[...]
With a prospectus and prototype in hand, Rusbridger made several trips to New York to meet with specialists in marketing, distribution, printing and packaging. He also met with potential partners and U.S. publishers of magazines with relevant readerships and circulation bases. "We did a lot of serious work," he says.
And then, to the disappointment of many, including Blumenthal, it didn't happen. What emerged from two dozen conversations from March to September was a ballpark guess that it would cost $50 million over five years before they reached the projected break-even point. It was called off in November, and on March 9, it was announced that, rather than investing millions in an American Guardian, Wenner would invest $200,000 in Salon.com and that Salon would open a Washington bureau with Blumenthal as senior vice president of editorial development and bureau chief. At the same time, Salon signed deals with the new liberal radio network, Air America, and with the Guardian, to carry their material. Patrick Hurley, senior vice president of business operations at Salon, says it is too early to know what or how much content will be posted from each. "We're going to work out the details in the coming weeks," he said. However, he said it has nothing to do with promoting the Guardian.
When Scardino was hired, one of his first tasks was to evaluate the Guardian in America proposal and make a recommendation. He was less than enthusiastic: "For $50 million, we could fly the paper over and pass it out at the airport." Scardino feared that to survive in the celebrityobsessed U.S. publishing market, the Guardian in America would degenerate into a George-like magazine. He thought they should come up with other ways to move in slowly over the next three or four years-perhaps evolving the Guardian Weekly into a liberal Economist.
Apparently, Wenner also saw it as too steep an investment. He went on about the cost to Felix Dennis, who has himself deftly colonized the U.S. magazine market. "If they want to come to America and mess around with the big boys, by God they better have a great partner and some really great journalists," Dennis says.
As the owner of Dennis Publishing-which produces more than eighteen magazines in the United Kingdom and four in the United States, including the racy lad-mag Maxim; the pop-culture hot-picks magazine Stuff; music-centric Blender; and his most recent coup, The Week, a whimsical news digest-Dennis should know. Maxim has been an overwhelming success since its 1997 U.S. launch. Its circulation is a hefty 2.5 million. Stuff, which appeared on the U.S. market in 1998, is now at 1.3 million.
Dennis said the Guardian in America is likely to cost twice the initial $50 million estimate. Nine months after The Week's 2001 launch, the cost of building subscriptions was up to $90 a person and Dennis almost pulled the plug on his favorite magazine. "I'm not Mort Zuckerman, with all due respect," he says. That number is now down to about $48 a head, after Dennis changed the marketing tack to rely on readers to promote the magazine to friends, family and colleagues. It has worked so far. The Week's U.S. circulation is up to 200,000 and Dennis expects to break even at 320,000. "We'll spend quite a bit more before it starts to flow the other way," he says.
Ultimately, Rusbridger made the decision to put the Guardian project on the back burner. He blames the newspaper wars in the United Kingdom. "Everything is up in the air at the upper end of the newspaper market in this country," he says. "It's more important that we concentrate on that than expand in America."
Blumenthal, the project's biggest advocate, is reluctant to have more than a cursory talk about it and Wenner simply seems to be over it (he refused several interview requests.)
But speculation still ripples through New York's media world. A recent phone call from Guardian headquarters asking for market advice had one publisher thinking the new magazine was on its way. When asked who his other potential partners were, Rusbridger declined to reveal them. "We may want to go back to them," he says. Stories on the wire suggest the Guardian needs to do something big to continue to compete in the market at home and has been madly experimenting with format; launching in the United States catapulted the Financial Times onto a list of the world's 100 most recognized brands.
A slightly made-over Guardian Weekly is another hint that Rusbridger hasn't given up long-range plans to publish in the United States. "I guess it's a sort of little turn in the water to see what kind of appetite there is for a newsstand version of the Guardian," he says. The new Guardian Weekly is folded in half and has a thick, glossy cover to help it stand up-and stand out-on the crowded racks.
Maybe the British are coming and maybe they aren't. The editors are vague. Rusbridger says, "The work is there, and we may choose to revisit it."