Magazines in the Museum

My local library has a magazine newsstand that is about forty feet long and eight feet high.  There are a couple of offshoots, but I won’t go down that road.  Every magazine enjoys a full frontal display, enabling me to read the cover lines from ten feet away.  Each magazine is framed in its own canopy, hinting it will last forever.

I would be well within my right to complain at this point about the high taxes that pay for this sprawling newsstand, even though I have never seen it attract a crowd beyond the few locals who can really work up a sweat over “Vogue Knitting.”  But I won’t.  This is meant to be a paean to magazines, my modest song of joy prompted by a snarky, but thoroughly understandable, piece by Laura Hazard Owen @gigaom entitled, “It was great having you, magazines. Let’s just say goodbye now.”

Ms. Owen tells us she subscribed to 14 magazines as a teenager and only seven still exist.  “Jump,” the magazine that got her through those difficult years, doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry.  The writer gets a little closer to home when she talks about “The New Yorker” and that 20,000-word piece on Russia.  I’ve just tossed the premier issue of “Dr. Oz Magazine” and that decision prompted a degree of angst.  But dealing with “The New Yorker” is much more complex.

I have designated spots in my office where I place copies of TNY that I haven’t read.  I have a pile for the issues that I have browsed, cut out the cartoons, just dipped into, or am thinking about reading. I don’t have a pile for magazines I’ve finished because I rarely get to that point.  Or perhaps I don’t remember because one issue appears on top of the other and after a few years of dutiful subscription, one is looking at tonnage that reminds me of my responsibility to the profession that bred and fed me.

I was thinking about Ms. Owen’s remarks about the decline of print magazines as I strolled through the halls of my vast local library.  Of course, it is true.  Newsstand revenue, advertising revenue and subscription revenue are on an inextricable decline and digital revenues, though showing considerable promise, haven’t offset this decline.

When I was at MPA, the magazine association, we struggled to define a magazine in a digital, multi-platform world.  The prevailing notion was that a magazine represents branded, edited content and that characteristic would be the differentiator no matter what digital platform the content was displayed on.  The perceived value of the brand and an intelligent editing would be the differentiator that separated magazines from what was coming down the pike, such as Flipboard, which has said it wants to be like “Vogue” in terms of reader engagement.  One way to do this is to carry video ads sponsored by Chanel. That’s apparently in the works.

A magazine is curated by experienced and loving hands.  Publishers are reluctant to unbundle a magazine or curate content the way Flipboard does because that move strikes at the heart of the value proposition. Industry platforms like Next Issue Media have talked about curating content across content verticals from the various publishers, but that remains to be seen.

On my private library newsstand, I counted more than 200 popular consumer magazines displayed, which likely constitute 80-90% of total magazine circulation in the U.S.  Since I had the place to myself, I could walk the aisles, dip into a magazine, and peruse it at my leisure.  I first went to magazines I had been involved with as publisher or editor, including Bicycling, Runner’s World, Backpacker, Organic Gardening, Scientific American, Men’s Health and others. It was fun to scroll the mastheads looking for old friends and to congratulate, by moving my library lips, editors and designers for vast improvements in the titles.  But in the basic content and format, the special-interest magazines in this crowd were not remarkably different. I found “Bicycling” a little “cheekier”--perhaps they borrowed some of that tone from sister publication “Men’s Health” which has been able to maintain is muscular and irreverent editorial manner for more than fifteen years.  If imitation is the finest form of flattery, judging from how much “Men’s Fitness” has mimicked its competitor, “Men’s Health” has flattery in abundance.

I don’t subscribe to the special-interest sports magazines mentioned earlier and rarely read them. But I’m still a runner and cyclist and an overall fitness enthusiast. It’s just that I’m not often in the market for a $3000 bike or a $300 running shoe.  Moreover, I can get most of the basic, sports-related information online.  I had once thought that special-interest magazines might be largely immune to the ravages of digital.  Now I’m not so sure.

I flipped through the October issue of Time Magazine with the cover story, “How to Eat Now.”  I read the magazine in its entirety and don’t think I found anything new to me.  I felt the same about “The Week,” but understand that the magazine is profitable because when launched, the late Felix Dennis was smart enough not to take on a New York City publishing head count and cost structure.

To a large extent the fate of magazines seemed to be playing out in these spacious library shelves.  Vanity Fair, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, GQ, Esquire and others in the fashion and culture sectors are heavy, thick with ads, and breathing life.  If you are patient enough, you can find an article about a philosophy student who left a phenomenology class and took up mixed martial arts fighting.  Or, if you have the stomach, learn how to skin a rabbit after wading through 200 pages of advertising.  It’s all there in these rich, catalog offerings.

Others have predicted that high-end glossy magazines such as “Vogue” would survive, news magazines would disappear, and special-interest magazines would be a mixed bag.  I don’t disagree with that.  Whatever the trajectory for magazines, it seems inevitable, especially as mobile becomes the dominant platform, that magazines will become uncoupled, as least as an alternative, and personalized in the best sense of the word. 

On my library roaming, I was particularly surprised by “Scientific American,” where I worked a decade ago.  I recall at that time the magazine was struggling with its identity, trying to reach out to a larger constituency of consumers and advertisers. In the process, the editorial got a little softer and the magazine seemed to flounder. Now it looks beautiful and sophisticated, and doesn’t dumb down science.  The magazine has editors for biology, evolution, energy, medicine and the brain.  I enjoyed staring at the cover of Scientific American as much as looking at Jennifer Lawrence on “Vanity Fair.”

When I recall that the first issue of “Scientific American” was published August 28, 1845, I am reminded to be less glib about my predictions.

The Militarization of Our Discourse

I have been following media coverage of a deadly head-on collision on Interstate 87, just a few miles from where I live.  In and of itself, the story is not remarkable.  We see more than our share of accidents on this interstate, including head-on collisions.

I initially paid attention because the head-on collision was at 7:00 a.m. and one driver was heading south in the northbound lane.  Someone reported the car stopped for a time and the driver apparently asleep.  Another driver reported he had seen the suspect car turn around, apparently making a conscious choice to head in the wrong direction.

I was talking to the owner of a local wine store, and he said it was devilishly difficult to make that wrong turn, especially during rush hour.  One had to cross a concrete medium to get to the other side. The wine guy, who rides a motorcycle, suggested such a maneuver was unlikely to happen by chance.

A narrative began to take form through television, print and online.  The wrong-way driver was a police officer. He was also an Army veteran, having served in Bosnia and the Middle East.  He was a cop in the Bronx with the New York City Police Department.  Up to this point, there was only passing mention of the other fatality, except that he lived in the neighborhood, about ten miles from where the other driver resided.  We would eventually learn that he was a cook at a local Catholic college. 

The only television interviews I saw—and perhaps the only ones available--were with the police officer’s family.  The first I saw showed their understandable grief and anguish.  In later interviews, while there was no less grief, a clearer narrative began to form.  The dead man was “sleep-deprived.”  He was working overtime because his girlfriend was pregnant, and he wanted to be financially ready when the baby arrived.  During the various interviews, a young man said something to the effect that it definitely wasn’t a suicide.

None of this is remarkable in itself.  We understand that a grieving family wants to have a sustaining narrative they can live with.  And we just don’t know much.  Both men died from blunt force trauma. The toxicology reports won’t be available for two months.  Police report there was no evidence of drugs or alcohol at the scene.

My first thought when hearing about the accident and knowing the terrain very well, was that it must have been deliberate.  Understandably, this kind of conjecture, without any proof, is not ready for prime time.  But people in the community were talking about this possibility.

From a journalistic perspective, I found the media narrative a little uneven from the very beginning.  There was very little reporting about the actual naturalistic detail of the accident and the decisions that set it in motion.  There was little of the old-fashioned cause and effect.  Rather, most reports seemed to begin with the fact that the driver at “fault” was a veteran who served in the Middle East.  That fact was followed by the other fact that the man was also a police officer.  Now add this to the family’s narrative about workload, lack of sleep, concern about an unborn child and we have a rather sympathetic story about a young man who, according to the information we have to date, made a determined effort to head in the wrong direction and kill another man.  We can argue the motives but there is no disputing the deaths.

Let me be clear.  The forensics will fill in some of the remaining gaps.  I am more interested here in the storyline, the semantic froth and the verbal associations that too often kick in when we hear the words veteran, police office, father-to-be and the like.  The associations readily come to mind: honorable, disciplined, and someone in service to the community and nation.  I live in the shadow of New York and listen attentively to the police being routinely referred to as the Finest, always in capital letters.  If there is truth in these acclamations, there is also hubris.

