Smart guy, smart magazine

David Carr has the story in The New York Times:

Esquire magazine, a monument to male vitality, seemed about to keel over in 2009. Famous for laying down a much-followed literary track with an article in 1966 by Gay Talese entitled Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, the magazine found itself gasping for breath and fighting for survival. Amid the plague that hit the magazine industry back then, Esquire was worse off than most. Beaten up by a crop of lad magazines like Maxim, then hammered by the flight of advertisers and readers to the internet, Esquire suffered a 24.3 percent loss in advertising pages compared with 2008, which was almost as bad, by the way. A website for investors, 24/7 Wall Street, predicted in 2009 that Esquire would be one of “Twelve Major Brands that Will Disappear” the following year.
Worse still, guys like me who have a general interest in the general interest— politics, music, sports, and yes, good-looking women— were looking elsewhere for guidance on how to be a modern man. I didn’t fit the demo perfectly— my fashion look has been compared to a laundry basket that grew legs— but I still should have been an Esquire reader. Like so many others, however, I began assembling my own content, grabbing sports from Deadspin, political profiles from New York magazine, and music advice from sites like Pitchfork.
For long-form reading, I had a nightstand full of narrative heaves from The New Yorker, and celebrity news had become so ubiquitous that I found myself uninterested in Esquire cover articles about Angelina Jolie or Ben Affleck, no matter how good the writing was.
Though it continued to be a handsome, well-crafted magazine, amid the sparkle of all the saucy new media, Esquire began to look like your father’s Oldsmobile. And we all know what happened to that brand.
David Granger, the editor in chief of the magazine, said that, during those grim days, he fired twenty percent of his staff and slashed editorial pages. “It was ugly around here,” he said, sitting in his 21st floor office in midtown Manhattan, looking out toward the buildings stacked in rows like dominoes. “I don’t think it was ever as dire as it was portrayed, but we had a deep recession in the magazine business, and the recovery has been a fragile one.”
Granger is known in the industry as a relentlessly decent, talented guy. Balding, with a mug that would not be out of place at a VFW hall, he may wear custom-made shirts, but he will spend more time telling you the story behind the amazing woman who made them than how much they cost. He gets excited about stuff— stories, writing, cocktail recipes, shoes— in a way that is hard to resist. But, nice guy or no, he was up against it back then, hard, and changes had to be made. This would be the spot where the modern media executive jettisons tradition and dumps seasoned writers and editors overboard in favor of shiny faces with reduced price tags. He did none of that.
Esquire’s four narrative horsemen— Scott Raab, Tom Junod, Charles Pierce, and John H. Richardson, who have been turning out big, ambitious pieces for years— remain in place, as do the people who edited them, Peter Griffin and Mark Warren. Classy that, to stay with those that brought you even though your magazine is hemorrhaging money. But here’s the weird part, and no one is more surprised than I am.
Esquire is not dying— it is killing it. In 2011, a year when the magazine industry was flat to down a bit, Esquire was up 13.5 percent in ad pages from the previous year. This at a time when GQ was down 6.3 percent in advertising pages and Details was down more than ten percent, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. David Carey, the chief of Hearst Magazines, said that the private company did not discuss profits, but added: “Relative to our other twenty businesses, Esquire was Number One in year-over-year performance. David has done an amazing job.”
Unpacking Esquire’s revival is complicated, but worth thinking through. As the magazine came under pressure from other publications and the internet, Granger 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.
And though Esquire may sell Man at his best, it’s not some kind of unattainable bible of perfection. Somewhere on the continuum between dude and dandy, the magazine has found a sweet spot; Esquire 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.
There is a bawdy sensibility, partly lifted from lad magazines before they lost their heat, but there’s not a lot that’s dumb or rank. Esquire is something a regular guy can open up without feeling like a frat boy or a fop.
Granger said he always felt that well-turned print products got unfairly slagged in the rush to new media. Bullish on the medium and stubborn by nature, he decided that Esquire was not going to get run over. “There’s nothing wrong with the magazine form that constant diligence won’t fix,” he said. (It’s true, Granger said, that newsstand sales, usually a good measure of heat with consumers, were down at the end of the year).
For its 75th anniversary issue in 2008, right about the time magazines were heading off a cliff, he and his designers put together an “E-Ink” cover that flashed, right there on the newsstand. In 2009, they published an issue with a QR tag on the cover that allowed readers to scan the codes into their webcams and bring its subject, Robert Downey Jr., to life on their screens. That may sound a little cheesy and so last year, but those early efforts at innovation left Esquire well positioned for the introduction of the iPad, an opportunity that had many other magazines scrambling.
Working in partnership with ScrollMotion, Granger and his crew came up with an immediate hit for the iPad in late 2010, one that Mashable suggested was “ahead of its peers” because it wasn’t “just another magazine under glass”.
In the January edition of the iPad app, George Clooney opens a door and asks: “What are you doing here?” A standing segment called Funny Joke from a Beautiful Woman featured Ari Graynor, an actress from the television show Fringe, warming up the video camera with a few come-hither looks while romping in panties and a muscle shirt. She tells a joke about squirrels— I can’t really remember the particulars— and then cracks wise as the video segments ends saying, “Nothing like telling a joke in your underwear”. And nothing quite like watching the bit come to life in video, either.
And though all the tech efforts might seem like digital Botox on an aging brand, the audience and advertisers have bought in. According to comScore, Esquire.com had over two million unique visitors in December of 2011, up from over 300,000 as recently as September of 2009. Advertisers like to see a legacy brand show muscle in a new realm.
“The Esquire you see in 2012 is a very different property than it was in 2006,” said Lee Jelenic, the United States advertising manager for cars at Ford, a company that knows a bit about recovery and reinvention. “It is a very competitive category, and Esquire has evolved very quickly as the landscape has changed.”
All the digital geegaws aren’t going to win a lot of National Magazine Awards, which Granger is old-school enough to take as an important metric of success. Then again, when I visited him, there was already a herd of so-called Ellies— the statues given to winners— up front, including three from 2009, when Esquire was supposedly in its death throes. “My staff responded to what was going on— those were really terrible times— with an absolute flowering of creativity,” he said. “Bad as it was, 2009 may have been our best year editorially in a long time.”

Rico says it's one of the few magazines he still reads (though can no longer afford to subscribe, alas).