Cathie Black is referred to, un-ironically, as “the First Lady of American
Magazines,” a title that not only describes her power within the industry, but
also her shattering of its glass ceiling. It’s largely due to Black that Hearst
has been the steadiest of America’s great magazine companies, conserving its
strength and growing slowly, steadily, while others chased grand expansion plans
and digital dreams.
But now, Black has decided that the time is right for Hearst to join the Web
2.0 wave in earnest, beginning with a generation of magazine sites rolling out
over the next few months. mediabistro.com recently interviewed Black about her
company’s plans, the shape of the industry, and the endgame for the magazine
business, which she dutifully presented in nearly 25 words or less: “There will
continue to be stars made and opportunities presented — I don’t know if there
are going to be fortunes made — I think we are going to be around as we know it
as long as we all are comfortable constantly with reassessing, with taking risks
and not being afraid of change, of just getting unstuck. But I think,
personally, that most people have gotten over that.”
Also on Mediabistro
Name: Cathleen P. (“Cathie”) Black
Position: President,
Hearst Magazines
Publication: 19 consumer magazines in the U.S.,
nearly 200 worldwide, including such brands as Cosmopolitan, Good
Housekeeping, Esquire, O, The Oprah Magazine, and
Seventeen
Education: Trinity College (She also holds eight
other honorary degrees)
Hometown: Chicago
First job: Ad
sales at Holiday magazine
Last 3 jobs: President, then
publisher of USA Today; executive vice president/marketing of Gannett;
resident and CEO of the Newspaper Association of America.
Birthdate:
4/26/44
Marital status: Married
What’s your
favorite TV show:Grey’s Anatomy
Last book
read: Two books in progress —Bad Blood by
Linda Fairstein, and I’m about to start Why Some Ideas Succeed and Others
Die by Chris and Dan Heath, that Kate White, editor-in-chief of
Cosmo, highly recommended. And there is always a cookbook by the side of
the bed for browsing.
Most interesting media story right now: Frankly,
it changes every day, sometimes every hour. But right now, Viacom asking YouTube
to remove 100,000 clips from its site and the Cartoon Network guerrilla
marketing stunt mistaken for a bomb threat are the two most interesting stories.
[Ed: Answer was sent Feb. 5]
Guilty pleasure: Massage
First
section you read in your Sunday paper: Page One and then Real Estate! (I
just bought a house.)
It’s my understanding that Hearst is about to begin re-launching each of
its magazine sites over the next few months, beginning with Esquire.com. I’m curious as to
what the readers should expect of these sites now that Hearst is finally heading
back onto the Web in a big way.
First of all, the sites are going to
look different from each other. The primary phrase we have at the front of our
brain, hopefully every single day, is “the user experience.” Our editors have
moved from thinking that a magazine’s Web site was just the magazine on the Web,
to really thinking that the magazine is a brand on the Web. We know for sure
that it has to be, and is, a different medium. In other words, we want to keep
that user going forward so they are finding the experience on our Web site
interesting, interactive, entertaining, fun, you name it.
Each one of them has been carefully thought out. [Esquire editor]
David Granger and I just had lunch today, and he was talking about Eric
[Gillin], his Web site editor, who he thinks is fantastic and who has a million
ideas and kind of, sort of scoped it out in his own mind. The teen sites have
been a petri dish for us. We’ve had a very goodWeb site for CosmoGIRL!,
and a younger staff is creating that, so we’ve used that as something to look at
to try to figure out what elements of that make sense for some of our other
sites. Everyone is just hot to trot. I mean all the editors here and the Web
editors want their site to be the best, and they wanted it up yesterday.
Unlike Time Inc. or Condé Nast, Hearst has been happy to farm out its Web
operations at times to Women.com and to iVillage. But now you’ve recentralized again with Hearst
Digital and the editors’ newfound zealotry for the Web. How and why did Hearst
get its Internet religion, lose it, and then get it back again?
