Rough seas

Say a prayer for the Sunday magazine, a meandering journey for the mind that's sailed into some dangerous waters

By Calvin Woodward

At Sunshine magazine in Fort Lauderdale, they're off chasing hurricanes - not through the back yards of Florida but from the west African lands where the ill winds form. In Philadelphia, a plot thickens each Sunday as local writers take turns in the Inquirer on a six-part serial mystery called "Murder at the Republican Convention." In the Hartford (Conn.) Courant, a troubled woman opens her life to readers and tries to explain why she faked threatening letters to her school. This is the world of the independent Sunday newspaper magazine. Part temple, part playground, it's where writers stretch and readers curl up. It's a diminished, even endangered, world, full of spirit and short on cash. It probably won't be around forever.

For most of the century, Sunday newspaper magazines have been a day-of-rest ritual perhaps rivaled only by church. Like church, they have offered reflection, soul enrichment and sometimes not a whole lot of laughs. They run counter to the conventional understanding about the rushed pace of life in America today and the modern appetite for information.

"I think Sunday has changed for everyone," says Robert Taylor, editor of In Sync magazine at the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times outside San Francisco. "There is very little that forces you to stay home on Sunday.

"Still, as a focused, colorful, helpful package - I don't know why newspaper magazines can't be as valuable to our readers as so many magazines on the newsstands are. Finding a niche and filling it is still everyone's real problem."

There are fewer than 35 independent Sunday newspaper magazines left in the country, says the Sunday Magazine Editors Association, also known as Sunmag. That's down by about half from the early 1980s.

Sunday survivors have, in a few cases, gone monthly while many of the larger ones have added syndicated supplements to the mix. These days, USA Weekend is carried in 561 papers with a circulation of 22 million and Parade is in 337 papers with 37 million circulation.

Change, death and rebirth

Facelifts and deeper changes have been the order of the decade for Sunday independents, at some papers demonstrating a dogged commitment to the long form; at others representing a final attempt to hang on.

Sunday editors cast their eyes across the circumscribed landscape, where every success and failure now resonate louder than before.

There's a Sunday magazine rebirth at The Beacon Journal in Akron, Ohio; a death at The Denver Post. The Philadelphia Inquirer's lively - yet still unprofitable - magazine heartens editors who cling to the belief a commitment to quality can mean a vibrant product. Yet they are still shaken by the loss of The Miami Herald's Tropic, a once verdant garden for Sunday journalism that was given new sparkle only to quickly fold at the end of last year.

"It mystified all of us who were sort of looking at that (Tropic) as an example of something to show to our own publishers," says Steve Courtney, president of Sunmag and deputy editor of the Hartford (Conn.) Courant's Northeast Magazine.

Courtney reports a "resurgence or reinvestment in a lot of Sunday magazines." On the other hand, he says: "The numbers show that people feel they're somewhat on the edge."

Sunmag estimates only 20 percent make money - by conventional accounting, a failure. One bane of the business is that Sunday magazines labor under profit-and-loss statements distinguishing them from the paper at large, where you may never really know what sections are paying their own way. Their necks, simply put, stick out of the soup.

But practitioners of the Sunday magazine assert that their product has always had a higher calling.

"We're sort of affirmative action for the longer story," Courtney says with a chuckle. "There's a trend now here where people have so much information - so much bombarding us. What's most valuable now is the time to sit down and think about something for a little while."

Yet when advertisers don't respond, that glossy package can seem expendable; that prestige, a conceit. "Publishers who don't have the vision to see that a certain richness in a Sunday paper can be ultimately successful to them might see it as a place to cut," he says.

Newspaper industry watchers attribute advertisers' lack of interest to simple economics.

"From the standpoint of the national advertising agency, it's more economical to deal with a handful of publications than it is to deal with dozens," said Leo Bogart, former head of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau.

John Morton, a newspaper analyst, added that department store consolidation and preprints have also contributed.

"Local store advertising decisions are now often made at the national headquarters. In that case, advertisers are attracted to preprints or something mailed to local people."

This allows advertisers to control paper quality, printing and distribution.

Uniqueness diminished

Editors note one more thing: Magazines are no longer a splash of color in a sea of black and white. "The challenge started when newspapers got color in the main book," says Ellen Stein Burbach, editor of The Plain Dealer's magazine in Cleveland. Advertisers "then had an option. All the department stores were in the Sunday magazine - nowadays they can buy a big broadsheet ad in color."

Moreover, competition from television wrought two changes in the industry that on the surface seem at odds with each other.

First, the demand grew for short, snappy newspaper writing. At the same time, storytelling and analysis of the kind that were once the province of many magazines were driven into the main Sunday paper, or on to the weekday front page, as a way to offer readers something they could never get from TV.

In that sense, the newspaper itself has become a bit more like the magazines once tucked into so many of them. But magazines are not without advantages that editors are doing everything to exploit.

The superior paper and reproduction of most of them make magazines still the flashiest vehicle for photojournalism. Many are concentrating intensely on local and regional news, drawing readers directly into their content through contests and other write-in features, and still offering space for the well-told story that just wouldn't fit anywhere else.

In Cleveland, what began as a follow-up to local grumbling over a canceled rock concert turned into Gen Bored, an exploration of the tedium of teen-agers who can't find much in the community to do.

"I think Sunday magazines need to be very regional," says Burbach, aiming her advice at all but perhaps the largest newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

"Somebody in Florida could read my magazine and say they don't get it. Someone from northeast Ohio understands."

