Mark WhitakerEditorNewsweek ASME President's AddressAmerican Magazine Conference 2005October 17, 2005Fajardo, Puerto Rico
Good morning. Although at Newsweek we’re in the business of reporting news, today I’m here to break some.
First, wearing my hat as the president of the American Society of Magazine Editors, I’m pleased to announce that today we are releasing the long-awaited new edition of the ASME Guidelines for Editors and Publishers. As everyone in this room knows, the ASME Guidelines have been a source of controversy. Some worry that they’ve hurt our industry’s ability to compete for ad dollars with TV and the Web. Others argue the opposite: that we haven’t been tough enough in enforcing the guidelines in an era of unprecedented challenges to the division between church and state. Are the ASME Guidelines still relevant? When the current ASME board began our term a year and a half ago, we took that question seriously enough to undertake a top-to-bottom review of the Guidelines—both their message and their mission.
We started by polling our members—850 editors of 417 magazines—to ask if they still felt the Guidelines were necessary. The near unanimous answer was: yes, more than ever. Editors of magazines in every category remain adamant that the ability to distinguish editorial content from advertising is crucial to maintaining their magazines’ credibility with readers. Yet at the same time, many of our members complained that the guidelines were overly long and difficult to understand. And to be honest, when presented with possible violations we on the board often found ourselves struggling to figure out exactly what the Guidelines said.
So the first change you’ll see is that the Guidelines are now dramatically shorter and more to-the-point. Instead of filling a 5-page booklet, they fit onto the back of a fold-up brochure, leaving room for ASME’s Best Practices for Digital Media on the other side. I like to think that we’ve taken what had come to resemble the Talmud and reduced it to The Ten Commandments (and you’ll notice that we really have boiled it down to ten commandments). Copies will be available outside as you leave this morning, and you can read the whole thing in the time it takes to get to lunch or the golf course.
By tightening the guidelines and eliminating a lot of nitpicky rules of the road, we think we’ve put more emphasis on the fundamental principles that the Guidelines exist to uphold. The first and most important is transparency. In this day and age, consumers in every industry demand it, and punish you if you don’t deliver it. In the case of magazines, we think that means that readers can love both editorial content and advertising, but they want to know which is which. The second principle is that magazines, and their editors, should have the final say in determining what’s best for their readers, and their brands. As Jon Stewart pointed out during the MPA’s much-discussed “humor night,” magazines may not always have the buzz of the latest cable food-fight show or reality TV craze, but we do have authority, and staying power. And editors shouldn’t be compelled to do anything for short-term gain that’s going to hurt that authority over the long run.
At the same time, we wanted the guidelines to work for publishers in the new environment you’re all operating in. During our review, we sought feedback from members of the MPA, and I’m pleased that the MPA’s Executive Committee has given this document their full support. While emphasizing first principles, the guidelines give publishers increased flexibility to compete for ad dollars and pursue creative partnerships with advertisers. They now allow advertorials and other ad pages that might be mistaken for editorial content to be slugged either “Advertisement” or “Promotion,” in keeping with the common practice in European magazines. They allow wide freedom for out-of-magazine sponsorships, and establish criteria for advertisers to sponsor special issues, inserts, onserts and reader contests. And while taking a firm stand against paid-for product placement, they allow editors to credit products at their discretion and marketers to create advertorials with product placement as long as they are properly slugged. Again, the watchword is transparency. And it’s not just for editors’ sake. We believe that the two qualities that the MPA has identified as the competitive selling proposition for magazine advertising—that consumers engage with it, and don’t find it obtrusive—are best served when readers can tell exactly what’s going on.
In a nutshell, we hope ASME’s new ten commandments will continue to serve as the conscience of our industry, without giving everyone a headache. And speaking of ten, it’s now my pleasure to break my second exclusive of the day: the top ten vote getters in our contest to choose the 40 best magazine covers of the last 40 years...
Number 10 is National Geographic’s June 1985 cover of a 12 year-old Afghan girl that became an icon of war photography.
Number 9 is the September 1992 cover of Harpers Bazaar with which Liz Tilberis ushered in a return to elegance in fashion magazines.
If you’ve wondered why you haven’t seen any of the famous Esquire covers of the 1960s yet, here they come. The first, at number 8, is this wrenching October 1966 Vietnam cover.
From the tragic to the satirical, we go to Number 7, National Lampoon’s unforgettable January 1973 cover, “If you don’t buy this magazine we’ll shoot this dog.”
Number 6 is The New Yorker’s stark black-on-black September 24, 2001 cover commemorating 9/11.
Number 5 is another classic that George Lois created for Esquire: the May 1969 Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup cover.
Number 4 is the cover that became the poster seen ‘round the world: Saul Steinberg’s March 29, 1969 depiction of the New Yorker’s view of the world.
Number 3 is perhaps George Lois’s most famous Esquire cover: this April 1968 image of the embattled Muhammad Ali as Saint Sebastian.
Number 2 is the most memorable magazine cover of the 1990s: Vanity Fair’s August 1991 cover of a pregnant Demi Moore. (If Tina Brown knew how well it would sell, would she have published it in August?)
And our top vote getter, at Number 1, fittingly on this 25th anniversary of his death, is the January 22, 1991 cover with which Rolling Stone remembered John Lennon.
So there you have it, the eternal secrets of great magazine covers: powerful photojournalism, humorous illustration and photo illustration, and celebrity nudity.
We at ASME want to thank all the judges who participated in the covers contest, and the incomparable Marlene Kahan and her staff, for putting it all together.
Thanks to all the speakers and panelists this morning for a great session. For all the golfers this afternoon, your lunches will be on carts ut at the golf course. Everyone else is invited to join us for lunch with Matt Cooper of Time Magazine, who will give us a personal account of his dealings with Karl Rove and the war over the CIA leak investigation. See you there.
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