“The Board of Directors of the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) is deeply concerned about a trend among some magazines to give advertisers advance notice about upcoming articles.”
These words appeared in a news release issued on June 22, and they were picked up in major newspapers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal as well as in the publishing trade journals. Odds are, most NASW members never came across them because the articles reporting on the ASME statement were often buried deep in the business sections of the general newspapers, and few of us read the trades. And yet I suspect that NASW members, like journalists generally, will immediately recognize the danger implied in the words. As a newly elected member of the ASME board, I can provide my fellow NASW members with an insider’s view of the chilling incidents that prompted ASME’s board to act.
The first alarm bells went off with the bitter resignation in February of Esquire literary editor, Will Blythe. Esquire editor-in-chief Edward Kosner, a veteran with experience at the helms of Newsweek and New York magazines, suddenly yanked a previously approved short story only days before it was to go to press because of its homoerotic scenes and profane language. Blythe charged that Kosner feared advertiser reaction and quit. Kosner (who has since left the publication himself) denied Blythe’s charge, but many in the magazine world were unconvinced, in part because Esquire is owned by the Hearst Corporation where magazines division president Cathie Black has reportedly told editors to “think like publishers,” and in part because of threats recently carried out by several of the magazine world’s largest advertisers against other publications.
A few of these were first exposed on April 30 in The Wall Street Journal. A front-page story reported that a variety of major advertisers have come to expect advance notice of controversial editorial material so that they might withdraw their ads from issues scheduled to carry such material. Then it went on to name the Chrysler Corporation’s ad agency, which had sent a letter to over 100 publications demanding such advance warning.
To experienced magazine editors, this news about Chrysler might, at first blush, seem less surprising than it would to reporters shielded from the realities of the marketplace. Every experienced editor has heard tales of—or actually worked on—magazines where it was discouraged or even forbidden to run editorial matter critical of current or potential advertisers. Such tales most often involve trade journals and consumer service magazines where, in many cases, the war for editorial independence is already over. Indeed, the Chrysler letter would have been unnecessary at these publications; there, editors generally know all too well what they can and cannot publish. (Just try to find a health column in a women’s service magazine that discusses the dangers of smoking.)
But at magazines and journals with a tradition of independent journalism, battles are still being fought across the open terrain between the editorial and business trenches. Not always, of course. Over the years, some common practice has arisen that permits many editors to compromise with business interests while maintaining a clear conscience. For example, most editors recognize that readers aren’t a publication’s only customer; advertisers are as well. Following the principle that one serves one’s customers, even the chief editors at the most respected magazines will agree that one wouldn’t choose to go out of one’s way to embarrass an advertiser. So how does one retain the editorial independence to publish, say, occasional investigative reports criticizing shoddy products or shabby business practices of current and potential advertisers? The answer has long been for the editors themselves to shield advertisers from business-related embarrassments without changing their editorial lineups.
As an example, during my tenure at Newsweek, the editor-in-chief routinely scanned ad placements just prior to closing the magazine. If he discovered that, say, an auto ad had accidentally been slotted close to a hard-hitting piece on some element of that industry, he would flag it to be moved to a more congenial area in the magazine. A more serious challenge would have been an instance in which an investigative report actually criticized a particular advertiser’s product or the company itself. I never personally witnessed such an instance at Newsweek, but I believe it is safe to say that, if faced with such a situation, most chief editors would go to their publisher who, in turn, would likely pull the ad from the week’s lineup at whatever sacrifice of revenue this would imply, perhaps hoping that the advertiser would agree to appear in a subsequent issue.
So if Chrysler’s letter had merely requested an early alert of editorial matter that was in some way critical to Chrysler as a company or even to the auto industry, in general, it would have provoked little anxiety in the minds of even the most independent editors. But the request by Chrysler’s ad agency substantially raised the ante. Now, early warning was being solicited—indeed, demanded—about any article that could be construed (presumably by Chrysler management) as “provocative and offensive”—whether it had anything to do with autos or not.
In a typical letter sent out by Chrysler’s agency, PentaCom, the associate director for print buying, Cindy Marshall, writes to publishers: “In an effort to avoid potential conflicts, it is required that Chrysler Corporation be alerted in advance of any and all editorial content that encompasses sexual, political, social issues or any editorial that might be construed as provocative or offensive.”
This warning, she adds, must allow Chrysler “ample time to review [the editorial material] and reschedule if desired.” To hammer home the threat, the letter demanded that the publisher acknowledge its receipt by signing a copy and returning it to the agency.
Enter family values—and even politics—into the ever-delicate discussion between publishing’s leaders of “church and state”!
