AS BRILL'S PAUSES, QUESTIONS LINGER

BY MARGARET SULLIVAN

Back in 1998, the idea was to point a finger at the finger-pointers. "This June, The Media's Free Ride Comes to a Screeching Halt," boasted flashy ads in New York's train stations and on the sides of buses. A new magazine, Brill's Content, was coming, founded by the fiery journalist-entrepreneur, Steven Brill. Finally, the sales pitch promised, someone would expose the foibles of that smug class of pond scum even lower than lawyers: the media. And that wasn't all that was promised. The magazine also would reach a circulation of 500,000 in five years and attract the cream of high-end advertising.

Magazines about journalism have not tended to be raving commercial triumphs. The one in your hands, as well as its Washington-based competitor, the American Journalism Review, have been able to make it via a combination of income, outside support, and tight cost controls, aiming at a relatively modest audience made up mostly of journalists. Brill's Content tried a more expansive model, aimed at the broader public. But things haven't turned out exactly as planned.

In early April, three years after the launch, an announcement came that Brill's Content would no longer publish. The magazine had ratcheted up its circulation as high as 400,000 and attracted some advertising but never, by Brill's own admission, enough to break even. Now the plan was to merge Brill's Content with Inside magazine (the print cousin of the media-oriented Web site Inside.com, both of which were recently purchased by Brill in a complex deal involving Primedia Inc. and Powerful Media, co-founded by Kurt Andersen and Michael Hirschorn). A new monthly, Inside Content, would begin publishing, though its mission seemed aimed more at the media industry than the general public.

But not so fast. In early May, just weeks after the first announcement, came a second: Brill's Content would retain its name and its original mission, but not its publishing frequency. The magazine would appear only four times a year, down from ten. As he detailed the change of plans, Brill gave it a positive spin. Still, there were layoffs and lots of turmoil. And publishers do not generally take wildly successful monthlies and go quarterly.

So after three years of publication and now this change of plans, what better time to take stock of this journalism experiment? Some questions and answers.

Has the magazine fulfilled its vaunted mission?

For three years, Brill's Content made good on at least some of its promises. With such features as the magazine's fifty-person Influence List, its ratings of the best and worst White House reporters, its Pundit Scorecard, Brill's Content called 'em as it saw 'em. The evaluations got plenty of media noses out of joint, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

And Brill's ran some solid, ground-breaking stories. There was, of course, that famous debut issue, which broke a huge story, written by founder Brill himself, about Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's press leaks. In November 1999, Brill's took a particularly hard look at The New York Times's handling of the Wen Ho Lee spy case. On a smaller scale, consider the trenchant "Hatchet Meter" in February's issue, which measured the extent that candidates were victims of the press, on such issues as Bush's intelligence or Gore's tendency to exaggerate. Its June issue cover line asked, under a big head shot of Rupert Murdoch, "Is this the face of world domination?"

Alex S. Jones, director of Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, praises the "brilliant idea" of making Bill Kovach -- widely regarded as Mr. Journalistic Integrity -- Brill's original ombudsman. All told, Jones says, "I think the magazine has set the bar higher for media ethics."

Why did something that sounded so thrilling read, at least at first, like homework?

With endless stories, inelegant layout, and an earnest mission statement, Brill's was, as one columnist quipped, the only magazine that could take a profile of the snarky New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and make it read like something from the New England Journal of Medicine. Despite flashes of brilliance, all too often the tone was self-righteous. "Reading it was like being pulled into a room where somebody with no sense of the joy of this world shouted at you and lectured you endlessly," says Daniel Okrent, former editor at large of Time magazine. Okrent, who admires Steven Brill's career, nevertheless found the magazine "a crushing disappointment," more "about gotcha" than "thoughtful journalism." He sees Brill as a modern-day Savonarola, the fifteenth century Italian religious reformer who ranted in the public square against the pleasure-loving sinners all around. (Interestingly, when I asked Brill to name the best Brill's Content stories over the years, he mentioned an early effort that took Time to task and resulted, he noted with satisfaction, in a Time correction.)

As the months went on, in an effort to temper the stridency, the magazine added a front-of-the-book feature called Stuff We Like -- mini-reviews that celebrated everything from provocative books to innovative Web sites to the best newspaper columnists. It was lively, fun, and readable -- not the three adjectives that came to mind for the magazine as a whole. "Getting the pitch just right," Brill concedes, "is a high art."

 

Can a journalist be a mogul, too?

For someone who seemed obsessed with the foibles of the media, Brill was hardly immune himself. Quick to point out a conflict of interest elsewhere, his own situation seemed somehow . . . less urgent. Consider, for example, his dual role as journalist and entrepreneur. It always troubled some observers but their complaints reached a crescendo last year when Brill's new Internet venture, Contentville.com, created financial relationships with several of the media companies, including major TV networks, that Brill's Content was supposed to be scrutinizing.

Around that time, Brill gave up the title of the magazine's editor in chief, retaining the title of chairman, but he says he did that only because he'd become much busier. He says he still functions as the magazine's final editor -- "I read everything that goes in, and I have the final say on every word" -- and he rejects the notion that he switched titles to counter charges of conflict.

"There is a conflict of interest," he agrees. "That's far from uncommon. It's a question of how you handle it." How he's handled it is this: "I've ignored who the partners are in Contentville, just as I ignore who the advertisers are in the magazine."

Even Okrent, despite his criticisms, gives credit, too: Brill, he says, is "not afraid of anybody. He didn't sell out. He did a lot that was right. He's had a remarkable career." (Before Brill's Content, Brill founded The American Lawyer and then Court TV). "I give him credit for what he's built over the years," says Alex Jones. "But, in this magazine, he set himself up as Caeser's wife. Well, he ain't Caeser's wife."

 

Does the public really care enough about the media to buy a magazine about it?

"Personally, I gobble it up every month," said Cyndi Stivers, president of the American Society of Magazine Editors and the editor-in-chief of Time Out New York. But many media watchers wonder if there are enough of us hard-core fourth-estaters to ultimately make it work. The early research for Brill's Content showed that the general public is interested in seeing the media held accountable, but that doesn't necessarily translate into wanting to devote precious free time to reading about it.

The magazine posted a circulation average of 325,064 for the last six months of 2000, just squeaking past its paid rate base of 325,000. Brill predicts that those numbers will rise in the next six-month audit. (On a smaller playing field, cjr's average for the same period was 21,116).

But magazines can go to considerable lengths to boost their circulation. Brill's Content's subscription price, for example, is heavily discounted at 56 percent off the cover price. (By comparison, Psychology Today offers a one-year subscription discount of 39 percent and Kiplinger's Personal Finance offers 32 percent. Other magazines, The New Yorker and Condé Nast Traveler, for example, discount even more deeply than Brill's Content.)

On the advertising side, certainly, the magazine never attracted the amount of high-end buys that Brill sought. By all accounts, Brill's Content always lost money and there was little prospect of breaking even as a monthly.

In an interview, Brill said he expects that, as a quarterly, with a smaller staff, the magazine will break even almost immediately. He expects the September debut issue to be hefty, between 200 and 400 pages. Some of the lost immediacy will be countered by greater depth and more emphasis on graphic presentation. And, he said, the Inside.com Web site will start to feature some of the close-to-the-news stories, produced by Brill's Content writers, that would be long out of date in a magazine that publishes every three months.

In the end, the future viability of Brill's Content, the quarterly, returns to a familiar question: Can a media-accountability magazine aim for a general audience (and the advertising support that follows) and survive? Steve Brill, never one to admit doubt, is convinced of the answer: "We've definitely confirmed that there is plenty of interest out there."