Some mags thrive amid the pandemic
WHEN the coronavirus first hit a year ago, Andrea Sachs, a 24-year veteran of Time magazine, started a Web site called The Insider to chronicle the pandemic — at first, just for friends and family.
Now celebrating its oneyear anniversary, theinsider1.com has grown into a weekly digital magazine with 10,000 unique visitors, and has attracted contributions from 30 to 40 writers. No one is paid and the online publication is free to read.
Her brother, Jeffrey Sachs, an economics professor at Columbia University who has advised everyone from Bernie Sanders to the pope, contributes updates on the effects of the pandemic on the economy. Former Variety writer Laurence Lerman files regular articles on cinema.
“I’d love to get some advertising,” she said. “If I did, I’d give it to the contributors. They’re coming from around the country and around the globe.”
While most of the publishing world has been reeling from COVID, a few intrepid entrepreneurs are bucking the trend. Danny Seo, who saved his wellness magazine, Naturally Danny Seo, when distributor Harris Publications folded five years ago, has seen it thrive in troubled times. In the fall, he acquired the home interior-design site Rue.
“It was a no-brainer,” said Seo, who said “statistically, the category is on fire” as people stuck indoors turn to home improvement. This week, he is unveiling the first print version of the title, a quarterly selling for $10 a copy, with a distribution of 350,000 copies.
“One big reason for launching print right now: retailers are asking for it,” Seo said.
The checkout pockets for which magazines once paid to be placed in coveted display spots at counters and racks are now often being offered for free. Retailers such as Target, Barnes & Noble, Rite Aid and CVS are trying to keep racks stocked as many publishers cut print runs or fold titles in the pandemic.
“We call it the COVID correction,” Seo said.
When the pandemic first hit, Jeffrey Mann — who publishes The Mann Report, Mann About Town and the Fashion Mannuscript, known as “fm” — was faced with unloading 30,000 copies of his magazines that circulated primarily in Manhattan, the Hamptons and other upscale outposts around the country because commercial buildings were closed.
He quickly pivoted, for the first time soliciting home subscriptions while also taking advantage of depressed paper prices to increase the stock of his paper both on the covers and inside. It helped him justify the $99-a-year subscription price that has attracted about 10,000 subscribers so far — netting him an extra $1 million.
He recently opened new offices in Southampton and Palm Beach, Fla.
“It’s found money,” Mann said. The result: “We didn’t lay anyone off.” His magazines were always thinly staffed, he said, with a fulltime editor, a dedicated ad salesman and a graphic designer for each. The rest were freelance. “We haven’t lost too many advertisers,” he said.
Schneps Publications, which earlier this year established an East End beachhead by purchasing Dan’s Papers from Richard Burns, returned to its core strength with its latest acquisition of three political newsletters from founder Stephen Witt: Kings County Politics, Queens County Politics and New York County Politics. Witt remains on board as the political editor in chief of the chain and this week began publishing under a new banner as his former newsletters merged into one now called PoliticsNY.
“Making an acquisition, particularly during the Pandemic, is certainly risky” because of the uncertain timing of the recovery, said Josh Schneps, CEO and co-publisher of Schneps Media, which started as publisher of a single weekly paper in Queens founded by his mother.