After the shooting death in Ferguson, Missouri, and the subsequent unrest, we are hearing a lot about the militarization of America’s police departments with an estimated 400 nationwide indiscriminately awarded heavy equipment and automatic weapons that were used or intended for use in Iraq and Afghanistan.  These include: grenade launchers, automatic weapons, night-vision goggles and armored vehicles that are mine-resistant and ideal for protecting against ambushes.  We should be concerned about the militarization of our police departments because there is more at stake than bringing home the political bacon.  The September 2014 issue of The Atlantic Magazine provides an interesting perspective of how America is becoming a police state and explores the role of local authorities in this dynamic.  This is not a case of Big Brother, per se.  It’s a much more pervasive form of Big Little Brother, replete with local accents.

But we should also be concerned about the “militarization” of our language, immediately putting anything associated with the police, military, terrorism task forces, border patrols, and the like in the same box that holds platitudes about our patriotism, righteousness and exceptionalism.   Our War on Terror has also become a War on Language where reports, inferences and judgments—our semantic intelligence at work--are mixed together in a palatable political stew, dumbing us down, dumbing the country’s discourse down, and making it easier for us to wage a highly questionable war in Iraq and to “nation-build” in Afghanistan, demonstrating American hubris and simplemindedness at its best.  America’s rabid international behavior since 9/11 is as much a failure of language as it is of politics.  The just-announced war on ISIS smacks of the same grammar, inverted and unbelievable.

President Obama is criticized for wearing a tan suit during a news conference and for being cautious about committing American military forces in the Middle East, as if we are in some “King of the Castle” kid’s game.  The psychologist Carl Jung writes in The Undiscovered Self: “Insight that dawns slowly seems to me to have more lasting effect than a fitful idealism, which is unlikely to hold out for long.”  Unfortunately, this sentiment is currently out-of-vogue and so un-American.   

I come from a large family of police officers, veterans and active duty personnel who have served our time.  We’ve put in our collective half-century of military service since Vietnam.  I recall my four years in the Navy with appreciation and necessary understatement.   Anyone who has served understands the shadow side of our armed forces, and the subliminal echoes of Catch-22 that will always resonate in the ranks where mere humans serve.   I touch on some of these Navy treats in my new novel USS Bunker Kills: A Sea Story.

America loves its sea stories.

Rodale: When Organic Wants to Become a Noun

I keep an eye on Rodale out of both interest and fondness.  I got my start in publishing at Rodale and remain grateful for the generous publishing tutorials provided by ex-President Bob Teufel and other executives.  This newly minted PhD had a lot to learn about the media business.

When the late Chairman Bob Rodale interviewed me for a position, he asked me what I thought about the company’s magazines.  I said from what I had seen of Prevention and Organic Gardening, they looked a little scruffy.  He laughed and hired me anyway.  I would soon learn how powerful and profitable these two scruffy magazines were.

The 1980s and 1990s were a dizzying time for Rodale in terms of acquisitions and startups including Runner’s World, The Runner, Bicycling, Cross Country Skiing, Men’s Health and Backpacker, some no longer in the fold.  These initiatives substantially enlarged Rodale’s demographic and editorial base, bringing young men and upscale advertisers to a company that had been largely down-market. 

Rodale had just announced the launch of Organic Life, which would subsume Organic Gardening where I spent a few pleasurable years trying to find the right positioning for a back-to-the land, largely mail-order magazine that was losing some of its luster and margin.  Rodale has long wanted to define “organic” as both a marketing and an editorial category, one that could attract a substantial advertising base.

In the early 1990s, Rodale, with help from Martha Stewart as a consultant, took Organic Gardening from digest-size to a full-size magazine, at the same time expanding the editorial base from gardening to cooking and décor.  This was a major and expensive undertaking by a company that had long enjoyed the financial befits of digest-size magazines.  Neither the company nor the market was then ready for this kind of repositioning.  The magazine remained full-size but settled into a predictable how-to editorial offering.    

Rodale hasn’t always been lucky combining core company values with the vicissitudes of the marketplace. The company launched Spring, the Magazine of High Energy Living, in 1983 without fully thinking through its advertising policy which rejected cosmetics that were made with chemicals.  That was not the message Madison Avenue wanted to hear.  Spring was shut down in less than a year.

The company tried again in 2001 with Organic Style to push the definition of organic to include designer dresses, European makeup, and other upmarket offerings, but the magazine was closed in 2005.  The timing was bad, the editorial was not compelling and the market has apparently not yet ready to embraces “organic” as an advertising and marketing category--in other words, as a noun.

But the third time or so might be the charm.  Organic Life, with the existing Organic Gardening as its base property, will be launched in 2015 into the so-called healthy living category that includes Hearst’s Dr. Oz The Good Life and Naturally, Danny Seo, a joint venture with Harris publications.  Rodale has hired James Oseland, a well-regarded editor from Saveur, to run the show.

Both the Hearst and the Harris titles are selling briskly on the newsstand, a good indicator of the vitality of a new title.  These magazines have an advantage in that Dr. Oz and Danny Seo are well-known and are celebrities in their own right with multiple platforms available to promote their titles.  Rodale possesses the same assets.  Perhaps a strategic question is whether the management is willing to let the new editor become a celebrity of sorts to compete in this very personalized space.  The company wasn’t pleased when the editor at Men’s Health assumed an oversized role.

Perhaps even more important is that Rodale doesn’t try to too narrowly define “organic” as it has done in the past.  The word has entered the marketplace as both lifestyle and slogan.  On the practical level, there is no evidence that organic food is necessarily better for you, but there seems a growing interest in organic, holistic living and health.  Editor Oseland promises a magazine that is community and a “clearinghouse of beautiful, authoritative information that will weave together food, shelter, gardening and good living.”

I wish Oseland every success, although I have seen this memo before.  Rodale’s other entries in the category covered similar terrain.  The key will be in the tone and the editorial voice; it will be all in the weaving. 

The Biggest Sea Story of All

Former wrestler and ex-Governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura was interviewed remotely on CBS This Morning by Charlie Rose and company about his successful defamation suit against the estate of late Navy SEAL Chris Kyle worth $1.845 million.  After the pleasantries, the hosts pressed Ventura on why he would sue and take money from the estate of a dead SEAL and his wife and children.  After all, Ventura was also a Navy SEAL.  Ventura responded that they should ask the jury who awarded the dollar amount.

When pressed further, he said the case was about his good name.  He had not in fact been punched out by Kyle in a bar fight in 2006 over comments about Navy SEALS’ actions during the Iraq War.  In Ventura’s words, that never happened and therefore when Kyle referred to the episode in a book and later identified the Governor in public, Ventura was defamed.  And no, he would make no attempt to talk to Kyle’s widow. But he would visit the office of Kyle’s book publisher HarperCollins to chat about the “incident.”  The publisher seemed to get the word and announced shortly after the interview that it would pull the episode in question from future editions.

It was a very strange interview. In the one corner was this relaxed, tanned and hulking ex-wrestler, politician, reality television “truth” seeker weighing in at around 280 pounds.  And by the way Ventura pointed out to his interlocutors that he was on blood thinner at the time of the “incident” and would have been marked by the alleged altercation and would surely have bled. He did not mention his titanium hip replacement.

And in the other corner three focused, professional journalists who asked and probed and did their best but seemed to get nowhere. But the last question got to the heart of the matter. Why would Chris Kyle, America’s most lethal sniper, make up such a bogus story and put it in his book?  Why would he need to?  Didn’t the man have enough “bona fides?”  

Ventura replied that it’s a sea story.  Sailors tell these stories all the time.  One sailor tells another who tells another and so on.  As a Navy veteran who just finished a novel about sea stories, I thought the Governor was reading my mind.

I don’t think this was the answer the hosts wanted or expected. In the dullness of the morning this remark from another time zone, whether “true” or not, seemed to land like a thud on the newsroom floor.  I’m not sure why this response about “tall tales” should have been particularly surprising.  Hiding behind various personas served Ventura well as a professional wrestler and politician.  His recent stint as host of Conspiracy Theories on truTV, which explored everything from FEMA preparing for a Police State to reptilians masquerading as humans in their quest to control the world, proved Ventura has a sense of humor.  And yes, he even sued TSA for aggressive pat-downs. He did mention to Atlantic.com that people should take his cancelled television show with a grain of salt.  But he did hint at a “conspiracy” in the cancellation.

