Adam MossEditor-in-ChiefNew York Magazine How'd You Do That?American Magazine Conference 2005October 17, 2005Fajardo, Puerto Rico
Thank you for asking me here today to talk – fast; 10 minutes, right? – about magazine service.
Since so many of you in this room are service-meisters, I can't imagine there's much I can tell you that you don't already know. Nevertheless, service is a huge part of our mission at New York Magazine.
It was central to the magazine at its founding ...it has evolved over the years ...... and now, in the past eighteen months or so, it's evolved some more.
Personally, I love the stuff, and since I've been at the magazine, I'd guess I've nearly doubled the amount of space we devote to service of all kinds.
On the screen you'll see The Everything Guide to Service.
The Everything Guide is the Hail Mary service unit we use when we have too much to say in too little space, and since I only have nine minutes left, it seems an appropriate vehicle for this speed-talk.
Generally, what we're doing here is taking a subject and riffing on its meanings – our Everything Guide to pearls... for instance gave instructions on how to be a savvy jewelry customer, but also riffed on oysters, offered pearls of wisdom from Earl the Pearl Monroe and selected out the best Pearl Jam album.
I could similarly riff on the word service, which has lots of meanings.
There's table service and army service and sexual service – which is not an unfamiliar subject to us as journalism ...though it is not the sort of service I'm talking about.
We did consider embroidering this story with our #1 escort's tips, as it were – a service I'm sure many readers would have appreciated, but which would have taken us somewhat out of our field of expertise.
Which brings us to what is surely for everybody the first rule of service journalism, which is: Know what you are talking about.
A magazine traffics in authority most of all.
The second rule, I guess, is to specialize. The New York Magazine I arrived at was an unrivalled expert on restaurants – we have exploded our coverage in this area, devoting a whole micro-section to the subject every week.
Our interest borders on the fanatical, which seems just right to me.Foodies appreciate that we are trustworthy and extremely fast, which is one of the advantages of a weekly.
But more casual hungry folk are lured in by the inventive series of tricks Robin Raisfeld and Rob Patronite use to tell the evolving story of eating in New York.
Service to us is just another form of storytelling.
This Cheap Eats issue is one of the strongest issues of the year for us – a hit because people actually believe us when we filter out the good from the bad, but also because it's entertaining, kinetic journalism.
But if we prize specialization, we are also invested in a little service imperialism.
We have tried not just to milk the expertise we have, but to insinuate ourselves into new arenas by hammering our readers with coverage until they succumb to our authority.
Three quick examples.
First food, as distinct from restaurants.
We've always published two excellent cooking issues; last year in the redesign we integrated a weekly recipe from one of the city's kitchens, illustrated with these elegant how-to drawings we stole directly from Cooks Illustrated.
Sometimes you build expertise by plagiarizing others.
Anyway, food is now one of our specialties.
Second area: home design. Same thing.
The magazine has traditionally done two annual interiors issues.
They were superb, and I read them with envy from my old perch at the Times, but they were too infrequent to be threatening.
So we've now started a series of regular Great Rooms – not whole houses or apartments, which would be impossible to showcase in our limited weekly space, but single rooms – miniature canvases of inspired design.
In addition to making a consistent case for our authority as home design experts, the more regular coverage also helps our larger goal of de-segregating our service.
Previously, special service issues had the effect of altering the magazine’s identity week to week – turning it from, say a fashion magazine one week to a shelter book the next.
Within advertising constraints, we have tried hard to create a single, seamless weekly that retains its coherence from issue to issue.
Third area: shopping. We had some authority in shopping, but it was scattershot.
Best Bets was one of the magazine’s earliest signatures.
But in order to seal the deal with our readers that we were the retail destination, we needed more regular coverage here too.
A year and a half ago, we started publishing a weekly annotated listing of new store openings; we figured that if we did this in a numbing enough manner then over time readers would come to expect that New York Magazine is where they should come to find new places to drop their cash.
These listings do not make for interesting journalism, but readers have gotten the idea.
And because that page needed to be filled out in our redesign, we threw in a funny little interviewette with various shopgirls and boys around town.
Turns out that this piece of filler was also a fabulous draw and served to underline our retail authority.
