Journal launches glossy mag
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Renita Jablonski: The economy may be floundering, but you wouldn’t know it by the number of luxury magazines around. This week the Wall Street Journal joins that crowded field with a new glossy insert. Rachel Dornhelm reports.
Rachel Dornhelm: The publication’s title is minimalist — WSJ. Its approach to advertising is anything but. The 104 pages are packed with ads from the likes of Hermes and Maserati.
Robert Boynton: These magazines are like a license to print money.
Robert Boynton runs the magazine program at NYU’s school of journalism. He says the quarterly should pull in lots of ad revenue with its media pedigree and coveted subscribers. Samir Husni, who tracks the magazine industry for Mr. Magazine.com, says luxury titles have gone from one-half to 4 percent of all U.S. magazines in the past several years. But these publications rarely have runs over 70,000.
Samir Husni: That’s the beauty of the Wall Street Journal. Because it’s sort of like mixing luxury and mass and putting it in one magazine.
But it won’t be too mass. Of the Journal’s two million subscribers, the magazine is only going to households with an average income of a quarter million dollars.
I’m Rachel Dornhelm for Marketplace.
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