I would not have been surprised if Gayle King or her associates asked Ventura that, when referring to sea stories was he referring to Moby-Dick, The Old Man and the Sea, or Treasure Island?  I’ve had this kind of conversation many times over the years while working on my novel, sometimes in earnest, sometimes in jest, and sometimes to send me packing.  After four years at sea and sleeping under too many stars, it’s reasonable to assume a sailor might need his head examined.     

I experienced this first hand, whether guys were bragging about previous engagements, surviving deadly typhoons or their sexual conquests.  I served during the Vietnam adventure and the sea stories ran apace with the military confusions, on-board conflicts and Vietcong in every sampan. There was certainly a psychological element to all of this.

Men and women who are far away from home, displaced, terrified or wounded often tell stories to lessen the pain and place memories, real or imagined in the “collective.”  The ship itself is a psychological container and “vessel” that can wear on a crew after months or years at sea.  In the Navy lexicon a sea story has more than a hint of exaggeration, such as when my ammunition ship swore it had an arsonist on board who grew more dangerous by the day.  I do wonder what the guys are telling their children and grandchildren about this event that hardly made it into the ship’s log book.  Sea stories can also be a contagion and spread fast when pushed by a punishing wind.  And ships can talk.

I can imagine the scene as if it were yesterday.  I am at the ship’s helm taking commands from my captain as we made our way through an Okinawa harbor.  From a distance I can see that the compass directions the skipper is giving me will put me on a collision course with an aircraft carrier.  My only recourse is to say, “Repeat Sir,” as if I did not understand the command.  The skipper repeated the order and I repeated my response at least four times until the captain gave me the final order, reminding me that I was disobeying a direct order. At that point, the Executive Officer assumed responsibilities for the deck and conn and ordered me to turn hard to starboard.  I did with the collision horn ringing in my ears. We missed the carrier by the skin of our teeth.  So I am able to tell this story again and again. Was I really looking through the early morning fog?  Was I seeing things?  Did the skipper have a death wish?

After the passage of time I like to keep my sea stories in deep water where they are well-feed and unpredictable with no respect for tides, time or compass. 

I have also called on the sea gods relentlessly, and they mercifully kept the wind at my back for 100,000 words or so.  Sea stories that contain a psychological resonance might well become narrative fiction or a novel.  Mine is called “USS Bunker Kills: A Sea Story.”  It’s available at Amazon in paperback and on Kindle. http://ow.ly/zTOLJ

        

LinkedIn and the End of an Affair

Not long ago, it was all the rage to ask, always rhetorically, whether Facebook, Twitter and Google were media companies. The answers, as convincing as the sound of one hand clapping, still hang in the air, largely ignored.  We now know every X, Y or Z will sooner or later become a media company, even LinkedIn.

LinkedIn, the trusty service that helped me network my way up through those treacherous New York media ranks, is more ubiquitous these days and therefore potentially a pain in the ass. What used to be a friendly reminder to congratulate friend John Smith for surviving one more year in that hell-hole of a company, is now a daily reminder to congratulate someone in my muscular network for crossing the street, showing up on time or having a tight epigram retweeted to the masses.  While I applaud the powers-that-are for trying to meld me and my LinkedIn connections into one highly-connected and indulgent family, I’d like to remind them that it is not necessary or even wise corporate policy.  Aren’t we doing enough for your business by letting you market our names to your growing list of advertisers who are improving your share price?  You don’t need to bombard me with tons of emails.  I will still love you in the morning.

Now let me count the ways.  I appreciate that LinkedIn sent me a personal invitation to write for their new Special Edition site.  How could I refuse?  The template is one click away and so are the instructions.  First, I should write thoughts, presumably my own.  Second, I should not misspell any words or offer images that don’t look good.  The example offered is about writing killer content for LinkedIn. 

Dear LinkedIn: for a site devoted to media professionals and anyone else you can collect, I am surprised you provide a writing template that might be better suited to a sixth grade class in the Bronx (no offense, Bronx).  I realize you are casting a wide net and are trying to be helpful. But we have been together a long time, and I thought you really knew something about me. Have all those data points I provided been wasted?  And what if I really want to write about the psychology of dreams or the Catholic Church’s suppression of the feminine?  Do I really have to go to medium.com to exercise these particular muscles?  What if that is a bridge too far? (medium.com/ChuckMcCullagh).

I don’t mean to sound like a spurned lover, but this is not the first time I’ve been disappointed.  Now about Pulse, the news readers you purchased in 2013 for a cool $90 million!  I liked Pulse before the purchase and was excited about the prospects after the purchase.  I’m sorry to say that I’m guessing all the “new” Pulse editors must work for LinkedIn because most of the content seemed very similar to the LinkedIn updates that I’ve grown accustomed to ignoring.  I like and have flown Virgin Airways but don’t think Richard Branson has much to teach me about hard-scrabble ways to manage my small business.  Or the other rich and famous you offer me on a regular basis.

Since we now have this personal thing going, I fully understand why you are shifting the company focus away from media professionals like me who just want to puff up our resumes and brag about our “connections” and move in the direction of a genuine B2B platform.  Though you might have been late to the game, your purchase of Slide Share for $119 million in 2012 makes sense.  Who doesn’t like to share a slide show?  And your recent acquisition of Bizo, the ad-tech platform for $170 million, is a dead giveaway that you are moving into that bland, impersonal, automatic ad sharing world that is driving Facebook stock price through the roof.  I understand that now I will be even more of a keyword, a data point, or a hiccup on a cluster.  Use me as you see fit.  Anyway, the arrangement has always been uneven.

I’m not saying you’re wrong and am definitely not pointing the finger.  I’m hardly a bystander.  But you’ll be the first to know when that # Executive Recruiter calls me for the very first time. 

Count on it. 

Felix Dennis: The Maximum Man

Felix Dennis, publisher, provocateur, entrepreneur, poet, and planter of a million trees is dead at 67 after a long battle with throat cancer.  Dennis, a very wealthy man, was the rare individual who wrote his life as he lived it, mainly over-the-top.  What else does one say about a man who claimed to have spent a cool $100 million on wine, women and drugs?  Well, he did hang with John Lennon and Mick Jagger.   And yes, he was jailed for his involvement in an edition of Oz magazine that showed the Rupert the Bear half-naked and wearing genitals. 

I got to know Dennis and his Maxim magazine when I was part of a team launching Men’s Health in the UK in the mid-1990s.  Special-interest magazines at this time largely catered to women but in the UK, with the launch of “lad” magazines such as FHM and Loaded, men were now being chased by publishers. By the splash, noise and notoriety that accompanied the Maxim launch, I knew this company was a force to be reckoned with.  Within two years, Maxim would be launched in the states and soon was outselling all the other men’s magazines in the category.

Dennis had a keen nose for finding business opportunities early, whether it was launching computer magazines, Star Wars and Jaws issues, or Kung-Fu specials.  And he knew when to get out of a business. After the advertising downturn following the 2007 recession, the “lad” magazines in the states felt the pinch.  Dennis sold Maxim, Stuff, and Blender to the Quadrangle Group for $250 million.  Today, Maxim is worth next to nothing, having been passed around by investment companies like an old shoe.

He told journalism students at Columbia University in 2008 that “You are all useless tossers, but I will be forced to employ you to provide content on the web.” In 2001, he warned European paper manufacturers of the coming digital tsunami. The man was equally comfortable with digital or print.  I recall him discussing a perpetual web business to celebrate the endless dead and dying and those who mourn them.  In his view, the latter would pay a pretty penny because they surely ignored the old man when he was alive.  Dennis’ wicked sense of humor never kept him from an interesting business opportunity.     

I recall our meetings in New York City during which Dennis was never reluctant to tell me what was wrong with American publishing.  Executive editors were spoiled and overpaid; the executive ranks were filled with people who would have trouble tying their shoelaces; and the cost of producing magazines was scandalous. Hyperbole aside, he has been proven prescient.  We have been watching for the last few years the downsizing and restructuring of media companies in the U.S. with Time Inc. the most public example.  Dennis never forgot he was an entrepreneur, the only position worthy of him.

What is remarkable about Dennis is that he developed such a rich interior life while still chasing the money.  He started writing poetry in 1999 and became seriously dedicated to his muse.  I still have a T-shirt that reads, “Did I mention the free wine,” an invitation to attend poetry readings delivered with a delicious hint of bribery.  Dennis said he would be pleased to leave behind two memorable lines of English verse. Felix, spoken like a true poet!

