MISCmedia for 6/1/00
'Life' Dies Again

AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it's 21 and over.

TO OUR READERS: Yr. ob't corresp'd't has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.

THE FIRST TIME Life magazine died, it was mourned far and wide on TV newscasts and in other publications' commentary pages as symbolizing the end of an era.

This time, its second demise is hardly noticed outside the mag industry.

The old Life was a huge glossy that came out every week for a paltry price. (The original 1936 cover price was 10 cents; subscription rates at its 1972 end were little higher.) It was supported by ads--big, slick, colorful ads for brand-name consumer products ranging from cars to Campbell's soup; ads aimed at mass-market middle-class households with little regard for the details of demographic market segmentation.

Five years after the weekly's end, Time Inc. bosses figured the Life name still held a cachet among readers. So they relaunched it as a monthly. They charged more for it the second time around, but it basically kept to the same format--photo-heavy stories and features about assorted general-interest topics (movie stars, animals, science, history, uplifting-human-interest stuff, etc.).

Time Inc. killed the old Life because TV had taken mass-marketing ad dollars away from magazines. AOL-Time Warner is killing the current Life, effective with the current issue, because the entirety of the advertising business (even broadcast) has gone to niche marketing as its gospel.

Life still had a steady circulation around 1.7 million. It was still turning a small profit. But AOL-TW's ad sales team was finding the mag an increasingly difficult sell to ad agencies.

The company could promote Money as reaching an audience of middle-managers, Fortune as reaching top executives, Sports Illustrated as reaching young-adult males, and In Style as reaching young-adult females.

But who reads Life? A little bit of everybody? Companies don't want to sell to a little bit of everybody. They want to sell condensed soup to grandmas, dry soup to college kids, ready-to-heat soup to upper-middle-class moms, microwaveable soup to busy singles, vegan soups to vegans, and boxes of soup ingredients to weekend chefs.

So Life will again become a heritage of photojournalism and a word in the names of AOL-TW's Time-Life Books and Time-Life Music.

It didn't have to be this way, and it still doesn't.

AOL-TW could always reinvent the title again, in this or some future year. The next time, they could downplay the feature-y material and emphasize a harder, more immediate brand of photojournalism, telling compelling stories to a readership that could cut across the demographic boundaries, allowing marketers to reach beyond their increasingly boxed-in little niches.

Could it happen? As they say in the photojournalism trade, let's see what develops.

TOMORROW: A few things you think you know, but which are wrong.

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