These kids behind counters make up a kind of Greek chorus of the shopping experience – nifty journalism in its way and probably the most efficient use of a third of a page of text in our magazine.
Ask a Shopclerk is also part of a broader program to fill the magazine with the testimony of real people.
We rely on plenty of experts to tell us what to do, but we also have a more democratic impulse, which is expressed most conspicuously in the magazine's Look Book.
Every week we stop a man or woman on the street and ask them a lot of impertinent questions about their sense of style.
The result makes a funny, great-looking and often useful centerfold. But the Look Book has a more subversive purpose as well.
One of the trickier aspects of editing New York magazine is addressing the astonishingly wide variety of readers we have, all of whom share an enthusiast’s passion for the city, but not necessarily for one another.
That is, the bohemians in our audience resent the rich, who in turn resent the bourgeoisie – there's a class war often going on in our pages, and the magazine needs to find ways to keep them all in our big tent.
The Look Book helps us do that, by telling different sorts of readers that we think the magazine is about them – or at least, in some cases, the most caricatured version of them.
Look Book has been wildly successful for us, and lately we've created spin-offs.
Look Book Goes to the Opera, last week – and during the summer, Look Book Goes to the Beach.
Other more obvious rules of service as we interpret them?
Tell the reader what he or she wants to know at the exact moment he most wants to know it.
Worrying About the Crash, which we published last May, just at the moment of incipient home-owner paranoia, included neighborhood by neighborhood ratings of greatest risk in the event of a real estate softening, and it has been one of the best-selling issues of the year.
We also use service to deliver news.
When a new neighborhood was developing on the southern edge of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, we could have run a story on the phenomenon, but instead covered it in one of our service maps, telling the reader of the neighborhhood’s verging happeningitude, but also showing him block by block how to best exploit its offerings.
In a different way, we use service to explain news.
Here’s an insto-package called 5x10, which we run right after fashion week.
In it, we boil down the acres of fashion verbiage published in the last week's newspapers into 10 radically simple headlines, each illustrated by 5 examples.
The form forces us to isolate what is essential.
We place enormous importance in the distilling process.
I've only talked about service here in terms of what we do in the Strategist section of our magazine, but we're also playing with new forms of service delivery elsewhere – most notably in our Culture Pages.
One of the more interesting devices we've started to use is something called Jukebox.
Jukebox is a method of reviewing new music.
Instead of asking a single authority-figure to review, say five CDs, we've chosen three citizen reviewers of different musical orientations – from an avant-garde music snob to a music dunderhead whose tastes are more populist.
The premise of the page is that interests vary; and if you can individualize the service, then you're doing something valuable.
Our Approval Matrix is another unusual way to do service in the culture area.
We plot the week's offerings on a business textbook style graph, from high to low and brilliant to despicable.
It’s meant to be amusing, and sometimes it actually is.
It is also meant to tell you what's worth seeing, and not incidentally, to send up the whole idea of culture service.
This last point is very important to us.
Once you establish authority, we feel you need quickly to undercut it.
It's a great value in a magazine that operates in a cynical thunderdome like New York that the magazine not be seen as taking itself too seriously.
Which brings us back to the Everything Guides, which are also designed to both mock and serve the service gods.
Our Everything Guide to Lunch, for instance, told you where to get the best sandwich, but also where to go for that lunchtime quickie with your co-worker.
Two other points are perhaps worth mentioning: The first is that service is a very dynamic type of journalism, and one of the more fun aspects of it is that you can always find new ways to invert forms.
In two weeks we will be premiering a new occasional magazine-within-the-magazine.
For the moment it's called Vu and it is an attempt to try something new in the realm of real estate, marrying houses on the market with home design and even fashion.
The second point is that most of these inverted forms will not find their home on the printed page, but on the web.
A discussion of service on the web deserves its own forum, but I will only say here that it seems obvious to me that that medium is far better equipped for service journalism than is print.
And in time the web will simply assume most of the service functions of magazines, making much of what we do in print obsolete.
That's almost already the case.
Our web site is experiencing a phenomenal growth surge, as I'll bet are many of yours.
And whoever you invite in to talk about service next year or the year after that will end up spending his entire time talking about service on the web, not the measly minute or so I have.
Which gets us back to the time, which is nearly over. So I better shut up.
Thank you very much.
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