It must be getting tougher to sell ads aimed at rich people. The soft and tony magazine Exclusively Yours has fired half its staff. Meanwhile, rival M Magazine is retrenching, having killed one of its three lifestyle magazines.
Both aim at the same audience: Milwaukee’s wealthy. Both are mostly sent free to homes in high-income ZIP codes. The targeting can be precise: EY may snub more modest homes while slipping through the mail slots of the mansions next door. Both compete with Milwaukee Magazine for ads, but largely avoid paid subscriptions or newsstands.
M is sold at selected bookstores: According to BPA, a circulation audit agency, its monthly circulation of 94,000 includes less than 200 single-copy sales.
EY was founded in 1947 by Wallace Patten, whose grandsons remain co-publishers. Jim Conley started Northshore LifeStyle in the mid-’90s, added editions for the city and western suburbs, then revamped the publication as M five years ago. Conley also owns the Waukesha Freeman and a string of suburban weeklies.
EY often looks more like a catalog for the trust-fund set, with features on sumptuous homes, cars and vacation spots, and occasional stabs at more serious fare. Its longstanding religious essay, “God’s Corner,” carries the byline of Gertrude Puelicher, who died in 1993 and has lived on in repeats ever since. M is more personality-driven, with flattering profiles of the trendy and well-heeled.
An alternative weekly in Tucson once snarked that Conley’s similar Tucson Lifestyle magazine had “carved out quite a niche for itself publishing bad photos of ugly white people attending various boring parties,” but all those photos may give Mthe edge over its chief competitor. Compared to M’s 94,000 copies a month, EY reportedly prints about 40,000 issues, according to a well-placed source. (EY does not choose to get audited by BPA.).
Another measurement is provided by The Media Audit, which uses telephone surveys to determine readership. It shows M’s readership has held steady the last few years (its readership was 99,500 in 2007), while EY’s plummeted to 66,900 readers in 2007 from 81,300 the year before. But M’s total readership could decline now that it has eliminated its City edition.
Still, it’s EY that has run into financial problems. The magazine delayed freelance payments and fired four employees this spring, including Editor Judy Jepson, now listed as a contributing writer. Sources say publisher Dave Patten blamed advertisers behind on their bills. (Freelancers eventually were paid.) Jepson didn’t return Pressroom’s phone call, and Patten’s brother and co-publisher, Andy, turned away our inquiries as well: “We don’t discuss our business.”
Growing recession worries and trends like stagnating home prices – especially at the top of the market– could be hurting these publications. And the competition is getting tougher, with Journal Sentinel Inc.’s purchase of Milwaukee Home and Fine Living and the Business Journal’s rollout of its Executive Living quarterly magazine supplement. In such an environment, EY’s apparently slipping readership could sour some upscale advertisers.
Conley’s plan at M is to combine the City and Northshore editions into one publication starting this month (M West would remain separate). This seems to contradict the company’s longstanding business model. Conley is known to favor niche markets and to tailor news and advertising to local geographic clusters. It’s not clear how that can work with a single magazine serving the distinctively different City and Northshore readers. What’s more likely is the city audience really isn’t interested in the magazine’s suburban mindset, and the city’s presence in the new combined M will be token at best. (M publisher Phil Paige didn’t return Pressroom’s phone call.)
Neither EY nor M puts editorial content online. With the Web rapidly supplanting ink on paper for other segments of the news business, can that approach continue to work? Time will tell.
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The much-touted Pulitzer Prize won by the Journal Sentinel and reporter Dave Umhoefer for uncovering questionable county pension deals had a couple of little-noted additional local connections. The Pulitzers are directed by Sig Gissler, former editor of the newspaper’s predecessor, the Milwaukee Journal. But that’s not all. The local news committee that recommended Umhoefer’s work, along with that of two other finalists, to the Pulitzer board was chaired by none other than Carolina Garcia, a former Journal and Journal Sentinel assistant editor who left a decade ago for San Antonio. Until recently, Garcia was executive editor of the Monterey County Herald in California. This spring she was named to the same post at the Los Angeles Daily News.
Garcia tells Pressroom she asked whether her connection with the JS would be a problem in judging its work. Gissler, she says, waved off worries. Garcia agrees: “It doesn’t sway you in any way that you previously worked or supervised these people. You just are really happy that it’s someone you know who won.”
