男性雜志的沒落

I've had it with men

Ten years ago, men's monthlies were making fortunes for publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. And FHM editor Ed Needham was at the heart of it. But, he says, the internet and trashy weeklies have destroyed all that: the party's over, and it's time to move on

Monday June 4, 2007The Guardian

Last summer, I moved back to London after spending seven years in New York editing FHM, Rolling Stone and - most recently - Maxim, the most popular men's magazine in the world. The role of editor-in-chief at a large-circulation American magazine is one of life's more charmed positions, but I decided to step away from the generous salary, sell the SoHo loft and manage without all the other perks and baubles that come with sitting atop a big masthead - such as the five-star hotels, backstage passes, foreign travel, limos to the airport, free (or massively discounted) designer clothes and invitations to premieres and major sporting events, including, had my hosts chosen a more reliable tout, the World Cup final. History may one day show this to be a financially moronic decision, but the internet, other electronic distractions and the UK weeklies have made the month a terribly unfashionable unit of time, and the path ahead for men's magazines increasingly difficult to chart. Of greater concern, it had stopped being fun. This genre, into which I had gleefully poured my heart and soul for so many years, had lost its appeal. I felt it prudent to move on. Someone else can have the tickets and the chauffeur-driven cars.
Just 10 years ago, though, men's magazines were in dazzling ascent, and FHM was the toast of the British magazine industry. I took over as editor in 1997, and by the time I moved to New York in 1999 it had become the biggest monthly magazine in Europe, with an average circulation of over 750,000. Our great rival Loaded was heralded in Vanity Fair as emblematic of "cool Britannia", but it was FHM that was flying off the newsstands in unprecedented quantities, thanks to a - then irresistible - formula of funny, sexy and useful. Our sales were more than those of our three nearest rivals combined. We dwarfed women's magazines. From nowhere, we suddenly found that our business cards could make traffic police tear up speeding tickets and prompt the swift unhooking of velvet ropes. Politicians sought our opinions on "young people". A private jet took us to Morocco for the day. There was lunch with royalty.Like the thrill of punk after the stodge of prog rock, FHM's success came in part from standing in such dramatic contrast to what came before. The previous generation of magazines for men felt there was no higher calling in life than to be an ultra-cool man of both action and urbane knowledge, preferably Steve McQueen, in spite of his being many years dead from lung cancer. FHM realised that generally men do not wake in the hope that each day will bring a fresh descent of the Cresta Run. Or care about fountain pens. Or consider ignorance on the subject of single-malt scotch a source of shame. At the heart of FHM was a belief that men are not noble or heroic, and are better off not trying to be. The idea that it was all right to be funny and self-deprecating about, say, failure in the pursuit of women came as an enormous relief to our readers.
But it was the women - or, more specifically, pictures of famous women in their underwear - who were the single biggest contributor to the magazine's success, and the title's biggest eureka moment came when we realised that men preferred covers of the biggest female stars of the day, such as Britney, Kylie, Gillian Anderson and Jennifer Aniston to, say, Frank Skinner in a jacuzzi or Harry Enfield with a sardine in his breast pocket. It was like the day country music discovered that "rambling" rhymes with "gambling" - once that penny dropped, there was no holding the magazine back. While rocketing sales confirmed that a lot of people liked what we were doing, a number of other people, possibly even readers of this newspaper, viewed what we were doing with some distaste, not to say horror. The magazine undeniably objectified women, in that they were shot, lit, made up, clothed and retouched to make them more appealing to look at, but complaints to the magazine were rare, and we certainly didn't sit around fretting that we were somehow hindering the progress of women's rights. Even 10 years ago, it felt like the debate as to whether such images were inappropriate or demeaning was over. Society had deemed them acceptable. There was a clear difference - clothing - between what we were doing and what you needed to resort to the top shelf for, and similar images were commonplace in advertising, film and television, music videos, even women's magazines. Our benchmark was the "tube test" - could people read it openly on the tube?
In 1999, I moved to New York to launch the US version of the magazine, and while FHM in the UK had seen off all competition with great panache, a very different set of opponents awaited us on the other side of the Atlantic. Felix Dennis had already launched Maxim, and by then was making the great and good of American publishing eat their predictions of its immediate and humiliating failure. (As a sign of that industry's enormous disconnect with the people who buy their titles, they took to calling our brand of men's magazines "laddie books", an expression that has still never been uttered instinctively by a single American male.) We were also drunk on our own brilliance - we had taken one look at the US newsstand, thought our magazine was magnificent, theirs were rubbish and couldn't understand how we could possibly go wrong. But a winning formula in Britain does not guarantee success in the US.
In many ways, good and bad, Britain is like a pub and America is like a university. Some British magazines are literally like a pub - beery and raucous - but the practice of journalism in the US is a solemn and serious activity, and not given to mischief-making. This meant that Maxim was able to grow into a monster, with a circulation of over 2.5m, and a readership six times that, yet it was still considered an aberration and a market for similar titles didn't erupt with the vitality that it had in Britain. There were other more immediate cultural differences to contend with, not least emotional ones. In one week I had to deal with three incidents of staff in tears, all of them male. I am still not sure what the correct response is to that situation. I suspect it may be instant dismissal.
