Families. Moms, dads, kids. Living in the same house. Sharing bathrooms, food, remote controls. Tension, laughs, thrills. What a concept. What a great idea for a magazine!
One after another, the giants of publishing have come to this conclusion, thus making life en famille one of the hottest magazine trends of the past five years.
The two most recent arrivals-Disney’s toddler, the 2 1/2-year-old Family Fun, and Straight Arrow’s newborn, Family Life-also could be considered part of a subgenre, the “men discover they are fathers and are, like, sort of getting into this gig” category.
Families have been around forever, of course. And parenting
magazines aren’t new. The grandparent of them all, Parents, is in its 68th year and is humming along with a circulation of 1.8 million.
But leave it to the annoyingly self-absorbed Baby Boomers, who can’t pass a lifestyle milestone without endlessly analyzing it and-whenever possible-making a buck from it, to turn their housemates big and small into a phenomenon.
If this trend needed to be branded hot and happening, it came this month when Jann S. Wenner, head of Straight Arrow, founding guru of Rolling Stone, US, Men’s Journal-and, by the way, father of three-gave birth to Family Life.
Family Life Publisher Nancy Evans proposed the idea to Wenner in 1991 and immediately got the green light. At that time, Evans, the former president and publisher of Doubleday, had left publishing to spend time with her young daughter. “Jann and I talked about it,” she said. “His instincts are great. We started working on it last October.”
And here, 10 months later, is the new arrival featuring a happy, outdoorsy family on the cover and promising inside features on dinosaurs, Tipper Gore, the left out child, soccer, weekend getaways and back-to-school basics.
The new family magazines say they go beyond the babies and moms featured in Parents and two other late ’80s entries, the New York Times’ 7-year-old Child and Time Inc.’s 6-year-old Parenting.
Said Evans: “Their major emphasis was on babies and toddlers, and they were geared to women. I wanted a magazine that welcomed fathers as well as mothers, a magazine for people ready to graduate from parenting magazines.”
Jake Winebaum, who founded Family Fun in partnership with U.S. News & World Report and then sold it to Disney 18 months ago, said, “This wasn’t going to be a magazine about new parents.”
He said the idea came to him when, as an expectant father, he saw a magazine cover that featured a father and daughter wind surfing. The title was “Fun!” What fun, thought Winebaum. And thus, Family Fun was born.
“The founding premise was about all the great things you can do as a family together, things that pretty much excluded kids under 3,” he said.
But clearly it was the success of Parents, Parenting and Child that spawned the new batch, said Samir Husni, journalism professor at the University of Mississippi at Oxford. By year end, the circulation Parenting will guarantee for advertisers will grow to 925,000 and Child’s to 650,000.
“There was this realization that all these hippies and yuppies have kids of their own and are wondering what do we do with them,” Husni said.
The two newest family magazines are going after the same basic audience: families with median incomes in the $55,000-$57,000 range with kids 3 to 12 years old.
But the established family-oriented magazines like Parents, Parenting and Child aren’t about to hand over the success they have nurtured over the years. They scoff at the suggestion that they are just “baby magazines.” They say they define “family” as beginning prenatal-not just when the toddler is potty trained.
“Yes, we have a baby on the cover 9 out of 12 issues,” said Carol Smith, publisher of Parenting. “But that’s because babies sell on the newsstands.”
The magazine’s content is aimed equally at expectant and new mothers, those with kids 2 to 5 and those with kids 6 to 11.
The competitive edge
Smith admits to having been annoyed when she saw Family Life touted recently on TV’s “Today” show. “There they were like this has never been done before,” she said.
Parents, for one, welcomes the competition. “We are the oldest, the biggest and the best,” said Elizabeth Crow, editorial director of Parents and president of the magazine’s publisher, Gruner+Jahr USA Publishing, a unit of the German communications giant Bertelsmann. “Competition keeps you sharp. The more magazines the better. It builds the field, lets advertisers know something’s happening here.”
Dan Ambrose, publisher of Child, said his magazine has pioneered a method of giving each subscriber four editorial pages each issue that are age-specific for that customer’s children. “That’s our secret weapon,” he said.
Child aims to get these readers before the baby is born and “hold on to them for a long time,” Ambrose said. “I haven’t found anything in Family Fun or Family Life that we aren’t giving them.”
“We already have these readers,” he added.
“They have to take them away from us. That gives us a competitive advantage.”
The new magazines place more emphasis on fathers as active participants in family life. But despite all the huzzahs for the nuturing dads of the ’90s, these new magazines will rise or fall because women buy them.
“It isn’t that men aren’t committed to fatherhood,” Ambrose said, “it’s just that they aren’t advice-seekers like women. There’s a reason that there are 7 multimillion circulation women’s service magazines and you don’t see a single men’s service magazine.”
Winebaum acknowledged that “women are the prime buyers” for Family Fun.
“As enlightened as dads are, they still are going to gravitate toward their Sports Illustrated and business magazines.”
The prime buyers
“Women will be the primary buyers,” said Family Life’s Evans. “But once it’s in the house, men will read it. My husband will read it.”
“We have a dual voice,” said Parenting’s Smith. “What we aren’t is a women’s service magazine. We treat you as an adult whether you wear a dress or not.”
When Evans first saw Family Fun, she said her reaction was: “They get it. It’s great what they’re doing.”
But she added that Family Life aims to be broader. Fun will only be part of its focus. “We will also be about how to be with your children, how to raise them. We’ll deal with some bigger issues. Do you believe in heaven? How do people get to be homeless?”
Husni, also a father of three, said he likes Family Life. “I could not put it down. It has an edge,” he said. “I love that magazine. It’s so hard to judge a magazine by one issue, but that first issue delivered.”
Crow said she thought Family Fun and Family Life are “both handsome magazines” but that they are “less accessible than Parents” in design and graphic presentation.
“We’re designed so the mother can read a snippet in 30 seconds before the phone rings and the baby starts crying.”
Family Life and Family Fun are a “different mindset,” she said. “They’re designed for people who can sit down, put their feet up and read for half an hour. It’s a dad’s view of parenthood.”