The letters to his friends in 2012, when Dennis was recovering from throat cancer surgery, are full of wit, despair, and ruthless reflection.  He mentions Freud and Jung in his ravings, but his self-analysis seems more fitting to the occasion. He knew his demons well (www.felixdennis.com).

Dennis’ gift of a forest of trees in “The Heart of England” says a lot about what this man considered to be permanent and for that reason must have come from a very old soul.

The NYT, Time Inc. and a Very Long Tale

The New York City media tends to get a little excited when covering one of their own.  We’ve seen that recently in the coverage of the dismissal of Executive Editor Jill Abramson, the first female editor of the New York Times.  I think Lewis DVorkin at Forbes online had the right response: download the leaked Times Innovation Report and re-read “The Kingdom and the Power” by Gay Talese, in which he quotes a NYT executive from a generation ago: most of our staff are “cathedral-builders, not stonecutters.”  The coverage of Ms. Abramson’s departure suggests that sentiment is still in the air at the newspaper.

Much more important than the termination, whatever the editor’s legitimate grievances, the Innovation document suggests that the paper has much deeper problems than egos in the newsroom.  The NYT deserves credit for the clarity and honesty of this report.  Having read and written my share of these white papers, I was astonished that the paper did not whitewash issues and shone a rare light on the interaction between the business and newsroom sides.  The report is brutally honest about the dangers posed by fast-rising competitors, including Vox Media, BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and others.  The report also acknowledges that website and news app traffic are declining. The authors of this paper understand the need for audience development, unlocking the power of data, and the importance of management agility.

The Times’ digital solutions appear to be focused, specific and probably late to the game.  I was a little surprised to read about a renewed effort to make better use of “evergreen” content through tagging, metadata and structured data.  By their count, the paper has 14,723,933 articles in its archives, dating back to 1851.  The need for more structured data has been in the publishing air for decades, spearheaded by IDEAlliance and others and embraced by companies including Time Inc.  Media companies have known that this is money in the bank as well as a way to deepen and personalize content.  It makes good sense for the report to recommend organizing the content by relevance rather than data.  For example, articles about art and culture have a long shelf life.  What an amazing perspective this company is sitting on.

The authors come out in favor of the “stonecutters,” suggesting that the paper’s staff needs to push back against perfectionists and focus on “minimal viable products;” not everything has to be perfect. The report notes that The Verge has redesigned its home page 53 times in the last year.  It also points out that Gawker “plundered” a NYT story about “12 Years a Slave” and milked it endlessly.  The Times tends to publish an article and forget it.  Their digital rivals carve out content in chunks and spoon feed an audience.

The management advice is familiar: reward entrepreneurs; kill off mediocre efforts; and focus on projects than are “replicable” rather than one-offs.  The gutsiest and most challenging part of the report is about Unbolting the Newsroom, which is an effort to build an audience-based collaboration between the business side and the newsroom, focused on reader experience.  There is still too much talk of tradition and turf and the church and state separation. The report suggests appointing evangelists who can help push the newsroom to embrace their digital futures.  This seems to be like a Super Committee.  The report says this with a straight face.

I think this well-charted effort might be a fantasy, and not for a lack of trying.  Lewis DVorkin, quoting from the report, puts his finger on the contradictions the NYT faces. “We still have a large and vital advertising arm that should be walled off.”  No company can win in the digital arena with this kind of restraint.  It seems a little surprising, given the recommendations of the leaked Innovation report, that the Times would appoint a new Executive Editor with little digital experience.

I’ve been thinking about the impending Time Inc. spin-off from Time Warner and how this company is trying to get out from under its legacy media shadow.  The New York Times might find some lessons here.  Even though Time Inc. might have been, by some measures, overstaffed with recent C-level staff lacking in digital acumen, its fundamentals are solid.  Time Inc. embraced early on the idea of structured data and generating income from its archives.  I know first-hand that this wasn’t always considered a high priority in-house (or in the publishing community for that matter) but the technical staff waged this battle and won.  Deep tagging of content significantly increases its value, especially as screens proliferate and advertisers seek more specific and personalized solutions.  

I’ve noted before that I think Time Inc. has had a somewhat muscular definition of “church and state” separation that was not always consistent with the fast-changing demands of the digital business.  That issue has been rendered moot by the new reporting structures at the company.  That Time magazine and Sports Illustrated ran a small Verizon ad on the cover of a recent issue suggests that this is a new beginning.  As a long-time editor, I’m not appalled at this development.

One gets the sense that a more streamlined Time Inc. will be able to move faster.  The recent purchase of Cozi, a free home-management app and website for meal-planning, calendars, and shopping, will likely be the first of many.  It has 10 million users and gives Time Inc. a leg up in the productivity category.

When I read the Times Innovation report, I thought that the company had a lot of digital catching up to do. When I read a report by Internet guru Mary Meeker about Internet Trends, delivered at the Code Conference recently, I realized that the newspaper and the rest of us better hurry up.  Not surprisingly, print is almost absent from this report but Meeker notes that “print remains over-indexed,” which means that there is a disproportionate relationship between the amount of advertising spent on print and the actual time consumers spend with print (19% of total advertising vs. 5% of consumer time spent).  The metrics for radio, TV, and the Internet are much closer and more consistent, except for mobile. Consumers spend 20% of their media time on mobile and this platform gets only 4% of the advertising.  Meeker says this gap represents a $30 billion opportunity for mobile in the USA.

I’ve heard the word “disruption” in media circles so often that these days it seems quite tame.  One could infer from Meeker’s numbers that advertisers are spending too much on print, though the print guy in me would say that the “over-index” exists because of the intrinsic value of print (engagement etc.).   I’m not sure how long I can hold out on this.  As display advertising gives way to more emphasis on programmatic sales, this print “over-index” will surely get more scrutiny.

If Meeker is correct, the Brave New World that we’ve been ploughing through for the last two decades will become even more interesting or frightening, depending on what chair one is sitting in.  Please don’t believe the hockey stick predictions for mobile growth, but do think about the fact that now there are almost as many mobile phone in the world as televisions. And in 2013, 25% of web usage was via mobile.

Just as I’m getting used to multi-purpose apps, Meeker tells me to pay attention to apps as a service layer that only opens when they have something to say to me that is informed by context, location sensors, history of use and predictive consumption.  Perhaps someone will remind me to buy “Mother Jones” magazine.

Meeker indicates that industry verticals are likely to change given the marriage of content, community, and commerce.  She cites Houzz, a site that brings together photos, professional consumers, and products in an ecosystem devoted to home renovation and design.  This sounds like a magazine to me.

The NYT Innovation report and the Meeker perspective, though different in intent, reside at distinct ends of a digital and existential divide.  But she has a lot to say to and about content companies.  According to her research, two-thirds of Digital Universal Content is created by consumers in the form of videos, social media, and image sharing.  That’s staggering.

As the authors note in their report, the NYT is perfectly positioned to experiment with collections comprised of videos and articles, such in the heavily-reported sex-trafficking, building at the same time a new frame around old content. The newspaper might learn from medium.com, founded by Evan Williams, ex-chairman of Twitter, which is built around specific content verticals written by people knowledgeable in specific fields (I contribute).  This could be a good way to extend the brand in a managed, professional way. Their fine professional journalists can’t do everything.

Or buy the company.  Lots of them.

The path to a digital future is probably not through the committee room door.

(The Mary Meeker presentation can be found at recode.net).    

Dark and Comic Technology in "The Circle"

I think it very hard to write historical fiction or even contemporary fiction set in a familiar landscape, especially one on which the media is cutting its teeth.   I’m finishing a novel loosely based on events in the Tonkin Gulf during the closing months of the Vietnam War.  In some respects, there is little new to be said about this period.  Robin Williams has probably told many Americans all they need to know about US involvement in Vietnam in his “Good Morning Vietnam.”  The comedian will always own Da Nang.  The Tonkin Gulf Resolution that legitimized what was essentially an illegal war pricks the public conscience about as much as the WMD fantasy that sent us into Iraq.  And George Bush is painting his dogs. 

