MONOCLE AN ECCENTRIC GLOBAL MAGAZINE TO KEEP AN EYE OUT FOR
December 26th 2007 11:00
[I]BusinessWeek,[/I] on December 13, hailed Monocle as the possible future of magazines, given that it’s got a global thrust.
BusinessWeek said, “Martha Stewart sells order and comfort. Hugh Hefner sells hedonism. Tyler Brule sells the ideal of a life in which every aspect is excruciatingly curated and significant. This worldview formed the basis for Wallpaper*, the iconic design magazine he founded in 1996 and sold to Time Inc.shortly thereafter.”
Brule left Wallpaper in 2002 and now lives in London, where earlier this year he launched the monthly Monocle.
The magazine also assumes that its readers are inveterate travelers, eager to explore the more remote destinations in the world. Recent destinations that have featured in Monocle include the breakaway Georgian republic Abkhazia and the Swedish-speaking Finnish archipelago, Aland.
The Guardian wrote that Monocle appears to target "departure-lounge divas."
Brule himself is somewhat of a legendary departure-lounge diva who travels 250 days of the year and, according to BusinessWeek, “at Time Inc his expense reports were notorious for including helicopter travel.”
Monocle, with its print run of 150,000, is a test case for a different publishing model, one that doesn’t target readers in a specific country but aims at a global readership.
BuisnessWeek said, “In a manner almost wholly lost at American magazines, it cherishes the primacy of a print publication as physical object. Each issue contains startling photography, multiple kinds of paper stock, and, somewhat discordantly, concludes with a manga comic. Monocle is either prescient, or steering sharply toward an audience that doesn't exist.
Brule says he in catering for a niche market of people who want unusual international material and this has been helped by shrinking international coverage in outlets ranging from the Los Angeles Times to the BBC.
BuisnessWeek said, “This gap allows idiosyncratic and smaller media players to plunge in, particularly in online realms where distribution costs are minimal. Among the new breed of internationally minded web players is monocle.com, which smartly sidesteps putting its magazine articles online in favor of a video-heavy strategy.”
Monocle magazine makes a strong distinction between its print version and its online presence, the latter being more like TV than web.
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