Her magazine is getting spruced up: staples, web press production, more color and a new name to be chosen with the help of readers. Splashy garden and travel features, richly illustrated, are part of the mix.

Engaging the reader directly may be more urgent than ever for some magazines but it is hardly new. Burbach reads from a 1907 edition of the old Cleveland Leader, its illustrated 16-page magazine reporting on a contest by the Chicago Tribune challenging cities to come up with the "most beautiful working girl in America."

Della Carson, a $12 a week stenographer, was Chicago's nominee. She's beautiful, concedes the Cleveland editor, with perhaps a touch of competitive hometown pique almost a century later. But Della's hair is this "crown of poofy Brillo stuff."

Local focus

A few years ago, one magazine editor characterized her decision to focus on issues closer to home with the edict: No more covers on Chad.

As it turns out, American journalists have gone back to Chad, but to get a story of clear local interest. The Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale sent a reporter and photographer there, and then west to the African shores of the Atlantic Ocean, to delve into the genesis of so many of the hurricanes that make their raging landfall on the U.S. east coast.

 Their work, spread over two weeks, was a "big mouthful" even for the paper's magazine, but just one example of how the format can drive writers and their newspapers to higher levels of achievement, says Sunshine editor Mark Gauert.

Sunshine's own journey is not untypical: glossy stock in its first 12 years, a money-saving but self-defeating transition to cheaper paper for a year, and then a reversion to quality.

"Readership stayed fairly loyal to the magazine but advertisers started to drop out," Gauert says of the mid-1990s economizing. "They didn't feel it looked so special anymore." Revenue went up with the return of glossy paper.

Tropic saw ad revenue double in the year after its makeover but it became more expensive to produce and posted a loss of nearly $2 million while Knight Ridder was telling its newspapers to increase profitability. Executives decided to cut Tropic and put more money into the main product.

"We are making an investment in the newspaper - the meat and potatoes and the bread and butter of what a newspaper is," Herald publisher Alberto Ibarguen said in making the announcement.

The mindset that homegrown magazines spur their newspapers to bigger and better things - not to mention journalism awards - lives on.

At the Anchorage (Alaska) Daily News, We Alaskans magazine looks back on the founding of a nomadic village with prose that luxuriates in the "white arctic sun," a lake's "rotting ice," a campfire's "fragrant willow smoke," an approaching helicopter's intruding "wop-wop-wop" - storytelling made for a morning in bed or a lingering two-cup visit to a cafe.

"There is still a place for all kinds of reading in the newspaper," Courtney says from Hartford.

If only the writer, coming over from the news side hungry for all that space, can be convinced that the story still needs to move along, he adds. "That's the mistake that newsroom writers often make. We have to explain what we're looking for. Even though people joke about the length of stories, we are not looking for people to blather on."

After a Connecticut teacher who had been stalked by a student implicated him in false threats to her school - sending him behind bars for six months - The Courant persuaded her to make her private writings about the matter public in its magazine. To Courtney, it was another long piece that would have lost something in the main pages.

A brief history

The first known Sunday magazine, was established by the San Francisco Chronicle in 1869. Later, the Chicago Inter Ocean introduced color to its supplement. But historians generally say the format took off in New York in the 1890s, when the Hearst-Pulitzer wars were turning a chunk of journalism yellow.

Features, illustrations, entertainment and fiction posing as fact poured into the pages of William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. "The early Sunday magazines were latter 19th century inventions and really linked to the rise of the department store and wanting to get those ads to women readers," says Janice Hume, who teaches journalism history at Kansas State University in Manhattan.

Journal editor Morrill Goddard launched the 16-page American Sunday Magazine in November 1896 - later to become The American Weekly (and now known as USA Weekend) - treating readers to the likes of Life in an Oriental Harem by an English Girl Who Married a Persian Priest.

"Nothing is so stale as yesterday's newspaper," he said, "but The American Weekly may be around the house for days or weeks and lose none of its interest."

But Hume said the fade began once radio and then television came on the scene, sucking away advertising dollars.

Nowadays, Jerry Tilis, a consultant and former Knight Ridder vice president, tells that company's in-house publication: "It's over for Sunday magazines. There's a better chance of resuscitating a dead man."

Retrenchment, yet determination

"When a virus comes through and knocks out people, the ones still around are hale and strong," says Buffalo (N.Y.) News magazine editor Charles Anzalone, voicing hope the failures have bottomed out. His magazine turned a $500,000 loss into a $100,000 profit after going monthly and getting a sprucing up.

Courtney says American editors may take a page out of the British model in the years ahead and produce multiple magazines, specializing in varied themes, instead of the general-interest Sunday read of today.

"I don't know if that's the future," he says. "But I think it's a lot smarter a future than simply eliminating something that is as rich and as essential as a Sunday magazine."

At the Inquirer, Avery Rome is confident only that the demand won't wane for the vivid story, the kind at which independent Sunday magazines have excelled, whether that tale is told "in a magazine, in a broadsheet or on somebody's Palm Pilot."

On shiny page or something else, they'll still be chasing the "elements of universal interest," as Goddard described the tenets of his pioneering Sunday rag.

His elements? They are a mouthful, passed down through generations and yet still apt for the Sunday storyteller of tomorrow. They are love, hate, fear, vanity, evil-doing, morality, selfishness, immortality, superstition, curiosity, veneration, ambition, culture, heroism, science and amusement.

Woodward is an Associated Press staff writer in Washington.