photographer there, and then west to the African shores
of the Atlantic Ocean, to delve into the genesis of so many of the hurricanes
that make their raging landfall on the U.S. east coast.
Their work, spread over two weeks, was a "big mouthful" even for
the paper's magazine, but just one example of how the format can drive
writers and their newspapers to higher levels of achievement, says Sunshine
editor Mark Gauert.
Sunshine's own journey is not untypical: glossy stock in its first 12
years, a money-saving but self-defeating transition to cheaper paper for
a year, and then a reversion to quality.
"Readership stayed fairly loyal to the magazine but advertisers started
to drop out," Gauert says of the mid-1990s economizing. "They didn't feel
it looked so special anymore." Revenue went up with the return of glossy
paper.
Tropic saw ad revenue double in the year after its makeover but it became
more expensive to produce and posted a loss of nearly $2 million while
Knight Ridder was telling its newspapers to increase profitability. Executives
decided to cut Tropic and put more money into the main product.
"We are making an investment in the newspaper - the meat and potatoes
and the bread and butter of what a newspaper is," Herald publisher Alberto
Ibarguen said in making the announcement.
The mindset that homegrown magazines spur their newspapers to bigger
and better things - not to mention journalism awards - lives on.
At the Anchorage (Alaska) Daily News, We Alaskans magazine looks back
on the founding of a nomadic village with prose that luxuriates in the
"white arctic sun," a lake's "rotting ice," a campfire's "fragrant willow
smoke," an approaching helicopter's intruding "wop-wop-wop" - storytelling
made for a morning in bed or a lingering two-cup visit to a cafe.
"There is still a place for all kinds of reading in the newspaper,"
Courtney says from Hartford.
If only the writer, coming over from the news side hungry for all that
space, can be convinced that the story still needs to move along, he adds.
"That's the mistake that newsroom writers often make. We have to explain
what we're looking for. Even though people joke about the length of stories,
we are not looking for people to blather on."
After a Connecticut teacher who had been stalked by a student implicated
him in false threats to her school - sending him behind bars for six months
- The Courant persuaded her to make her private writings about the matter
public in its magazine. To Courtney, it was another long piece that would
have lost something in the main pages.
A brief history
The first known Sunday magazine, was established by the San Francisco
Chronicle in 1869. Later, the Chicago Inter Ocean introduced color to its
supplement. But historians generally say the format took off in New York
in the 1890s, when the Hearst-Pulitzer wars were turning a chunk of journalism
yellow.
Features, illustrations, entertainment and fiction posing as fact poured
into the pages of William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal and Joseph
Pulitzer's New York World. "The early Sunday magazines were latter 19th
century inventions and really linked to the rise of the department store
and wanting to get those ads to women readers," says Janice Hume, who teaches
journalism history at Kansas State University in Manhattan.
Journal editor Morrill Goddard launched the 16-page American Sunday
Magazine in November 1896 - later to become The American Weekly (and now
known as USA Weekend) - treating readers to the likes of Life in an Oriental
Harem by an English Girl Who Married a Persian Priest.
"Nothing is so stale as yesterday's newspaper," he said, "but The American
Weekly may be around the house for days or weeks and lose none of its interest."
But Hume said the fade began once radio and then television came on
the scene, sucking away advertising dollars.
Nowadays, Jerry Tilis, a consultant and former Knight Ridder vice president,
tells that company's in-house publication: "It's over for Sunday magazines.
There's a better chance of resuscitating a dead man."
Retrenchment, yet determination
"When a virus comes through and knocks out people, the ones still around
are hale and strong," says Buffalo (N.Y.) News magazine editor Charles
Anzalone, voicing hope the failures have bottomed out. His magazine turned
a $500,000 loss into a $100,000 profit after going monthly and getting
a sprucing up.
Courtney says American editors may take a page out of the British model
in the years ahead and produce multiple magazines, specializing in varied
themes, instead of the general-interest Sunday read of today.
"I don't know if that's the future," he says. "But I think it's a lot
smarter a future than simply eliminating something that is as rich and
as essential as a Sunday magazine."
At the Inquirer, Avery Rome is confident only that the demand won't
wane for the vivid story, the kind at which independent Sunday magazines
have excelled, whether that tale is told "in a magazine, in a broadsheet
or on somebody's Palm Pilot."
On shiny page or something else, they'll still be chasing the "elements
of universal interest," as Goddard described the tenets of his pioneering
Sunday rag.
His elements? They are a mouthful, passed down through generations and
yet still apt for the Sunday storyteller of tomorrow. They are love, hate,
fear, vanity, evil-doing, morality, selfishness, immortality, superstition,
curiosity, veneration, ambition, culture, heroism, science and amusement.
Woodward is an Associated Press staff writer in Washington.
