New WSJ magazine: a new standard or a flop?
September 12, 2008 by grzegorz.piechota
Financial Times supplement ”How to Spend It” is like a BMW 3-series, and this is a BMW 7-series, says Robert Thomson, an editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal. Is he right?
The Wall Street Journal’s new luxury lifestyle magazine, WSJ, debuted last week as a quaterly. It is expected to become a monthly next year.
The magazine will cover cars, fashion, property, philanthropy, personalities and travel. Of the 51 advertisers in the launch issue, 19 are new to the Journal.
Thomson, formerly an editor of the Times of London and a deputy at the Financial Times, invited his old brothers-in-arms to make the new magazine. WSJ’s editor is Tina Gaudoin, who was previously the editor of Luxx, a high-end supplement to the Times. And WSJ’s creative director, Tomaso Capuano, last worked on the FT’s supplement How to Spend It.
Negative reviews
Adam Hanft of Huffington Post writes: ”The Wall Street Journal Magazine is Irrelevant On Arrival” and calls it: ”ill-conceived, ill-timed and epically copy-cattish endeavor.”
Hanft dislikes especially:
- a feature about Sarah Palin, a governor of Alaska, as it - unfortunately for the Journal - was written before she was announced a vice-presidential nominee. It made this feature ”an instant, chilling anachronism.”
- a model on the cover, ”a clumsy, solipsistic shot of a woman in a WSJ paper dress - a strange and otherwise un-referenced homage to the 1960s.”
- illogical, flat and uninspired department headers like “Hunter” and “Gatherer”: ”there’s no rhyme or reason to the split: why does racecar collection earn the sign of a hunter, while a jewelry story is stuck in the cross hairs of the gatherer?”
- the rest of contents: ”It’s nothing I haven’t read before, seen before, cringed at before.”
Andrew Losovsky states gently that the contents ”just isn’t very good”.
”For a magazine supposedly aimed at a ‘well-read, discerning about what you consume… multi-faceted, multi-talented group with a sense of humor’ (according to the intro letter) some of the content feels too obvious for a discerning, knowledgeable crowd, and they all read as uncritical fluff in a way that the main paper would never allow.”
Losovsky is disappointed by the ”too-obvious luxury namedrops”: mentions of a Stradivarius; Virgin Galactic; Hollywood actors buying islands; the Louvre in Abu Dhabi; a new bar in the Peninsular Hotel in Hong Kong etc.:
”Exceptions were Lulu Wang’s car collection, the best safety videos on airlines, and a collection of wallets combined with a Dürer illustration. Those were good, but the rest made me yawn.”
Virginia Postrel of the Deep Glamour notes that ”the magazine just isn’t smart enough”:
”As a lifelong WSJ fan, I had high hopes for the magazine. The Journal is a great newspaper, intelligently written and edited for smart people. Its style coverage, whether oriented toward business or culture, is as good as the rest of the paper. But the magazine isn’t. Good ideas–the evolution of ‘lifestyle’ identities for jewelry, for instance–are executed in a superficial way, while good writers are wasted. Architecture critic Alastair Gordon, who wrote the terrific book Naked Airport, is given a six whole paragraphs to tell us about a house. The most substantive piece, perhaps because it could have run on the real WSJ’s front page, is a feature on how cruise lines are luxing up their accommodations and separating the big spenders from the riff-raff.”
Postrel recalls another WSJ venture in magazine journalism: the single prototype issue of The Wall Street Journal Magazine, published the summer of 1981, that in her opinion had much better words-versus-pictures balance. You can see some of old pages on her blog.
Vincent Valk of the Gelflog compares WSJ to the Parade, a national Sunday newspaper magazine, distributed in more than 400 newspapers in the US. It is known for its celebrity gossips, promotions and very early deadline - 15 days prior publication date. So in January 2008 they made a cover story about Benazir Bhutto’s election prospects, despite her death on December 27th, 2007.
Valk writes:
”It’s Parade for superrich investment bankers, rife with coverage of the rich and stylish and consumer goods you can’t afford. If you were expecting, say, a rightward-leaning New York Times Magazine, look elsewhere.”
Juan Antonio Giner of Innovation Media Consulting Group as always goes straight and calls the new magazine simply ”a flop”.
Positive reviews
However, there is somebody who says that WSJ sets the new standard for luxury magazines.
Samir Husni, or Mr. Magazine, writes on his blog:
”Elegant, upscale and aimed at the ‘cream of the crop’ of The Wall Street Journal readers, the magazine offers its readers a European look and feel from the cover all the way to the inside pages…
WSJ. magazine is yet another welcomed new magazine bucking the trend that print is dead and the future is for something else. The audience of WSJ. was already there, the advertisers were already there, all what the folks at the Journal had to do was build the bridge that links the readers/customers to the advertisers…and they build one good ‘London’ bridge… In fact, WSJ. is, to me, the new standard in luxury magazines and has become my standard (even after only one issue) in comparing other luxury magazines to.”
Others praise at least some parts of the WSJ.
Mario Garcia, a well known newspaper designer, likes the design:
”WSJ does not disappoint visually. White space waltz in and out of the pages. The font selection sets it apart from many of its competitors. I was thinking that the design was minimalist, but perhaps that is not the best way to describe it: minimalist design tends to be more skeletal than what Tomaso has carried out in his design for WSJ. Some of the photos bleed off the page, something minimalist designs usually avoid, as the emphasis would be on framing with white space around the page.”
Disclosure: Garcia worked on the layout of the main Journal. However, he is not afraid to get a bit ironic, when he notices:
”One good thing: texts are short, photos are big, and many of these ‘luxury’ readers will be satisfied to get through the magazine pretty quickly.”
Magazine Smitten thinks ”the cover was phenomenal. I mean, that dress!” Juan Antonio Giner of Innovation also likes the cover. And Andrew Losovsky sees ”solid structure, a supplement-y feel that goes well enough with the main paper, and an inoffensively tidy design that feels a little out of date, but not objectionably so. It has the foundations to create something interesting.”
Metaprinter, in spite of some minor faults, finds the magazine innovative.
”YES! Why innovation?
• New revenue stream
• Highly targeted product that grows your brand
• No third party applications required
• Deliverable cannot be aped by online companies
• Magazine.wsj.com website grows their multimedia offerings”
Finally…
Watch a video showing how the WSJ dress was made:
Join the debate
Have you read the new WSJ magazine? What do you think? Is it a flop or a good start?
Tagged: advertising, design, innovation, launch, magazine, newspaper
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