With the Chrysler situation suddenly made public by the WSJ, a dirty, not so little, secret was out: Increasingly, advertisers and their agencies have been demanding editorial schedules of magazine publishers and, increasingly, they have been getting them. Whereas once upon a time, only advertisers in trade and service publications would expect “editorial calendars” to help them schedule ads in especially “positive” environments, now major advertisers, advertisers capable of placing or pulling hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising a year, were demanding advance notice, and with a different motive. They weren’t doing this in a search for anything “positive”; quite the contrary, these behemoth advertisers despite consciously seeking environments known for their editorial edge—Esquire, The New Yorker – want the rewards coming from editorial high-wire acts with none of the risks of being present during an “accident.” They want a fail-safe alert system so that they can pull their ads when the literary or journalistic edge cuts the wrong way for them.
News of this ominous development would have sent a chill through the magazine editing community no matter when it had appeared. But the WSJ piece had special impact on the magazine editing leadership because it arrived at an auspicious moment: just as the top editors of all the major magazines gathered in New York City for their annual ceremony honoring excellence in reporting, writing…and, of course, editing.
As National Magazine Awards were collected by proud editors-in-chief, standing before their publishers and ad sales heads, much of the talk at the lunch tables (and especially in the corridors when publishers weren’t listening) was of the WSJ article and the sinister trend it had revealed. Among the leadership of the American Society of Magazine Editors, there was special sensitivity to the story. ASME sponsors the awards; it stands for editorial excellence; how could it remain passive?
And yet, for a variety of reasons, it isn’t easy for ASME to challenge the business practices of its business-side peers. For one thing, ASME is hardly the vox populi of the magazine editing world. Its bylaws state that “members are chief editors; managing and executive editors; and senior editors, art directors, photography editors and on-line editors nominated by the chief editor.” As a result, the membership currently numbers 864 of the magazine world’s elite. I mention this only to point out that there are few radicals in this organization. To the contrary, every member works cheek by jowl with America’s publishers—indeed, some of these top editors aspire to, and indeed, occasionally become, members of the publishing elite.
Moreover, many ASME members who would never aspire to corporate management positions nevertheless know that their paychecks—and their raises—are entirely dependent on their publishers. (This is true even at Science, but whether Richard Harris controls Howard Lewis’s paycheck is unknown to this reporter.)
Yet another illustration of the dependency of editors on publishers is that ASME, itself, shares headquarters facilities with the wealthy and powerful Magazine Publishers’ Association (MPA), and the MPA provides informal insurance against any potential attack on ASME’s fragile reserve funds.
But ASME simply had to act, not to deal with an unpleasant singularity but rather to try to roll back a tide. Consider the case of The New Yorker. Back in 1995, according to the WSJ, Ford pulled six months of ads in protest of sexually graphic song lyrics that had appeared near a Mercury ad. Perhaps no magazine publishing company has deeper pockets than Conde Nast, which owns The New Yorker, and yet its response was not to shrug off the Ford action but rather to develop a list of loyal advertisers who might be sensitive to such matters and to request that, in the future, all Conde Nast editors-in-chief alert the publisher, Steve Florio, of any potentially upsetting material before it was published.
One Conde Nast editor-in-chief told me that this is acceptable because Florio merely shifts ads out of a given issue and no pressure whatsoever is exerted to tone down, much less kill, “sensitive” stories as may have been done at Esquire. But the dangers of this allegedly benign arrangement were well illustrated in an article published in the August issue of Vanity Fair by writer Jennet Conant. Conant obtained memos written by veteran editor and founder of American Lawyer, Legal Times, and Court TV, Steve Brill, in which he protests to his boss, Time Warner Chairman Gerald Levin, that Time Warner Chief Financial Officer Richard Bressler had pressured him to kill a piece in a Brill newsletter also published under the Time Warner banner. The newsletter piece profiled a new figure at the Federal Trade Commission, and Bressler allegedly wanted it killed not because the story in any way criticized Time Warner itself, but because the person being discussed was about to take over an FTC body that was then reviewing Time Warner’s plan to merge with Ted Turner’s media company.
In a July 10 article in The Washington Post, a Time Warner spokesman denied Brill’s account of events, but for the purposes of this article, it doesn’t really matter who is right. What matters is what Brill said next in a private memo to his Time Warner supervisor: “…you [Levin] and Rich [Bressler] are the only two people responsible for my annual bonus and for our ongoing discussions on restructuring our entire partnership—which means you two control, with no review, three quarters of my annual income…and the entirety of the fate of the equity interest I have built up over eighteen years…”
The moral of this tale is that, in certain companies, it may take a very strong editor to resist self-censorship when even the most benign early warning systems are instituted. ASME’s board recognized this danger and the need to shore up the less-than-brave even if it meant challenging the practices of some of their colleagues on the business side of our industry—and in some particular instances, of their own organizations. Taking a lead role, ASME President Frank Lalli, chief editor of Time Warner’s Money magazine, resolved then and there to place the issue on the agenda of ASME’s next Board of Directors meeting. And that occurred in my presence on Monday, May 5.