Well I
don’t think Hearst ever lost religion, but the Web has changed so dramatically.
Early on, there was Home Arts, which merged with Women.com. So right from the
beginning, we were working through partners. I don’t know if that was such a bad
thing because, let’s face it, there weren’t that many users back then, and
certainly there were no ad dollars. In any event, Women.com handled our sites,
so we kind of talked the talk, but we were not creating them. It was the same
thing with iVillage. Yes, there was a Web editor for each magazine here, but the
real ownership was at iVillage. I mean that figuratively and literally. And we
all felt very strongly that for us to really be a part of a very
transformational moment in our media world, we had to be the patrons of our own
sites. So there’s great excitement here that this is the right moment. Our sites
are magazine brands; we don’t want them disconnected from the brands here.
What’s Hearst’s philosophy online in terms of revenue and growth? Ann
Moore is making headlines, seemingly every week over at Time Inc., as she seeks
to dump every spare penny into the magazine sites. She’s convinced that online
is where all of Time Inc.’s future growth lies.
The day that the digital
revenue for Cosmo will come close to profit that Cosmo makes for
this company will be a beautiful thing. Cosmo is a huge
profit-maker and a huge revenue-generator, so it would surprise me if at
any time in the next couple of years we would see anything approaching it. Maybe
it’s 10 percent of our ad revenue that comes into the company today, but the
idea of it becoming 50 percent or even higher of the revenue from our magazine
division is just improbable to imagine. I could be wrong, but I don’t see the
migration of many of our magazines to a digital-only platform.
That said, do we need a new way to measure the vitality of magazines? Is
it worth it to still track advertising pages sold? And is it worth a permanent 5
percent decline in ad pages in exchange for what amounts to a 10 percent gain
from digital revenue? Are we talking about the wrong things when we talk about
the health of the business as a whole?
No, I don’t think we are talking
about the wrong thing, but what I do believe that we have to look at digital
efforts as its own business, because it’s expensive. What I don’t want is to
encourage advertiser A or advertiser B to say ‘Well, I spent a $100 with you
last year. In 2007, I’m going to spend $90 at that magazine and $10 online.’ And
I don’t want them saying ‘you should feel good about that’ because I want them
to spend $110. It shouldn’t be an either-or.
In your remarks at a recent Magazine Publishers of America breakfast, you
touched upon the increasing difficulty of launches. Other publishers have
experienced this too, with Time Inc., Hachette, etc. all closing magazines to
refocus on core properties like People, Sports Illustrated, and
Elle. Even Meredith is pouring the majority of its efforts into
franchising brands like Better Homes & Garden in new media, rather
than inventing new brands. Given those developments as a backdrop, how do you
see the Hearst portfolio evolving? Is it inevitable that the largest publishers
will only have a handful of their most successful brands pumping at their
hearts?
It’s a simple answer to say you have to do some of all of it.
We’re all looking for the next big idea for what could be a really important
magazine. Oprah has been an extraordinary successful magazine. And there
are new magazines started in the last decade: Real Simple, and now
[Everyday With} Rachael Ray seems to have gotten a lot of traction on the
newsstand. But it’s a much more difficult environment.
You know, years ago here at Hearst, we launched Country Living, which
has been a great moneymaker for more than 20 years now. We put one magazine on
the stands with no ad staff and it sold very well, which told us that this
reader really had a connection to the magazine. In today’s world, pick any
number you want; I have no idea what Condé Nast will have spent — both for
almost the last two years and into the next two years — on Portfolio.
They’ve announced it’s a $100 million investment. We’re just not going to
do that. It may not be a hockey stick [Black is referring to the shape of
financial projections on a graph], but at some point, after your big early
investment period of two or three years, what’s it really looking like there? Is
it going to get the ad traction? Maybe it will, I’m not really positive.
