Magazines

When you’re jetting off for the long holiday weekend, remember the stories and places you come across — they could land you a cover story.

GO, the award-winning in-flight magazine for Airtran, is seeking in-depth travel pieces on markets that are less-covered. ”We want to inspire really interesting ways of seeing different places,” said Jaime Lowe, GO‘s executive editor. “We want as many people as possible to get excited about learning about other communities, being surrounded by new experiences and pushing themselves, through travel.”

While most mags advise new writers to break in through smaller, front- or back-of-book stories, GO has a meaty feature well that’s ripe for the pitchin’ — even for first-time freelancers. “We’re always looking for new writers with great stories,” said Lowe. “A great idea always wins. If there’s an excellent travel narrative, we’ll assign it.”

For more details on breaking in, read How To Pitch: GO.

This article is one of several mediabistro.com features exclusively available to AvantGuild subscribers. If you’re not a member yet, you can register for as little as $55 a year and get access to these articles, discounts on seminars and workshops, and more.

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

Bauer Publishing has named Jared Shapiro editorial director of news and entertainment for In Touch and Life & Style, a new role at the company. Shapiro has been with Bauer since 2005, most recently as executive editor of Life & Style. As editorial director, he will report to Dan Wakeford, editor-in-chief of the two magazines.

Bauer has also named Terri White executive editor of Life & Style. White was most recently editor-in-chief of Buzz, an entertainment  magazine published alongside Britain’s The Sun.

“The appointment of such strong talent to our executive editorial team reinforces the extraordinary quality that Bauer is known to deliver at the newsstand,” said Sebastian Raatz, executive vice president of Bauer Publishing. “The talent that we’ve positioned to lead these staffs will take Bauer’s entertainment group to the next level.”

Each move is effective immediately.

Best Life, the spinoff of Men’s Health that folded in 2009, is coming back. The New York Post reports that it will return this fall as a “special interest publication,” with a planned distribution of 300,000.

As in its previous life, Stephen Perrine will return as Editor-in-Chief and David Zinczenko will serve Best Life’s Editorial Director.

The men’s title launched in 2004 with a rate base of 500,000, but was shut down just five years later. “Best Life could not meet our internal benchmarks, and we have made the decision to focus our resources on our core brands,” Rodale’s former CEO Steven Murphy, said at the time.

Newsweek/The Daily Beast has hired Doug Bachelis as its new Executive Director of Marketing. Bachelis comes to the company from Prometheus Global Media, where he served as Vice President of Marketing for its Branded Entertainment division since late 2010.

Prior to his time at Prometheus, Bachelis worked as Strategic Marketing Director for the Condé Nast Media Group and Marketing Director for USA Today.

Bachelis starts on June 11.

Hayley Romer, a five year veteran of Condé Nast Media Group, is joining The Atlantic as Associate Publisher. Romer had been with Condé since 2007, most recently as its Executive Director of Corporate Sales.

“Hayley has a stellar reputation from all corners of the publishing landscape — from our peers, clients, and partners on the agency side, said Jay Lauf, Vice President and Publisher of The Atlantic.

Romer begins on May 30.

The results are in and it’s official: America likes boobs, no matter what. According to The New York Times, Time’s provocative cover featuring a woman breastfeeding her son was its best-selling issue so far this year. “We had a cover that captured lightning in a bottle,” Richard Stengel, Time’s Managing Editor, told the Times. “It’s obviously a story that hit a nerve.” Not only did the issue fly off the shelves, Time doubled the number of subscriptions it sold in a typical week.

Time also did well digitally. After the bizarre issue debuted, four out of the top five searches on Google were related to the cover. It kicked up a social media storm as well. In the eight days since the breastfeeding cover’s release, Time had over 50,000 mentions on Twitter and its Facebook page had received over 43,000 likes.

With all this attention Time garnered, magazine fans can expect the “Hey look at this crazy shit!” cover trend to continue. We suspect that even when people complain about the glossy fronts, they’ll secretly be happy. As long as there are boobs, that is.

While Lola Ogunnaike has interviewed First  Lady Michelle Obama for BET and been a regular contributor for Today and MSNBC, her first love is writing, with her byline appearing in the pages of Rolling Stone, Vibe, New York, Elle and Glamour.

So what does it take to land those coveted cover stories time and time again? Cultivating strong relationships with editors, she says in mediabistro.com’s So What Do You Do? interview.

“One of the key things is to make sure they know who you are. That can be as simple as asking them out for coffee or tea or asking them out to dinner and offering to pay for both of those things, which is very important.”

Don’t think once you’ve got your story in, you’re done. “It’s also just following up with a link to a story that you may have written, something as simple as ‘You may not have gotten the chance to see my New York Times piece in the style section; thought you may be interested in this.’ What I found in my years in the industry is that most people don’t follow up. So, if you actually do, then that puts you head and shoulders above the pack.”

Read the full interview.

Fairchild Fashion Media is relaunching M, the men’s title that folded in early 90s. The new version will be overseen by Fairchild’s Editorial Director, Peter Kaplan. Marc Berger has also been named Vice President, Publisher of M. The initial circulation will be 75,000 and the first issue will hit newsstands September 24.

M will target rich dudes who like fashion. Or maybe we should let Kaplan explain? According to him, M will “speak to an elite and exclusive group of affluent consumers and top industry players.”

Hmm… We’re pretty sure he’s talking about the same people we are.

According to The New York Post, Lucky magazine is teetering on the edge of a big time scale back. As ad pages continue to drop — they were down 17 percent for the first half of this year and down nine percent in 2011 — rumors are spreading that Lucky might go all digital, or at the very least, cut back to a quarterly publication.

A source told the Post that if Lucky’s luck (sorry) doesn’t pick up with the next few issues, things will definitely be changing.

A spokesperson for the magazine — of course — said the rumors were just that.

According to Maxim readers, Bar Refaeli is the most beauftul woman in the world. The latest Maxim Hot 100 List — available on newsstands May 29 — was picked by the magazine’s fans. Refaeli beat out Olivia Munn, Mila Kunis, Katy Perry and Olivia Wilde for the top spot.

Refaeli told Maxim that she was “truly honored” to have won, but she might want to reconsider that statement. She did beat out those lovely ladies mentioned above, which is great. But a cartoon, Stephen Colbert and Amanda Knox — yes, the woman who maybe murdered her friend — also made the Hot 100 List, so Refaeli should probably take the honor with a grain of salt.

Maxim’s editors, however, were excited that readers chose Refaeli. She “puts the ‘promise’ in the Promised Land,” they explained. We have no idea what that means, but it sounds like a compliment.