This dilemma is quite real for me.  I served in the Navy in that region during this period.  I know the historical narrative and the seascape quite well.  For these and other reasons, I am casting my novel as a sea story, in the fullest sense of the word, replete with fictions, mythologies, and a range of characters who might be involved in conduct unbecoming.  The ships, the weapons, and the weather all adhere to the strictest specifications, as any military manual would require.  But I reserve the right to take appropriate liberties with those who roam the decks.  The richness must be in the characters, the personas and the necessary fictions they create.  And I know this is easier said than done.

I offer these remarks as a prologue to a review of the novel The Circle by Dave Eggers that seems like a loosely fictionalized account of some of the big boys in the data, content, and privacy game.  It would be a little unfair to say that The Circle reads like a faintly disguised “roman-a-clef” about Google, though many of the themes promulgated by the Three Wise men who are the brains behind such quotable phrases such as Secrets are Lies and Privacy is Theft, seem faintly familiar, though inverted.  By the end of the novel, “Do No Evil” will seem pretty tame.

One quickly catches on that The Circle will have little in common with Dante’s jaunt; the novel seems more like a parlor game that gets creepier as we get inside the workings of this company that is referred to on the first page as “heaven.”  On arriving at the corporation, the lead character Mae marvels at the beautiful campus, the picnic tables arranged in concentric circles, and the children from the day-care center squealing.  One can detect a thin layer of satire in the opening pages but that element doesn’t completely allay for me the sense that the narrative fix is in.  Just follow the yellow brick road.  This walkway has tiles with imploring messages of inspiration, including:  Dream, Participate, Innovate, Imagine, and Breathe.

If The Circle is about technology, it is technology in the fanciful extreme.  We soon learn that one of the founders had devised a Unified Operating System that combines everything online: social media profiles, payment systems, passwords, email accounts, preferences, and every last tool, real and imagined.  From here the thematic hockey stick would track a familiar course, one slogan at a time.

This is a breezy, easy book.  The author fills the book with enough human interaction and pathologies to make it interesting.  Mae seems to remain, more or less, in a state of wonder and her character is not particularly well-rounded.  The Circle offers a never-ending menu of good food, comedians, booze, and chamber orchestras, and dormitory rooms for those who indulge too much.  On her first day on the job Mae has some wine and says to a fellow male traveler she’s just met: “You fuck me not.”   Of course, this is a marker of sorts, suggesting Mae can’t handle her wine, is thinking about sex, or the ribald line is a hint that beneath the best Operating Slogans is an itch that needs to be scratched.

In a sense the novel is all about visual layers; about screens on top of screens on top of screens.  But this is more about data than depth.  More about the thematic than the dramatic!  Mae begins her job in Customer Experience under the guidance of managers who remind her that “no robots work here.”  This becomes a very visible inside joke.  The Plan by one of the Wise Men to place cameras at surfing spots turns into a project that places cameras everywhere, even in the most repressive kingdoms.  The business logic is simple:  All That Happens Must Be Known.  The novel now enters the dawn of the Second Enlightenment.  Why not chips inside of children, inside everyone?  And cameras on everyone, politicians included!  Given that there is no real pushback to these schemes and no one is falling on her sword, the increasingly wacky efforts can continue at their riotous pace.

In time, the company will peer inside Mae’s body, soul, and psychological state.  She is criticized for engaging in activities not included in her profile.  She is caught on camera in a kayak she “borrowed.”  This excursion gets her in hot water and to a meeting with one of the Wise Men.  During her apology to the entire Circle team, Mae utters three phrases:  Secrets Are Lies, Sharing Is Caring, and Privacy Is Theft.  Her candor is greeted with thunderous applause and from that point on Mae will be on the inside and “would be going transparent.”

Mae wears a camera that records her day except for the private moments.  In some respects she becomes the center of the Circle universe, relaying through her lens the inner workings of the company.  The statements from the Wise Men about completing the Circle and Making the Circle Whole take on a touch of the delusional, even though these words find themselves at ground level on campus tiles.  Mae imagines the Circle as the center of a perfect democracy.

Any growth in Mae’s character comes at the author’s hands.  It seems a little forced, as if she has been anointed.  A mysterious man, Kalden, who wanders the underworld of the Circle, warns her against descending too deeply into the inner circle.  Mae seems more interested in having sex with this mysterious old/young man in some handy underground alcove.  The heavy breathing might as well come from some indulgent comic book scene.  Only the word balloons are missing.  

Mae does have a family and a slight background, but these don’t seem to bear on her choices.  In fact, she uses all available Circle technology to find a friend, Mercer, who is running away from everything the Circle stands for.  In the language of an increasingly mean-spirited Mae, Mercer is a fugitive from friendship.  The SeeChange cameras and the drones find him soon enough.  Mercer drives off a gorge, killing himself.  One of the Wise Men reminds Mae that she was “trying to help a very disturbed, antisocial young man.”  Suicide is also evil.  This is perhaps the best and most chilling scene in the book.  Other parts of the novel could have benefited from such a close up of the price of dark technology.

The Circle is a novel about technologies that are all too familiar, if somewhat conflated.  The author has simply taken these ideas and platforms to their illogical conclusions.  One is not surprised that the Machine God appears in the form of her lover, the missing Wise Man, who counsels her against closing the circle, gives her a manifesto to read to her watchers, and then suggests they bike through the Mongolian steppe. 

Mae had gotten so close to the Apocalypse, it rattled her.

It’s unlikely to rattle you.  

Hatching Twitter in Four Acts

Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton is a curious and perhaps necessary book.  In his introduction, Bilton reminds us that “history is the certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”  Although Twitter the company didn’t let Bilton in the door, he conducted sixty-five hours of interviews with current and former board members, the four Twitter founders, and many more, on and off the record.  The author found, as do most historians, that people remember past events differently.  Bilton does his best to triangulate various events, using social media in the process to even out discrepancies.  The tweets, videos, and photos shared over a decade substantiated the basic narrative.

I am writing this the day after the Academy Awards, during which host Ellen DeGeneres took out her Samsung Galaxy Note 3—a sponsor-- for a “selfie” with a group of celebrities.  Her post has been retweeted about three million times, almost bringing Twitter to its knees and wiping our President Obama’s election retweet record.  All in all, this was another night at the office.  Ms. Ellen used her Galaxy on a number of occasions to tweet photos of other celebrities.  Media folks call sponsored advertising that seems intrinsic to an event or brand, native advertising, as if it’s been there all along in plain sight.  Who can imagine the Academy Awards without Twitter?

Hatching Twitter offers abundant evidence that this solipsistic Oscar celebration was by no means inevitable.  I am not simply referring to the fits and starts associated with a startup, the lack of capital, or even the internal spats, Silicon Valley style, that inevitably bubbles up in that basement apartment or adjacent garage.  The drama that engulfed the four Twitter founders, Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Noah Glass, was marked by intrigue, revenge, betrayal, and mendacity.  Jack Dorsey could play a mean Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello.  Other playwrights can accommodate the rest.  

Just how does one organize a book about a bunch of really smart, childish adults who write code and act spoiled?  Bilton’s answer to my hypothetical appears to be in his choice of a dramatic structure for his book, starting with the ouster of Evan in a board coup on October 4, 2010, led by Jack Dorsey.  In a way, this is a smart choice because we already know, more or less, how the story ends.  The intrigue is presumably in the early chapters where the restless psyches of the founders are fully on display.  That said, there is still something surreal about this book, as we are taken inside the heads and psychologies of the major players, as we would expect in a novel.  In a way, this approach is in keeping with the main narrative.  There is something surreal and improbably about the launching of Twitter.  One can never know too much.

The seeds for Twitter were appropriately sown in or near San Francisco on the heels of the dot com collapse.  Evan Williams launched Blogger, push-button publishing for the people, which he sold to Google in 2003, for millions.  At this time, Noah Glass, who was working with Evan on an audio extension of the Blogger, turned Audblog into a separate startup.  Evan would launch Odeo, a pod-casting startup with decent financial backing.  By 2005, the four founders were all involved in Odeo and the squabbling had already begun, especially between Ev and Noah. 

Who invented Twitter is a discussion worthy of a book such as Hatching Twitter.  Twitter, like success, seems to have many fathers.  By Bilton’s account, Jack and Noah, though not in parallel, souring on the prospects for Odeo, began thinking about other business.  Jack has apparently been thinking about a “status update” since 2000 when he used a blogging service called LiveJournal.  On a primitive level, the status update was in the air.  According to Bilton, Noah took the concept to another level: “This status thing could help connect people to those who weren’t there.  It wasn’t just sharing what kind of music you were listening to or where you were at the moment; it was about connecting people and making them feel less lonely.”

