The 2009 Publishing Innovator of the Year: Esquire

David Granger is impatient. But you would never know it by looking at him. Standing in front of the plate glass windows in his office, suited to perfection in black Armani, the editor-in-chief of the famed Esquire magazine is the very picture of calm, unassuming confidence and contentedness. But make no mistake, the impatience is there, just below the surface. Evidence of it can be seen in Esquire’s pages, especially on its covers. As Granger puts it, it is a “general impatience with the way things are,” and it drives him to strive for things that have never been done before. In fall 2008, Esquire made headlines worldwide when its 75th anniversary issue hit newsstands. The magazine’s cover didn’t feature Esquire’s usual striking, confident or enigmatic man. Instead, it featured a simple headline, “The 21st Century Begins Now.” But it was flashing: “The 21st Century” appearing first, “Begins” next, and the poignant “Now” the last word to appear. The cover, as well as the Ford Flex advertisement that appeared inside the front cover, used electronic ink, or e-ink, a technology brought to the masses by the Sony Reader, the Amazon Kindle and other electronic readers. While the two-years-in-the-making e-ink endeavor was a “bold adventure” and a “massive pain in the ass that taxed the capacities of almost everyone at the magazine and the printing plants,” to quote Granger, and certainly met its naysayers who criticized the cover’s lack of extravagance, or “underutilized circuitry,” it was also the epitome of Granger’s impatience and desire to push print to the farthest reaches possible. It was a definite first in the magazine industry. It was innovation that required painstaking risks, and it was what inspired Publishing Executive to name Esquire the 2009 Publishing Innovator of the Year, honoring the magazine at an awards dinner on Monday, March 23, during the Publishing Business Conference & Expo. The E-volution of an IdeaAbout three years ago, Granger presented his staff with a challenge: “To change the way they think,” says Granger, to find “new ways to do print.” One year later, Granger and his staff decided that Esquire’s 75th anniversary issue should not do what most magazines do to recognize their anniversaries, again a reflection of Granger’s impatience with the status quo. It should not look back, but instead, it should look forward at the emergence of the 21st century. Deputy Editor Peter Griffin recalled a company called E Ink Corp.—a supplier of electronic-paper display technologies, which the staff had encountered some eight years ago while planning Esquire’s “Genius” issue. “Peter said, ‘Remember E Ink? We should use it; it’s 21st-century technology,’” explains Granger. The staff had 18 months to plan the e-ink cover, which “was not enough,” Granger says, his I-can-laugh-about-it-now tone unmistakable to those in publishing who have finished a behemoth project that seemed to continually present new and bigger obstacles to completion. “It was incredibly stressful … and there were definitely moments when we were sure it was going to fail,” he says. The actual implementation of the project began in Shanghai, China, where the electronics, display screens and batteries were assembled. From there, the assembled components were flown to Dallas and transported by climate-controlled (refrigerated) trucks—heat is detrimental to the battery life—to Negras, Mexico, where the cover was hand-assembled. Next, the covers were loaded back onto refrigerated trucks for their trip to the RR Donnelley plant in Glasgow, Ky., where they were bound to the rest of the issue. Structural Graphics, which specializes in 3-D, interactive print products, helped coordinate the logistics throughout the project and managed the hand-assembly in Mexico. While the company is no stranger to complex production projects, CEO Mike Maguire says, “This project was unlike anything we had ever done. … We were incorporating a technology in a way that had never been attempted, so we had to think through every possible contingency to ensure the cover was a complete success—which, thankfully, it was.” One-hundred thousand copies of the magazine featuring the e-ink cover were produced for newsstand distribution. Subscribers didn’t receive the e-ink cover, however—a decision made strictly “to keep [the project] somewhere within the realm of possibility,” says Granger. Producing more than 700,000 copies for Esquire’s circulation base would have escalated the costs out of control. We Need What?!The biggest headache of the project? “I guess just the spiraling cost … and unanticipated difficulty of it,” says Granger. “We had one estimate from our manufacturing department … and that’s what we figured into all our pricing for potential advertisers and for ourselves. They just couldn’t anticipate … [things like needing] refrigerated trucks.” Another surprise: finding out that Esquire needed to produce 20 percent “extra” units, in anticipation of possible spoilage. Throw in a flood that destroyed 250,000 batteries and last-minute regulation changes by the Chinese government, and it makes you wonder: Was it worth it? Granger is sure of his answer. “Yeah, it was worth it. How often do you get to feel intense emotion about a piece of editorial? … And, you know, then I got such amazing responses from everybody who’d been involved in it … even the guys who worked on the line at Donnelley … called up our head of manufacturing and talked about how excited they were about this, that they felt like they were participating in the beginning of the future,” he says. Plus, he adds, “It did position Esquire as one of the magazines that wants to