Smoking Gun: found??  there’s a lot of scrambling…

In case you haven’t been to Secular Blasphemy or read my post below, there’s some scrambling going on of some sort regarding new incriminating information about Iraq’s allegedly terminated WMD programs.

Note that Jan found a Voice of America article detailing how Emma Nicholson has furnished to Hans Blix information provided to her regarding previously undisclosed hiding places of Iraqi WMD equipment or labs.

Emma, or actually I should say, Baroness Emma Nicholson of Winterbourne is a rather interesting person of unusual credentials, including WHO envoy for Eastern Mediterranean region and VP - European Parliament's Committee for Foreign Affairs, Human Rights, Common Defence and Security Policy.

She’s been active in health issues affecting mid-east countries for years, including Iraq, and has been vocal in defense of Kurds.  Who better to present incriminating data that may well be the last straw?

(p.s. Nice website, Baroness!)

2:54:33 PM    comment []

RantsCounterRants:  Again already with the Martha thing…

(Yeah, yeah, you don’t like her, you’re bored with her, you can’t figure out why I’m wasting my time, whatever.  If you feel that way, you may not want to stick around for this.  You’ve been warned.)

After reading Maxine Daley’s blog post about Martha this past week, something stuck in my craw.  Maxine’s words ring true, all too true, but still…

Was it really just politics that got to Martha?  Was it one-some-all of the attributes about which I’ve already ranted?  A combination of politics and all the rest?

Or was it something else?

In 2001, Martha Stewart Living (MSL) magazine had a circulation base of 2.1 million.  That’s more than the entire circulation base for home interest/lifestyle magazines in the United Kingdom for the same period.  Compare to the women’s lifestyle magazines total circulation of 5.7 million in the UK for same period.

Yup, that’s the UK magazine market, not the US magazine market.  But we’re also talking one magazine.

Now, let’s take a look at the UK market a little more closely.  There’s a magazine published there in the home interest/lifestyle magazines slot called, oddly enough, “Livingetc.”.  Title typeface looks incredibly similar to typeface used in earlier versions of MSL (on first site, I actually thought it WAS an MSL overseas publication).  Puny circulation, even within the UK; it’s also sold in Australia.

Livingetc.’s publishing company is IPC Media – an AOL Time Warner Company. IPC Media, largest magazine publisher in the UK, was acquired in autumn 2001by AOLTW.

Any chance you remember what company published MSL before Martha parted company went on her own (forming MSO – Martha Stewart Omnimedia)?

I do.  I’ve been a reader since MSL debuted in 1991 and still have copies from the early days.

It was Time Inc., subsidiary of Time Warner (now AOLTW).

Yeah, I know, they’re huge.  Time’s overall reach is 300 million subscribers across all its magazines.  A 2.1 million subscriber base is a drop in the bucket.

MSL currently retails for $4.75 a copy; based on 2.1 million subscribers, gross subscription revenue could be between 42 million (assuming all copies sell for less than half retail) and 120 million (assuming all copies sell at full retail) dollars per year.  That doesn’t include royalties from any sales of MSO / MSS / MSL branded products or on-line product sales, or ad revenues from the magazine, other MSO publications and books, television or radio programming, or any other MSO revenue streams.  Not exactly a landfall, but not exactly chump change either.

To look at this from another perspective, 2.1 million subscribers could be the difference between a good year and a bad year for a rather large publishing company when ad revenues are declining post dot-com bomb and in a stagnant-to-down economy.  The additional non-ad and non-subscription revenue streams are pretty tasty, too, when you considered other magazines in the same women's/lifestyle space haven't been able to establish similar opportunities for revenue.

And the eyeballs attached to the MSL magazine are the crème de la crème of the industry: Late GenX – Early Boomer women with lots of disposable income. (At the time the first MSL magazine was sold, the target market was females 39 years of age on average with average annual income above US$30,000.)

During the first year of publication, MSL sold 400,000 copies; Time was negotiating with Ms. Stewart for a contract of six or more years in length.  That didn’t happen (at least not the “or longer” part of that negotiation).  She pulled her magazine and began publishing it under her own company MSO after a handful of years (MSO went public in 1999).

This was a bit more of a coup than the press let on at the time; in 1991, the “Seven Sisters” of women’s lifestyle magazines (New York Times’ McCall’s and Family Circle; Hachette Publications’ Woman's Day; Meredith Corp.’s Better Homes & Gardens, Ladies Home Journal; Hearst Corp.’s Good Housekeeping, Redbook) were estimated to have lost approximately 8 million subscribers during the 1980’s as women moved into the workforce in increasing numbers.  These magazines also retailed at an average of $1 to $2 per issue in 1991, as compared to MSL’s $3 per issue retail price.

Now we’re starting to talk some real cash and impact at the grocery checkout – especially since some of the “Seven Sisters” have been perilously close to kicking the bucket or have mutated since MSL’s debut (I believe McCall’s became Rosie and I’ve no clue what it is today, if it even exists).

So…what if Martha’s leaving to go it alone and start a media company really annoyed someone at Time, someone who also had political clout?

What if there were other synergistic reasons to induce tanking of MSL, like buying its publisher MSO and synergistically merging the MSL magazine with its little clone, “Livingetc.”, for a single magazine with global distribution, thereby acquiring entry to the market and market share at a depressed or firesale price, yet offering branded products at a premium price?

And what if there are other premiums that snagging a vehicle like MSL brings that other magazines won’t?  That original target market has grown older – now they’re 49 instead of 39, and they’re a lot wealthier than they were in 1991.  MSL also has a fiercely loyal subscriber base, hanging on tightly through the last year; far more loyal than the subscribers that read the “Seven Sisters” in the 1980’s.  This could be worth some very serious money.

It doesn’t explain all the bashing; there are people who just don’t like her.  It can explain how some of the bashing has been spawned or fed; it could explain why the SEC and Justice Department have been dragging their feet over something of far less consequence than something like Enron or WorldCom.

But this is purely speculation, just something rattling around in my head like my previous speculations on the why-for of Martha bashing.  It could just be me grasping at straws to make sense of the nonsensical.

One person I’m pretty certain didn’t fuel the Martha bash-fest: Robin Wolaner.  While poking around amongst the names of old Time Inc. people on board in 1991 (MSL’s birth year), Robin’s name came up as a VP at Time.  Since then she’s moved on to CNET.  She’s another successful female manager who pierced the upper echelons and gets bashed regularly – you’ll find her mentioned in f*ckedcompany.com.  Of the five VP's listed at Time in 1991, the other four are male and don't have a trail of flaming documents bad-mouthing them littering the internet.  Interesting correlation: male, no flames; female, flames.  Appears to be irrelevant whether any of these five remained with Time or not, since others have also moved on. If anybody gets what Martha’s up against, it’s Robin.

8:05:46 AM    comment []