Ev raised the prospect of Odeo becoming a messaging platform.  Biz Stone, who came from Google, had been obsessed with the idea of a “Phone-ternet” for particular communities.  The status-thing was getting everyone’s attention.  Names like Smssy, Friendstalker, Twitch, Twit, Twitchy were banded around until Noah stumbled across the word to describe the light chirping sound made by certain birds.  Twitter was it.  The rough, self-conscious tweets began.  The internecine struggles would soon follow, with Ev forcing Noah out over management issues.

Existential questions about Twitter remained.  What exactly was this business?  Jack saw it as a place to say: “What am I doing?”  Ev saw Twitter as a mini-blogging product.  The 2007 San Francisco earthquake brought some clarity to this question.  By this time, 15,000 tweets had been sent, all about status.  Sharing the quake on Twitter suggested the platform would also be about a status larger than the individual self.  That conversation would continue.  While Twitter debated the matter, the outside world used the service in all sorts of adventurous ways, including for hard news, celebrity chatter, fake personas, politics, police scanners and so on.  Twitter would become whatever we say it is.

By the time Yahoo knocked on Twitter’s door the service had almost 250,000 active users.  The joke around the Twitter offices is that the company should take no less than $100 million.  Yahoo offered $12 million, since Twitter was simply a messaging service.  And Yahoo could replicate that.  That’s the oldest negotiating trick in the book.  Twitter would seek venture funding.

Twitter suffered the growing pains many startups endure: lack of strategic direction and focus, tension among management, burn rates, technical issues (servers crashing) and liquidity.  This time, the axe fell on Jack, who at the time was trying to make a separate peace with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.  That didn’t work out nor did Zuckerberg’s attempt to buy Twitter.  The Facebook CEO would have a long memory.

Nick Bolton devotes considerable space to the psychological pain suffered by the founders who were fired or demoted.  He seems to give disproportionate attention to Noah and Jack in a manner I thought bordered on bathos.  I’m not sure I wanted to go so deep into their loneliness, whether it was well-reported or not.  Most of the individuals who were displaced were financially well-off.  My heart doesn’t beat any faster learning that in the early days Biz Stone and his wife had to raid their piggy bank, or how Noah and wife have a baby, or about Ev’s rumination or parenting, or Jack  dressing and sounding like Steve Jobs.

The founders launched a very successful company and were as ruthless, venial, cutthroat, confused and savage, as many who have come before them.  It’s always about the money, the power and bragging rights.   A ten-page coda at the end of a very enjoyable book seems an unnecessary and pious redemption.

The trouble with writing a book about a startup, especially a remarkable one like Twitter, is that the book is inevitably going to be all prologue.  Success can cancel out even the most delicious narrative.

Just ask Jack Dorsey. 

Dr. Oz and The Good Life Launch

I’ve eagerly awaited my first copy of Dr.Oz’s The Good Life from Hearst.  Given his successful daytime talk show, it was inevitable long before the announcement from the publisher that there would be a print magazine bearing his name.  Oprah provided the model.  Oz was a magazine waiting to happen.

From what I have seen, Dr. Oz’s television show is aimed at women in Middle America and at times is replete with props and exaggerated depictions of human anatomy.  On today’s show, three women played a G.I. tract, a uterus, and a bladder, in that order, without any self-consciousness I could detect.  There’s a celebratory feel to the show with the good doctor at times something of a barker.  This is evident in his pushing of herbal remedies and other regimens considered outside of mainstream medicine.  And this seems precisely his point.

This magazine is probably the only title to be launched by a major publisher this year, so it’s getting a lot of attention.  Actually, I think health and fitness is one of the few categories that can sustain another big magazine of consequence.  My first real magazine job was with Prevention, and I have nothing but respect for what Rodale has contributed to the sector, exploring non-traditional therapies a generation before Dr. Oz popularized them on television.  The bedrock of Rodale’s health coverage could be found in the medical journals.  Editors translated this information into language the lay person could understand. Now, every health editor can do this.  It is no longer a competitive advantage.  Today we want advice tinged with celebrity promise.  And we want props.

While watching some of Dr. Oz’s shows, I was reminded a little of Bob Rodale, the late company president, who in his understated, decidedly non-celebrity way took on the medical establishment and its emphasis on cure rather than prevention.  That has been Rodale’s editorial cornerstone since its launch seventy years ago.  I sensed, somewhat nostalgically, that Dr. Oz would have been a perfect fit for an earlier Rodale, editorially speaking, but also realized Rodale was probably not the best home for the doctor, a driven celebrity who like Oprah is comfortable with his image on the magazine cover again and again.  The closest Rodale got to this breed was with David Zinczenko, past Men’s Health honcho, television celebrity, author and New York man about town.  When he became the de facto Men’s Health brand, the owners showed him the door.  Dr. Oz doesn’t have to worry about that.  Hearst, with its successful joint ventures with Oprah, The Food Network, and HGTV magazine, is the perfect home for The Good Life.   The company understands celebrity.

Dr. Oz writes in his launch editor that “The battle for your health is going to be won in your kitchen, your bedroom, and your living room.”  He “won’t be hesitant to make suggestions that aren’t yet proven by medicine just because certain areas haven’t been fully explored by science.  My litmus test is this:  Would I give that advice to my own family?  If so, then you’ll find it here.”

About a year ago in an article in The New Yorker entitled, “The Operator,” author Michael Specter asks: “Is the most trusted doctor in America doing more harm than good?”  That is the subtitle and doesn’t really reflect the tone of the article.  Tracker, a science blog from MIT, while praising Specter for his knockout piece, notes that the author “circles Oz slowly and attacks indirectly.”  He is writing for The New Yorker after all and Oz casts a very large shadow.

 Specter acknowledges that most advice on Dr. Oz’s television show is grounded in medical fact and science.   On other occasions he suggests that the doctor’s descriptions of medical treatments as “startling, breakthrough, and miracle,” his giving air time to a spokesman for gay reparation therapy, his support of laying on of hands in the operating room, and his aggressive pushing of supplements, constitute an abdication of his medical responsibility.  For Specter, “There is no hierarchy of evidence for Dr. Oz.” (The New Yorker, February 2, 2013).

From what I’ve seen of the television show, the article is spot on.  There is a certain hyperbole in the show’s presentation and a touch of reality television when Dr. Oz asks his audience to handle a large intestine as if they are part of a Conga Line.  On the other hand, this is also, Dr. Oz-style, Exaggerated Physiology 101 with wounded hearts, bulbous livers and arteries you could die for.  This is daytime television and therefore theater with a touch of the absurd.  The audience laps it up and apparently learns a lot.   

That said, even though Dr. Oz is clear about the limits of traditional medicine, he has provided a forum for views that seem far outside the mainstream. The program on arsenic in apple juice, based on a discredited report, is one example.  So is the session on miracle green coffee beans to burn fat fast.  Giving air time to an osteopathic doctor who considers cancer a fungus that can be cured with baking soda seemed a little over the top. 

In The New Yorker article, Dr. Oz the host is described by an associate as an “entertainer.”  The show provides considerable latitude (and longitude, if you like) for medical entertainment that is likely essential for its survival.  Dr. Oz manages to hold his time spot and his audience by telling women how many orgasms they should have a year if they want to improve their lives (around 200).  Another doctor has called this kind of advice, “lunacy.”   Someone else might call this advice, ratings.

The Good Life is a New Magazine from Dr. Oz.   That is what the cover proclaims.  The doctor’s photo is on the cover and his image appears about seven times throughout the issues, in different styles and different clothes.  But this is not about vanity, as the personalization of “Oprah” sometimes appears to be.   His image is always tied to specific medical advice.  It hardly appears intrusive.  This is exactly what the consumer is buying.

As a longtime editor and publisher, I usually pay attention to the masthead of new magazines.  Hearst probably handles business partnerships and joint ventures as well as any media company in the world.  With the veteran Ellen Levine sitting in the Editorial Director’s chair, there’s no chance the editorial will mimic daytime television or stray too far.

The premier issue of The Good Life has 148 pages with 66 pages of advertising.  The magazine is blunt, cheery, and designed with Optimism that is also the doctor’s final page and last word.   The editorial direction is subtle and organizes the magazines around categories including: Health + Happiness, Mind + Mood, Love, Family, and Friends, and Food + Recipes.  The plus sign underscores an important theme of this magazine: everything is additive.  I suspect it will grow on people.

