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Gilded ink
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Sept. 10, 1999 |
In this digital age, who would have thought that a major beneficiary of the
heedless needs of the newest of the nouveau riche would be venerable newsprint? For decades, the glossies -- the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue and her ugly
sisters -- owned the franchise for collecting money from the purveyors of the
stylish and vestigial; newspapers had to content themselves with real estate
voyeurism as an adjunct to their classifieds. Of course, there was a time when
dailies dipped into glossy pretension with their Sunday magazines, but these have
gradually attenuated as the mega-spending department stores have increasingly
favored their own glossified inserts. Even the vaunted Sunday New York Times Magazine is
looking a little anorexic, pummeled by the competition from all corners of the
mag world. But now the Wall Street Journal's Weekend Journal and the New York Times' Sunday
Styles section have suddenly become less traditional newspaper sections than
broadsheet catalogs, ink-stained bastions of yuppie porn configured to create
desire. Newsprint has a peculiar attribute: While the current crop of men's and
women's magazines will clearly do anything to push product, there is an
assumption that staid old print is concerned with higher, calmer matters. Like
the cheaply printed fliers for the cheaply priced hardware store, the medium
offers a message of reassurance. Each week, both papers set out in a slatternly
quest to find ever more expensive ways of getting married, mowing the lawn, or
putting things in your pie-hole. Only the Journal and the Times have the robust
demographics to make this gussied-up version of a blue-collar medium hum
like a $490 electric razor. These daily mitzvahs for the recently wealthy are themselves fat and happy. The
Times stumbled hard with the launch of a daily Styles section a few years back,
but found its stride with daily consumer sections about gadgets, food and
housewares. WSJ's Weekend Journal, a Friday sonnet to the art of avarice launched
back in March 1998, is a massively successful extension of the Journal brand.
According to the July 12 Media Industry Newsletter, second-year revenues at
Weekend Journal section will total $34 million, 70 percent over the previous year
and far ahead of projections. "Certain advertisers have always loved our demographic, but we didn't have the
right environment for them. Weekend Journal is right for a lot of these guys. And
on the reader's side, I think it's clear we are meeting an important need, which
is what drives advertising," says Richard Tofel, vice president of corporate
communications for Dow Jones and Co., which publishes the Journal. Like power boats that seat only two people while costing more than most houses,
the newly enriched sections of this grubby medium offer
daily iterations of how many clueless knuckleheads have found themselves in
receipt of tall money that they have no idea what to do with. Forget the
millennium, isn't one of the surest signs of the apocalypse that Armani and Gucci
are buying big girly ads to cuddle up betwixt the gray pinstripes of Journal
text? "As a reader, I am thrilled to see [those ads]," says Joanne Lipman, Weekend
editor. "I think it adds a great deal to the paper. Our letters suggest, and this
is purely anecdotal, that Weekend is a family read, passed around by family
members. In some instances, it's replacing their weekend metro paper, while
others compare it to a magazine."
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