Oh Dear Print Media, Here We Go: Radar Magazine FOLDS
American pop culture digest (and one of our favourite new mags) Radar, has just announced it will fold as of today. An alert has been posted on Gawker, the media gossip site where many of Radar’s writers used to work. No news on why yet, as the title seemed to be doing pretty well up until the banking crisis (it’s just looking worse and worse for print media right now). Radar wasn’t perfect, but it championed younger writers, younger content matter, and published some pretty great ‘new journalism’y stuff from time to time.
My fellow editor Jack Roberts recently interviewed Radar’s founding editor Maer Roshan for the new BAD IDEA issue 7, and here’s what he had to say:
Having run aground in 2005 after its investors pulled out after just three issues, the American magazine Radar was resurrected in 2007, and has been resurgent since, putting on a circulation of 250,000 and one million plus monthly page views on its website Radaronline.com.
Billed as ‘pop-culture for smart people’, its recent success has been a poke in the eye for the critics of founding editor Maer Roshan, who number Gawker.com’s Nick Denton, who has posted relentlessly mocking blog posts about Radar for half a decade now (“It wouldn’t surprise me if Nick had fantasies about moving into print,” Roshan told us from his office in New York), and Spy magazine co-creator Kurt Andersen, who dismissed the publication as “a wholly recursive exercise in recombinant magazine-making.” While Roshan’s long-running pursuit of financial backers and his attempts to “re-relaunch” his title were much ridiculed, his grit paid dividends when Yusef Jackson, the millionaire son of Reverend Jesse Jackson, came on board as an investor with Ron Burkle, a billionaire business associate of Bill Clinton – although Burkle refuses to publicly confirm his involvement.
Defying gloomy predictions for ‘dead tree’ media ventures, the new Radar has put on sales every issue, and blue chip advertisers – Calvin Klein, Budweiser, HBO – are warming to the title. A summer redesign, courtesy of revered design agency Pentagram, has pepped up the magazine’s look, and an addiction to Photoshopped covers has thankfully been curbed, with post-ironic glamour girls Pamela Anderson and Shannon Doherty giving good face in recent issues.
“The idea was to take the ballsiness of a tabloid, but do it with intelligent writing, great photography, and great journalistic values,” says Roshan. “The obvious parallel is Vanity Fair in the ‘80s.” This may be so, but Roshan needs to have a word with his foreign distributor; you’re more likely to find members of the Bin Laden family in a British newsagent than copies of Radar, and that’s a shame.
RIP.
Posted by Daniel Stacey in Creative Economy | October 24, 2008 5:56PM |