This woman’s magazine has a couple of advantages.  Advice about the power of kissing, the benefits of tea, and safer cat food is anchored in the medical literature but retains through deft editing the over-the-fence chat quality that Dr. Oz has perfected on his show.  The Good Life is not filled with breakthrough medical advice; it doesn’t have to be.   And that’s not what monthly magazines do anyway.  The challenge of this magazine is to harness unselfconsciously the power of the Dr. Oz brand and let this power seep into to every piece of information, whether the doctor’s image is on the page or not.  The reader knows that he is ubiquitous.

After camping out with a half-dozen Dr. Oz television shows, I must congratulate the editors of The Good Life for their exquisite restraint.  The tone, brand, and point-of-view belong securely to Dr. Oz.  The editors have made sure of that.

They honor their craft by remaining invisible.

Sochi, the Daily Show, and Media in Retreat

I can’t bear to watch the Sochi Olympics on television.  Perhaps because there are thirty inches of snow outside my office windows while the Olympic site is experiencing beach weather.  Actually, I think is something deeper.

The Olympic site has been widely branded as another Potemkin village named for the phony settlements built in the Crimea by a Mr. Potemkin to impress Empress Catherine II.  While this anecdote is probably apocryphal, it seems to have stood the test of time.  Of course, building facades to impress the other party is as old as, well, sport.  London and Beijing covered a lot of their inner city-rot before their respective Olympics and gave the homeless and the untidy one-way tickets out of town.

The media has had a field day with reports of snowboarders locked in Sochi bathrooms, hotel water running yellow and downhill skiers adjusting to the beach conditions.  One can’t be sure whether it is comic relief or Russian destiny to repeatedly see President Putin rise out of the sea or some embroidered clam shell to proclaim with his bare chest and Soviet grin that Russian manhood, long devastated by alcohol and suicides, is now in good hands.  One can hardly blame social media for finding in this artifice a version of the Most Interesting Man in the World campaign, Dos Equis-style, perfectly equipped to pull the tail of a snow leopard, toss a 300-pound male with the flip of his judo hips, and, when necessary, part the Black Sea.

I think it was Karl Marx who said that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce, apparently referring to Napoleon I and his nephew Louis Napoleon.  But, in these days of compressed time, we don’t have to wait for the long arc of history to play itself out.  The Sochi political overlay, the dictator-cum-breasts, and the delicious, brotherly canards offered up by the Olympic Committee are indeed the stuff of farce.  Unfortunately, tragedy lurks just below the surface.  Please don’t look for it on NBC, our paid sponsor. 

The Committee to Protect Journalists has published a devastating account of media repression and self-censorship related to the Sochi Olympics. (“Media Suffer Winter Chill in Coverage of the Sochi Olympics”, available at www.cpj.org).  The report describes the exploitation of migrant workers, forced evictions, environmental destruction, contaminated water supply, and levelling of prime forests.  But the real guts of the report is the extent to which the Russian government has muzzled both Russian and international journalists.  The CPJ reports government payouts to media, prior review of programming, and widespread use of paid content.  The government threatens to withdraw media licenses to any outlet that addresses any of the touchy subjects, meaning anything the government has not approved in advance.  Journalists are harassed.  Defamation in the press is a criminal offense.  There is hostility to all things foreign.  The approved article lead is this: “The skies are always clear over Sochi.”

In perfect serendipity, the Daily Show, apparently dissatisfied with the New Russia fantasy being showcased in Sochi, traveled to Moscow to find the old Russia.  In looking for the historic bread lines, the reporter found lines for lattés and the like.  He begged Russian politicians to bring back the Cold War.  He even managed, or perhaps staged, a brief session with Gorbachev, pleading with him to bring back the Berlin Wall.  The Master of Détente threw him out of his office.

I found the Daily Show piece especially interesting because I was working in Moscow during the “perestroika and glasnost” period.  It became pretty clear early on that the Communists simply walked across the street and became Western-style Democrats overnight.  Putin is a reminder of how little has changed.

The Daily Show joke seemed to be that the old enemy was much more interesting and useful than the new regime in tights.  But perhaps the joke runs deeper than that.  Add a little gas money, international prestige and secret handshakes from the guys who hold the Olympic rings, and we have a modern day Potemkin village, sturdier than the one erected for Catherine II and expansive enough to feature the new emperor, usually without his shirt, pulling the world’s chain while laughing all the way to the bank.

In the West, this is known as funny business. 

The New Yorker, Pope Francis, and Theology under Fire

I’ve long been a fan of The New Yorker, but the recent article about Pope Francis, “Who Am I to Judge” by James Carroll, has touched me more deeply than any magazine article in recent memory.  Perhaps this is because Carroll once studied for the priesthood, is a fine writer, and seems to understand Catholic dogma at its roots.  Perhaps it is because the piece is a welcome respite from the kind of hagiography we have seen in Time Magazine and much of mass media since Francis’ ascension to the papacy.  Perhaps, as an Irish Catholic who has been a foot-soldier in the culture wars and wrote a PhD dissertation on the Catholic imagination, I badly needed a fresh look at a church organization that has become anathema to many for its handling of the crimes against children.

When the Pope responded to a question about homosexuals with the remark:  “Who am I to judge?” the various factions lined up as expected.  Some saw this as opening the door to the gay community.   Conservative clergy, led by New York’s Cardinal Dolan, who seemed to be everywhere, responded that it was a matter of tone, not a shift in theology.  Carroll’s reading is a little more subtle in that he suggests Francis “unilaterally declared a kind of truce in the culture wars that have divided the Vatican and much of the world.”  But Carroll reminds us that in a less-known interview Francis calls homosexuality “an intrinsic moral evil” and the inclination “must itself be seen as an objective disorder.”  And these remarks are consistent, in language if not in tone, with what Francis said when he was Archbishop of Buenos Ares.

The New Yorker piece also reminds us that there has been nothing subtle or understated about his remarks concerning the Institution Church.  Francis denounced the “psychology of princes” before new bishops last fall.  He denounced episcopal careerism as “spiritual adultery,” a “form of cancer.”  As Carroll notes, clearly there is more than a tonal shift when Francis, in an open letter to an Italian journalist, says: “I would not speak about ‘absolute’ truths, even for believers ….  Truth is a relationship.  As such, each one of us receives the truth and expresses it from within, that is to say, according to one’s own circumstances, culture, and situation in life.”  The New Yorker writer suggests that the Pope “violated a set code of Catholic ethical and discourse” in his reference to moral relativity.  The Pope would expand on this. “The view of the Church’s teaching as a monolith to defend without nuance or difference understanding is wrong.” 

Sooner or later all discourse leads to the central tenets of Church doctrine.  One gets a sense from listening to Cardinal Dolan and others that we should indeed applaud what Francis has to say but at the end of the day, the Church should be understood as “semper idem”—always the same.   The good man can make changes at the pastoral edges but nothing in the long run will change.

However, Carroll reminds us that the “Church has made profound doctrinal changes in living memory.  In 1964, the council repudiated a millennium-long tradition of ‘No Salvation outside the Church’.”  That formulation dates at least to the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215…. The Vatican overturned the doctrine by affirming the primary of conscience—a doctrine Francis has reiterated.”   Even “more momentous is the council’s rejection of the ‘Christ-killer’ slander against the Jews, which has its roots in the Gospels.”  Carroll writes that “None of the potential changes to doctrine facing the contemporary Church compare with the depth of this revision.”      

At the end of the day, Pope Francis will likely be judged by how he responds to priest sexual-abuse.  He has established a commission of priests, nuns, and lay experts to address these issues.  There is no indication that the commission will look at the Vatican or bishops’ involvement.  Pressure on the Vatican to do just this is coming from a lot of places, including the United Nations’ Committee on the Rights of Children.  In an unusually blunt and sobering report released at the end of January 2014, the UN Committee states that the Holy See hides behind Canon Law and places obedience to the Pope above the protection of children.  The report states that tens of thousands of children have been abused by clergy and the Holy See has not acknowledged the extent of the crimes.  In fact, there is a code of silence around this abuse.  Abusers are rarely reported to civil authorities.  Accordingly the commission to investigate these crimes should include civil society and victims.  The U.N. urges the Church to consider sexual abuse a crime and not some vague “defect against the moral” order, as the Church has defined it.  Canon Law should be changed to reflect the reality.

