If you read one book this year�� - Editorial

Maybe it's an insular viewpoint, but I can't understand why there aren't more books about the magazine business. There are a handful of good ones--Russell Miller's Bunny: The Real Story of Playboy (1984), Christopher Byron's The Fanciest Dive (1986), and Dick Clurman's To the End of Time (1992)--but the magazine industry is bereft of anything of the caliber of In Cold Blood.

But wait, you say, no one in the magazine industry ever brutally murdered a farm family. True, but according to Newsday reporter Thomas Maier's recently published Newhouse saga, there's plenty of blood, metaphorical and otherwise, on at least one of the great media dynasty's hands.

At least I think that's what Maier is saying in Newhouse: All the Glitter, Power and Glory of America's Richest Media Empire and the Secretive Man Behind It (St. Martin's Press). I encourage FOLIO: readers to dig into Maier's book despite the analysis he brings to bear on Si Newhouse and Conde Nast, not because of it. Because, when push comes to shove and the reader begs for real interpretation and explanation, Maier waffles. Many of his conclusions are of the wink-and-a-nudge variety; you think you know what he's suggesting, but ultimately you're left on your own to draw a conclusion.

An example: In the chapter "My Friend Roy," about Si Newhouse's relationship with his long-time best friend, the deceased anti-Communist/mob/ultimately disbarred lawyer Roy Cohn, Maier writes, "In turn, the Newhouses' reliance on friends like [Roy] Cohn and [newsstand-distribution magnate Henry] Garfinkle underlined some of the more complex business relationships that helped their media empire to expand and flourish."

If I had been his editor, I would have written, "What the hell does that mean?!" in the margin. On the other hand, if I were St. Martin's attorney, I probably would have written "stet" over the editor's query. Because whatever "complex business relationships" is a euphemism for--restraint of trade or payola are a couple of possible implications that spring to mind in the context--it appears to me, as Maier actually chose to express it on the page, unactionable.

Hobbled as it is by the invisible hand of lawyers, Newbouse is a book that pays the highest dividends to those who already have the most invested. In other words, the paradox is this: The more knowledge about Conde Nast and magazines in general you bring to it, the more you will enjoy this exhaustive compendium of gossip, speculation and innuendo. What you already know will give you license to skip the boring or misguided stuff, and allow you to draw your own conclusions based on Maier's four years of investigation into the kind of company Conde Nast is, how it got that way, and what impact it has had on our business as a whole.

Enough about Conde Nast; what's in FOLIO:? This is our special year-end salute to the best and worst in the magazine world during 1994. Our staff works diligently all year to collect this stuff, so in order to give you your money's worth on our second annual FOLIO: Ovation Awards (page 44)--as well as on our special expanded Electronic Magazine supplement (page 63)--we put some of our regular material on a one-issue hiatus. For those of you who turn to the columns first, hang on: They'll be back in our next issue, January 15.

Happy holidays to all our readers from us at FOLIO:!

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