Would you buy a magazine named Rosie’s?
Gruner & Jahr is betting that people will, which is why the company is killing the cover title of McCall’s, a 125-year-old veteran of the women’s magazine genre, and renaming it Rosie’s: The Magazine.
From a strategy standpoint, this is another attempt to duplicate the success that Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey have enjoyed from parlaying their television celebrity into magazines.
But the numbers suggest this will be no slam-dunk for the talk show host, whose ratings peaked in the 1996-97 television season. At that time, “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” was a second-place finisher to Winfrey’s show. Since then, however, O’Donnell’s ratings have plunged 33 percent, according to the latest measurement from Nielsen Media Research, slipping to fifth among the talk shows, behind Winfrey, Regis Philbin, Jerry Springer and Maury Povich, and a hair ahead of Montel Williams.
Winfrey’s ratings have also dropped–24 percent since the 1996-97 TV season–as have ratings for all of the top syndicated talk show hosts during the same time. With numbers slipping (there are 21 shows in syndication now, down from 29 five years ago), this may prove to be a difficult time to try to cash in on celebrity status that does not match the radiance of Stewart or Winfrey.
The remake, scheduled for this spring, comes on the heels of the demise of George magazine. Hachette Filipacchi last week pulled the plug on the 5-year-old political personality monthly that struggled even when its publisher, John F. Kennedy Jr., was alive.
It’s difficult to imagine a magazine with an average monthly circulation of 4.5 million as struggling, but McCall’s is the weakest of the remaining so-called Seven Sisters–Better Homes & Gardens, Good Housekeeping, Women’s Day, Family Circle (also from Gruner & Jahr), Ladies’ Home Journal and Redbook. In the last six months of 2000, McCall’s collected the smallest percentage of ad dollars of the group–7 percent of the total, according to Publisher’s Information Bureau.
McCall’s ad revenue of $61 million is being hotly pursued by O, the Oprah Magazine, which had $45 million during the same period, after being launched last spring. Martha Stewart Living reported ad income of $107 million.
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So what are the chances for Rosie’s?
“They’ll be lucky to maintain half of their circulation, because I believe the readers of McCall’s are in no way, shape or form the readers of what Rosie’s: The Magazine will be,” said magazine industry expert Samir Husni at the University of Mississippi.
That is by design. Rosie’s will try to set itself apart from the rest of the women’s group, incorporating more of a political edge to the standard fare of celebrity and pop-culture features.
“This is going to be more controversial,” Husni said. “There’s a big difference between a TV host who wants to fight and champion causes and an editor of a mass-circulation magazine.”
The end of an era: Say good-bye to Slick Times, the 8-year-old publishing boomlet that was born with and thrived on the Clinton presidency. Michael Dalton Johnson, who created the magazine in 1993, enjoyed what he called “the wild ride” that vaulted his every-other-month publication to a circulation that peaked at 100,000 and spawned a lucrative business in political satire.
“I’m really going to miss Bill,” Johnson said in a telephone interview from his San Diego home. “We shot the moon with this guy and made far more than we ever thought we would.”
As profitable as the magazine was, its success pales in comparison to Johnson’s commemorative $3 bills, featuring the president and Hillary Rodham Clinton, Ross Perot, Bob Dole and John McCain. They cost less than a dollar to make and cost buyers $4.50 per order; Johnson sold 3 million of them.
“There will never be another Bill,” he said. George W. Bush doesn’t offer the material for a new magazine.
“There’s not much there,” Johnson said. “He’s about as funny as a grapefruit.”