Esquire’s Revival

Left for dead in 2009, Esquire magazine in 2012 is "killing it," reports David Carr in the New York Times (1/23/12). Just three years ago, Esquire’s editor-in-chief, David Granger, was firing staff and cutting editorial pages, having been "beaten up by a crop of lad magazines … then hammered by the flight of advertisers and readers to the web." Advertising pages were down 24.3 percent and the magazine made a list of "twelve major brands" that would be gone in a year.

Instead, in 2011 "Esquire was up 13.5 percent in ad pages from the previous year," and Hearst, its publisher, says it "was No. 1 in year-over-year performance." Esquire’s journey back from the brink "is complicated," but started with keeping its "seasoned writers and editors" versus dumping them in favor of "shiny faces with reduced price tags." David Granger also "departed from standard design templates and modernized the front of the magazine to reflect the growing interest in marginalia and small laughs, with goofy asides and in-jokes."

The net effect is that of a magazine that "looks and feels like something a bunch of guys put together for a bunch of other guys, not a glossy widget produced by a big corporation." Esquire also experimented with QR codes on its cover, calling up a video with Robert Downey Jr., for instance. Its iPad app similarly adopted a multimedia approach, and its website attracted more than "two million visitors in December," up from just 300,000 in 2009. David says he thinks "well-turned print products" are too often given short-shrift these days. "There’s nothing wrong with the magazine form that constant diligence won’t fix," he says.