But you know, we’re a different company, everybody’s a different company. We
measure our metrics very carefully. We review our new products constantly, and
ask ‘is it going to hit break-even?’ But not only is it going to break even,
what is it going to do in the 24 months after that? It is going to really make
sense for us to put in the time, the effort, the creativity, the financial
investment, etc.? It would be great to be able to launch something for $10
million, but when you’re in New York and the ad community demands a big hoopla
over the launch of a magazine, it adds overhead that’s just unbelievable and
hard to live up to.
What happens to staffing levels and employees as the industry contracts
and cut costs to maintain its overall health? You’re on record as being a fan of
the British magazine method, with its smaller, more nimble staffs, and Hearst’s
magazine have quietly reduced headcount on your watch. What does the staff of
the future look like at Hearst, and will employees have the same opportunities
to advance upward?
That’s a very good question. I remember when Felix
Dennis spoke at the MPA Conference six years ago, and he knew that when he came
to the United States to launch Maxim, he would have a 25 pecent larger
staff than he did in the U.K. just because that’s how New York is. And that’s
the sort of thing we wrestle with all the time.
For example, Quick and Simple is, at this point, sold by the Good
Housekeeping sales staff. There’s a lot of synergies between the two, so the
former’s advertising staff is — honestly! — one person and an assistant. But
they have the resources of Good Housekeeping, which has a lot of feet on
the street, if you will. America has not come around to the way most advertising
is sold in the rest of the world, which is much more on a group concept. You
might have a publishing director — there’s no publisher — and the next title
is probably “advertising director,” and they might sell two magazines or it
might be a group.
We were charting workflow not long ago — I like the operations side of the
business — and if you look at the U.K., an editor might touch a piece of copy
once or twice because it’s a small staff. It’s that they don’t have the time,
not because they don’t have the interest. They don’t have the time. It
moves through the system very quickly. If you chart most magazines in the United
States, including our own, you’ll see that people are touching, and retouching,
and editing, and re-editing something six or seven times. If you want to figure
out why that happens, look at the UK. I would suggest that they have very few
middle managers. It’s probably 15 people or 18 people or even seven people, so
they multitask. They don’t work all night long. Honestly, they aren’t in the
production departments at eight or nine at night.
How is the new Hearst Tower helping with recruiting? It’s been suggested
that the new building and new cafeteria has gone a long way in addressing
Hearst’s corporate inferiority complex vis-á-vis Condé Nast.
The power
of an environment to change people’s thinking,, and their attitude and their
sense of everything is unbelievable. Our retention rates have already gone up…
it’s only a few percentage points, so it’s not going to make or break it one way
or the other but — quite honestly — if I were 25 and if I were interviewing at
this company or a similar company, and saw that we have a fitness center and saw
this incredible café, and all the open work environment that creates
communication and camaraderie and all the rest of it, I’d think it’s a slam
dunk.
Well, assuming you were 25 again, and were starting your career over
again, where would you start? Seeing that you began your career at Ms.,
and seeing that Ms. doesn’t really exist anymore, I was picturing you
starting out at some sort of blog network aimed at young women…
I have
always loved the print business. I’m as excited about the digital world as
anybody else, but I love the feeling of being around creative people, of looking
at beautiful things, of reading a great story, so I’d probably come to magazines
again.
You broke gender barriers during your upward ascent, including becoming
the first female publisher of a weekly magazine at New York. How has the
magazine landscape changed since then in terms of opportunities for women? From
my generation’s view, publishing would seem to be dominated by women, or at
least editorial is.
It’s a very welcoming environment, and if you want
to look at an industry and ask ‘Where have women succeeded? Where are they
sitting in the larger offices? Where do they have the titles?’ I think you would
say, for whatever reason, ‘Gee, this seems to be a place that I can excel.’
Women tend to get stuck in the staffing positions, not the line-operating
positions, and they haven’t been trapped in those in publishing.
Greg Lindsay is a freelance writer.
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