Given the popularity of the new Pope, the UN report came as a shock to many, not only because of the charge that the Vatican is hiding behind Canon Law but also because the report included criticisms of the Church’s position on homosexuality, gender equality, birth control and abortion.  It is very rare for the UN to comment on religious doctrine.

The Pope has directed dioceses to distribute questionnaires to parishioners about divorce, birth control, and gay marriage.  According to Carroll, “When Archbishop Lorenzo Baldisseri, the Secretary General of the Synod, was recently asked if remarried divorcees might be admitted to the sacraments, he replied, ‘The fact that it has been included in the questionnaire means it’s going to be looked at, and the intention is to discuss the issue without any taboos, otherwise it would not have been mentioned.’”  Mary McAleese, former president of Ireland, quoted in the Irish Times, suggested “This is a great opportunity for Francis.  Please, let us not have a bunch of men who have deliberately chosen not to have families tell us as members of families how we’re going to live our family life.  Please, let us have a broad-ranging discussion in which people who have real experience of family life lead the reflection.”

I wrote after returning from Italy last fall about how the Catholic Church, surrounded by such lushness and lustiness in art and architecture, has never found a way to let a full feminine impulse into its teachings.  Certainly Mary, the Mother of Christ, has an exalted presence but she was ever virgin, a perpetual virgin.  The Church tried to imbue its theology formally with the feminine principle by announcing The Immaculate Conception (1845) and the Assumption into Heaven (1950) as dogma.  These seem rather late in a 2000-year history.  This full article can be found at www.medium.com.

In explaining much of the conflict and ambivalence in the current Church, James Carroll quotes Stephen Colbert, speaking about Francis at the Al Smith dinner.  “I believe the Pope is infallible.  But he’s also wrong about a lot of things.”

That issue might be the least of the Church’s doctrinal worries.  Colbert is joking but his humor finds support in a recent poll by Univision, the U.S. Spanish-language network that confirms what has been long assumed:  most Catholics in the developed world are at odds with the Church over gay marriage, contraception, divorce and women’s admittance to the priesthood.  The Church has already pivoted in its outreach to the souls in Latin America and Africa where the laity is more in tune with Catholic doctrine.

Colbert has his work cut out. 

New U.S. Soccer Magazines, the Pele Effect, and Leggy Data Points

I’m British by birth and have kicked something ever since I could walk. And I have been waiting since coming to America as a teenager for soccer to become mainstream in this country.  While in the Navy in Asia, I looked forward to traveling to Hong Kong because the folks there at least knew what to do with their feet.  I stayed in the hunt, starting a soccer team at a small state college in Pennsylvania.  My brother was the first player signed for the fledgling University of Wisconsin-Green Bay soccer team.  My daughter played varsity for the University of Pittsburgh.  We’ve all done our share of coaching.

U.S. women’s soccer, led by the brilliant Mia Hamm and a strong contingent of female college and professional soccer players, captured the imagination of America and the world during the last decade of the 20^th century and early in the 21^st.   This represented massive, community-level enthusiasm in the very best sense of the words.  I loved attending these events with my daughter and her friends.  I loved this muscular expression of the feminine. 

Our collective hopes for English football, American-style, were raised when Brazil’s Pele’ came out of retirement in 1975 to play for the New York Cosmos for three years.  Even at thirty-five, Pele was a wonder to watch and helped soccer for a period attract national television and celebrity coverage, but the top down approach didn’t work either.  It would be another twenty years before the country was ready for the sport.  The North American Soccer League celebrates its 19^th anniversary in 2014, a longer tenure than any other U.S. soccer league.

The New York Times noted that NBC has paid a record $250 million for broadcast rights to every English Premier League game for the next three years.  The Times also notes that soccer journalism lags its foreign peers with only one magazine, Soccer America, in business since the 1970's.  Now two soccer quarterlies, Eight by Eight and Howler, have joined the fray.  A third called XI is said to be experiencing financial difficulties.

I think that most special-interest magazines in America have come into being when there were rising consumer and business interests in the sector.  Certainly this was true of Runner’s World in the 1970's and Bicycling Magazine, where I served as editor and publisher during the relaunch in the 1980's and 1990's.  Growing interest in health and fitness was matched by upscale consumer products from Nike, Trek and others and a boom was born.  We’ve seen this happen in America before, such as a generation earlier when returning GI’s who had learned a little about mountain skiing in combat brought their experience and enthusiasm back to the states.  Ski and Skiing magazines were a by-product of these World War II activities.

So the historical parallels for the growth of soccer magazines in American are well-known.  As noted, youth soccer has been flowering for a generation as has collegiate soccer.  Television—and that means major advertisers in tow—have embraced the sport.  NBC is providing delicious, understated coverage of the best Premier League Soccer games.  Fox, a little more chatty, provides the best of the European leagues. The general optimism about the sport, worldwide, is partly fueled by the fact that the World Cup is being held in Brazil in June of this year.  Billions are expected to watch this extravaganza in part because Brazil is considered the spiritual home of the beautiful game.  This is a bit of a fantasy because Brazilian players are often overrated.  But so are the New York Yankees.

The new soccer magazines, though currently exhibiting modest plans, are run by management with deep experience in publishing, including at Esquire, National Geographic, and GQ.  The NYT piece reveals that Howler “got its start with $69,000 from Kickstarter and ‘pretty sizable’ support through advertising by Nike and beIN Sport, the Al Jazeera-affiliated sports network.”

These magazines share a common theme:  that US soccer has been largely ignored by US print media and that is true enough.  Given the long slog soccer in the states has undergone, I wonder whether fine journalism and splashy layouts are enough to draw in the finicky American crowd.  After all, soccer is not three yards and a cloud of dust.  It is about finesse, the ability to run on average a 10-12K race each game, and more than a little understanding of geometry.

I’m currently reading Soccernomics, a splendid, NYT best-selling book that examines soccer from an empirical standpoint, relying on data rather than truisms and old world utterances offered by aging white coaches about a game they apparently don’t know that well.  The authors’ opening salvo makes the point.  Researchers at a large club looked at more than four hundred corner kicks and concluded that “the most dangerous corner was the ‘inswinger’ to the near post.”  They took this finding to the club’s manager, who was an ex-player who knew from his field experience that an ‘outswinger’ was more effective.  End of story!  This represents the book in miniature.

Authors Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski see English and European football, with some exceptions, as a century-old game that has changed little in the way owners and managers view the sport.  So clubs continue to overvalue older players, certain nationalities, and high school stars.  And they frequently prefer to hire blondes, another mistake.  The authors suggest that teams might be better off if managers were hired through the wisdom of the crowds or perhaps not at all.  They offer a ton of data to support this thesis.

English and European football are undergoing changes that the Brad Pitt movie Moneyball captured about the 2002 Oakland Athletics.  Hamstrung with a tight budget in a small market, the owner decided to rely on data rather than the intuition and experience of coaches.  The rest is history, more or less.

The authors note that it is a little surprising that soccer has been so adverse to studying data because the sport, like baseball and football, is all about the numbers.  We’ve heard the lament before.  Why sully a beautiful game, any beautiful game, with attention to cold, hard numbers.  The authors suggest that when England loses a penalty shootout in a World Cup quarterfinal, instead of throwing beer glasses at the TV, fans might temper their disappointment by reflecting on the nature of the binomial probability theory.   

The big clubs in particular are relying less on gut and more on data.  The authors report that AC Milan’s in-house medical team, by studying the data, could predict with 70% accuracy whether a player would get injured.  The joke is that this lab has discovered the secret of eternal youth.  Not quite, but they seem to have a pretty good idea when a player is ripe for the transfer window.  For me, one of the most interesting chapters was on game theory and the penalty kick.  The best soccer players have internalized a form of game theory and on their run-up to the penalty kick they still don’t know whether the ball is going to the left or right of the goalie.  Talk about a random sequence.

If I was editing a new magazine for the burgeoning soccer crowd in the U.S., I would start with great journalism and splendid graphics, but I wouldn’t forget the numbers and the data that feeds hardcore, passionate fans.  Or the discussion of the soccer psychology, mythology, economics, and yes, theology, found in this precious book that turns conventional soccer wisdom on its head.

The authors of Soccernomics write that “Until very recently, soccer has escaped the Enlightenment.”

Now that’s a story with legs.

(This post is dedicated to my brother Desi McCullagh, recently deceased.  He was a life-long soccer enthusiast and coach who played for various amateur clubs, during stints in the Army and Marines, and for the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.  He was my soccer confidant.)