And there was also the culture of litigation. In London we had scoffed at the niceties of libel law and somehow emerged unscathed. In the US such a cavalier approach is unwise. At Maxim the lawyers read every single word we wrote. One such piece was a diagram describing how to ski off the roof of your house on a snowy day, which the lawyers considered so irresponsible that it should be pulled immediately. Eventually we agreed to run a warning. The lawyers wanted it to read: "If you do this, you will die," a warning of such apocalyptic - and inaccurate - portent that we would occasionally put it on other stories because we liked its uncompromising position so much.
At Rolling Stone, I tried to apply some of the lessons I had learned in men's magazines. To a British eye, Rolling Stone looks very foreign and intimidating, with its oversized pages of dense copy. In the US, however, it is a journalistic colossus, especially in certain political, business and entertainment circles. Rolling Stone's problem is that it has to look backwards and forwards at the same time: back to its serious musical and political roots, beloved of its hard-core readership, but also forwards in ways that attract new readers, who in many instances do not have the patience to consume media in the long-form way Rolling Stone serves it up. This is a convoluted way of saying I wanted to get sales up, and believed that more commercial covers didn't have to compromise the quality of the writing inside. One of my first covers was a picture of Christina Aguilera on a red sheet, with a guitar arranged artfully over her naked form. The magazine sold well above average, but proprietor Jann Wenner felt we'd tipped the balance too far. No more red backgrounds and no more women dressed in musical instruments, he decreed. While I was finding out exactly where American journalism's tolerance for red bedsheets lay, however, other forces were at work to turn back the march of men's magazines.
Until recently the magazine industry considered the internet little more than a gimmick, and magazine websites were a place for second-rate journalists and off-cuts of content considered too weak for the print version. By the time publishers woke up to their spectacularly poor judgment, the internet had made a move on its audience. We once had a very genteel conversation at British FHM about whether we should run a photo of a man who had been killed having sex with a chicken. He had been surprised by a large boulder, which had crushed him and the chicken to death. It had appeared in the Spanish press a few years earlier and, while unfortunate, was quite funny, so we ran it, and it was much talked about and widely reprinted. Nowadays, the idea that a monthly magazine can be first with such a "Did you see?" photo is laughable. That image today would be in half the world's in-boxes before they got the rock off him.
Besides the internet, a battery of electronic wonders - iPods, mobile phones, video games, MySpace, instant messaging and the rest - has taken huge bites out of the time formerly allotted to magazine reading. And mass-market men's monthlies, which once stood in such thrilling contrast to everything that came before, are now thought of by a new generation of readers as last year's model, as exciting as black-and-white television. Other magazines, newspapers and websites have plundered their best ideas, which has only diluted their originality further. Men's monthlies in this country made a potentially fatal error in an attempt to shore up flagging circulation when they decided to show bare breasts: overnight, it became impossible to defend against the porno accusation. It didn't help circulation or advertising. They no longer passed the tube test. Worst of all, it meant closing the door on the hope that big celebrities would ever return, and no one sells magazines like big stars. Porn stars, glamour girls and z-listers moved in to fill the void. All this was too much for poor American FHM, which died and was laid to rest in December 2006, its official cause of death "difficult trading conditions".
By then, the bloom was long off the rose. Not even the funniest photo caption can be recycled, yet magazines will insist on trying. There is a law of diminishing returns on the ingredients of men's magazines - franchises such as FHM's "100 great adventures" become less great with each new hundred. We once ran a photo - admittedly revolting, certainly not safe for the tube but a source of immense fascination at the time - of a 13-stone tumour being removed from an eight-stone woman. I have now seen so many freakish images I find even the art of festive biscuit-tins more deserving of attention. Most disappointing of all, celebrity culture has become dull. We didn't care whether actors and actresses were talented or not, but it did matter that they were interesting. Now, thanks to their publicists, glimpses of the stars' special weirdness are all too rare. And some of them are just plain awful. If there is any justice there will be VIP section in hell reserved for the likes of Jessica Simpson and her ridiculous entourage.
The last straw came on a sales trip to Los Angeles last spring, presenting healthy sales figures, desirable demographics and a golden vision to blank-faced advertising executives whose pens sat politely untouched on their notebooks. They trooped back to their cubicles while we drove at walking pace in vile traffic to the next identical appointment. I could see why people end up going berserk with a samurai sword. A magnificent job had become drudgery.
So I got out. I'm also the parent of a two-year-old girl, and while I've never been ashamed of the pictures for which I've been responsible, the "have a good time, all the time" attitude of men's magazines now seems like a message from a different frequency. But essentially my decision is a selfish one: I've taken the ride up, and it was tremendous, thanks, but I think I'll give the ride down the other side a miss.

· Ed Needham now runs an online publishing business called Grand Parade.