The discussion at that meeting would have made an excellent roundtable on the realities of editing and publishing. Every editor present (and the group included editors with experience at the mega-publishers such as TimeWarner, Hearst, and Conde Nast, as well as at specialty publishers in the computers, science, fashion, and black lifestyle fields) agreed that this Chrysler practice, if left unchallenged, would signal advertisers in still larger numbers to do likewise. Worse, as the ASME Board’s eventual statement noted, many of these advertisers would try to go beyond Chrysler’s stated intent. Rather than merely rescheduling their planned ads in a later issue, some advertisers would, as ASME’s board put it, “mistake an early warning as an open invitation to pressure the publisher or editor to alter, or even kill, the article in question.” The chilling effect this would have on the editorial process would inevitably, the ASME board agreed, destroy the proud tradition of American magazine editors to publish high-quality, socially significant articles without fear of reprisal of any sort.
A consensus rapidly emerged to issue a statement of deep concern, and just such a statement was approved unanimously at the board’s June 11 meeting.
Speaking directly to the publishers, the statement reads, in part, “We believe publishers should – and will – refuse to bow to…pressure.” Then the statement concludes: “Furthermore, we believe editors should—and will—follow ASME’s explicit principle* of editorial independence, which at its core states: ‘The chief editor of any magazine must have the final authority over the editorial content, words, and pictures, that appear in the publication.’”
Having passed a statement, ASME’s board then agreed that a subcommittee of ASME members would be formed to meet with the leading publishers (members of the Magazine Publishers’ Association) to seek common ground on the importance of discouraging advertisers from intentionally or inadvertently employing their power of the purse to become the political and moral arbiters of American magazine journalism. Said ASME board member Suzanne Levine, who is former Columbia Journalism Review editor-in-chief, in the WSJ: “Our short-term goal is to alert the community to what is going on. Our long-term goal is to change this practice.”
Depressing as it may be to reporters to hear, the realities of the publishing marketplace are such that, once instituted, practices of this sort cannot be reversed without the cooperation—tacit if not open—of the publishers. In an extensive piece of reporting in the May 28 edition, Newsday’s Paul D. Colford relates graphic statements by two of the most senior, and toughest minded, editors in consumer magazines—emeritus Cosmo editor-in-chief Helen Gurley Brown and Good Housekeeping editor-in-chief Ellen Levine (both at Hearst)—who frankly concede that pressure from publishers has forced compromises in editorial and, according to Levine, is escalating.
But there is also some good news to be reported, albeit at a very preliminary stage in what will surely be a protracted battle: Even before the ASME subcommittee had a chance to meet with its MPA equivalents, ASME president Frank Lalli reported to the ASME board at its July 8 meeting that he had received a series of very positive reactions from a number of prominent publishers and MPA members about ASME’s public stand.
Such a response by the publishers had been hoped for, of course. During the ASME deliberations, some members of the board had speculated that the top publishers would recognize that, when it comes to general interest and news magazines, readers will flock only to those publications exhibiting the highest standards of independent editorial practice and that magazines that consistently shun controversy will be deserted by their readers. Since publishers are accountable, along with editors, for the delivery to advertisers of a maximum number of attentive readers, it was hoped that MPA would work with ASME— quietly if not publicly—to remind advertisers and their agencies of our common need to uphold the standards of editorial excellence that attract and hold readership. Thus, it seemed that the reaction Lalli was getting might presage a productive relationship between ASME and MPA on this potentially contentious issue.
The first test was a meeting on July 24, during which ASNE President Lalli attempted to elicit support from the Marketing Committee of the MPA. All the publishers in this get-together agreed that providing advertisers with advance warnings of controversial comment that was unrelated to their businesses was unacceptable. And the publishers agreed that, if asked by reporters, the MPA leadership would make this point.
But whether this will be enough to curtail practices that may be occurring at levels beneath the notice of the top publishers is questionable. And perhaps the greatest danger to editorial independence comes not from explicit practices of the sort demanded by Chrysler, but rather from self-censorship as practiced by editors-in-chief who are more concerned with their pay stubs than they are with the need to publish quality material whether controversial or not. So the hard truth is that this topic isn’t likely to go away soon: Indeed, anyone experienced in any of the branches of journalism knows that the war for editorial independence never ends.