take the lead in trying to do things that haven’t been done before. And that was one of my goals—to say that we’re truly a 21st-century magazine.” To the naysayers who criticized Esquire’s use of the e-ink technology, Granger says, “I was kind of amused when people said that it wasn’t all that impressive. It moves and changes, and it’s on the cover of a magazine. I was amazed that we got to do it. Nobody who critiqued it could know how hard it was or what our limitations were.” “Our Biggest October Issue Ever”So, the big question on most publishing executives’ minds: How much did this grandiose project actually cost? “We could start with the word ‘expensive,’” says Kevin O’Malley, Esquire’s vice president and publisher, and end at “several million dollars.” The cost was “essentially paid for by Ford,” explains O’Malley. “The only reason we can’t give you a precise dollar figure is that it’s not really our prerogative … it’s really the advertiser’s prerogative.” Was Ford happy? “Yes, thank God,” he says. While return on Ford’s investment was likely impossible to track, the impact on Esquire was seen immediately in an ad revenue boost and an almost unheard of 90-percent newsstand sell-through (despite a $2 increase in that issue’s retail price). “This was our biggest October issue ever, both in ad revenue and ad pages, and one of the highest ever,” says O’Malley. (He believes they could have sold more had it been feasible to produce more.) But he sees e-ink as only partially responsible. The other major contributor, he says, was the “very deliberate strategy … to be … the first American magazine to not only publish the first digital version of a magazine cover, but the other first that we think we accomplished is that we’re the first American magazine to celebrate an anniversary with no real nod to or focus on the past.” O’Malley suggests that the typical “self-congratulatory pat on the back” is irrelevant. “In the new consumer universe, who cares?” he says. “The hardest thing to achieve today is relevancy—there’s just too much information out there from every conceivable source and place.” Granger believes that Esquire’s anniversary issue, along with other recent examples—the sold-out New York Times edition published the day Barack Obama was elected president and Time magazine’s record-breaking newsstand sales with its “Person of the Year” cover featuring Obama—prove that: “People will pay for stuff they want.” More Than Just a GimmickWhether it was the e-ink or relevant content, or both, Esquire did something right. In fact, the magazine is bucking industry trends of decline well beyond its anniversary issue. In 2008, “We were up,” says O’Malley. And so far this year, one of the worst in publishing history for many, Esquire is still up, he says. Capell’s Circulation Reports named Esquire as one of 12 magazines to achieve the “triple play,” according to O’Malley, meaning “you not only increase your overall newsstand [sales] and [cover] price … we raised our overall sell-through and efficiency.” Perhaps the success is fueling the fire of Granger’s impatience and his staff’s creativity as they push the bounds of print. In the months following its e-ink cover, Esquire made headlines again, this time for its February cover, featuring President Obama, with a lift-up “window” that opened to reveal quotes from inside the issue, and the inside window flap featuring an advertisement for the Discovery Channel’s “One Way Out” series. Esquire’s May issue features its “mix-and-match” cover, where readers can pull back different cover segments to mix George Clooney’s eyes with President Obama’s nose and Justin Timberlake’s mouth, for example. E-ink: Esquire’s Future?Granger and his staff are not likely to undertake another e-ink cover anytime soon. “It would be impractical to try to do something like this on a more regular basis,” Granger says. So one can’t help but ask: Is this really a glimpse at the future of publishing? And if so, what will the next iteration look like? O’Malley, for one, doesn’t see e-ink as the future of magazines … but certainly as a part of it. “I see the future of magazines based on a simple premise: We need to move to a platform-agnostic perspective,” he says, noting that print will be one of many formats in which Esquire content is published. “We are definitely talking internally about how we want to create our iPhone app. Will it be the entire issue? Of course not. … But there can be elements from an issue that can be both timely and there can be evergreen elements within that issue that can serve that [format].” He points to m.esquire.com, Esquire’s current mobile platform, as an example. “One of the things we’ve done is taken an editorial franchise that we do annually called ‘Best Bars in America,’ and we did what this platform does brilliantly, which is archive information and make it easily accessible,” he says. O’Malley believes that in four years, “We’re going to be doing stuff on a Kindle. No doubt. We’re going to wait until it’s color, and until we can do ad spreads, but that’s going to be here in four years.” It’s not too surprising that he sees e-readers as important to the industry’s future, considering Esquire parent company Hearst recently announced plans to launch its own e-reader—larger than the Kindle and Reader, and formatted specifically for magazines and newspapers. Still, he says, “Everybody in this [Hearst] building, myself included, believes that magazines and print are going to be around for a long time.”

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The 2009 Publishing Innovator of the Year: Esquire

Noelle Skodzinski

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Noelle Skodzinski