collection The recent New Yorker Christmas cover, featuring a brilliant Barry Blitt illustration of President Obama bowing deeply to Santa Claus, reminds us of how much we like the long tradition of magazines making bold holiday statements on their covers for the December issue. We went to our local newsstand looking for more of these covers and found… very little. What was once considered essential for any magazine worth its ink and paper has now obviously been banished by an aggressive War on Christmas Magazine Covers by the Forces of Evil. (more...)

The Aughts

As the face of media evolves, it's important to honor the figures who helped define, shape and set the standards in their industries. These are some of the most prominent members of the media who passed away over the past 10 years.  Take a look back with some snippets from their respective New York Times obituaries.

Breaking It's been widely reported that Time Inc. has been planning a rather significant round of lay-offs before the end of the year. The conventional wisdom around New York publishing circles was that the lay-offs would be coming after Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, that does not appear to be the case, as a Time Inc. spokesperson confirmed exclusively to Mediaite: "Yes, sadly there are layoffs today across a number of titles at Time Inc." (more...)

The NY Times reports today that Time Inc. is expected to announce next week that it will cut $100 million in costs and make significant layoffs, describing this as "another blow to what is becoming an increasingly grim industry." Well, at least some attention is off of Conde Nast. (more...)

The pot aficionado's handbook High Times has almost singlehandedly owned the marijuana magazine beat for going on 35 years now. But curiously, they've had a little bit of competition lately, with Harper's, New York, Fortune and other mainstream publications all running long-form cannabis articles, a trend we mused on last week, also citing stories from Time and NPR. The newfound mainstream approval must be quite affirming for veterans of the field like High Times senior editor Bobby Black, recently interviewed by the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog as an expert on both mary jane and the media. (more...)

Grab the latest issue of New York or Fortune magazine, roll it up and smoke it — you might get high. Both are full of weed. Both titles ran full-length features about marijuana in their most recent issues, taking a look, in their respective ways, at the relationship between marijuana and American law. Both stories notice that marijuana is more legal these days than you might think. But both stories mention The Volcano, a $600 vaporizer. And both make passing jabs at the Reagan era, a backward slide after the pot-smoking progress of the '70s. (more...)

POLL The media loves one-year anniversaries, hundred-day anniversaries — any excuse to zoom in on the thing they've been covering all along. This week's one-year anniversary of the financial crisis -- a gold mine for business magazines! Or a call for gold spray paint, if you're BusinessWeek. Mary Louise Parker -- the maintstream, not to mention sterile, face of rampant marijuana use, after her five-season success on Showtime's Weeds. With her help, and some magic leaf, this cover could actually grab a few non-Fortune-reading stoners. And "Wall Street: One Year Later" up top is a nifty hard-news peg. Mediaite Grade (B+): Hey, an issue of Fortune about pot -- that's pretty cool. Oh wait, Sage, the color, what are you doing here? You're not very cool. If this cover was trying to make marijuana seem staid (which it probably is), then it's a wild success. We wonder how their pot story stacks up to New York mag's.
Before we snub The Economist, we want to get one thing straight: We know the cover isn't what sells the magazine (it's the incisive content, dummy). That said, we have to ask if these Economist covers are a nose-in-the-air smirk at the rest of the magazine industry, or just the product of uninspired designers who hate sharing an office with neurotic econ-types? Mediaite Grade (D): We don't need to beat a dead horse, or a series of plastic horses revolving in a circle, but this cover is bush league. Tucking the dollar sign ornament at the top of the carousel into the deck? It's not cute. It's not imaginative. We worry that a bunch of professionals actually sat down together and brainstormed this cover, or spent any time thinking about it at all. We've seen you do your best work before, Economist design team, now keep it up. If for no other reason, to set a good example for Newsweek (their cover this week -- yikes).
Magazines are at their best when they jump on the next hot thing, rather than just distilling a week or month's worth of news. The latest edition of Forbes does both, highlighting the story of high-speed computer trading, which has been percolating all summer —  a smart and timely take on the one-year anniversary of the financial collapse. Mediaite Grade (A-): Visually, the cover's play with font and depth is sharp; the psuedo-pyramid of faces at the bottom, illuminated by the chilling glow of computer screens, is electric. Pick up Forbes for a smart, forward-looking take on the financial world, one year after the collapse.
It's a scary time for BusinessWeek. People are talking about buying the magazine for $1 . We wanted this cover to be a ray of light for the floundering title. Though cheap, spray-painting a gun gold and pasting it on the cover, wasn't exactly the sizzle or pop we were hoping for. Mediaite Grade (C+): We wonder, is there a BusinessWeek intern walking around somewhere with gold spray paint on his hands? We like the idea of putting a gun on the cover, but this one looks too fake, too gold. And the yellow at the top of the cover doesn't exactly complement the gold below (not even yellow could make the "America's Manufacturing Crisis" banner exciting). Add BusinessWeek's big, red, blocky masthead to the mix and watch the colors clash. Let's see some hustle, BusinessWeek. COVER WARS WINNER: Forbes nailed the one-year anniversary with a cover that subtly acknowledged the bench mark, but took the story in a new direction -- the future of finance. And they had fun with the cover -- not too conservative, not too boring, not too tacky. Take notes, BW, before you're liquidated. Which business mag cover is your favorite?(polls)

Keith Kelly reported in the NY Post yesterday that Fortune magazine is set to embark on that rarely-effective exercise called a "re-design." He went on to report that John Huey, the Editorial Director of Time Inc (and former Managing Editor of Fortune)  had "assembled a high-level SWAT team of in-house and external experts to revamp the biweekly business magazine." (more...)

The A.I.G. Financial Products unit is to the global financial crisis what rickety levees were to Hurricane Katrina. But as Michael Lewis points out in his excellent article in the latest issue of Vanity Fair, F.P., as it’s called, used to be the envy of Wall Street. In 2001, the elite unit accounted for a stunning 15% – roughly $300 million – of the insurance giant’s overall profits. And it charged fees that would make most hedge fund operators blanch. (more...)