Chris Gore’s Footage Fetishes: No More Premiere in the U.S.A.

I am a media junkie. In fact, I used to subscribe to more than 50 magazines. Everything from movie mags to technology to video games to porn magazines arrived at my door step and I greeted every arrival with the urge to get my media fix. Premiere magazine was one of the many mags I looked forward to devouring each month and now it’s dead.

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Premiere magazine has shut its doors in the U.S.

This week, Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. announced that due to decreasing print ad revenue, the magazine would no longer be published and would continue as an online-only publication. Hey, join the club.

Ten years ago, I decided to shut down Film Threat magazine myself and I have to admit that it was a painful decision. So, perhaps I know how some of those folks feel at Premiere right about now. When I ceased publishing Film Threat, the idea was that we’d create a web site as a way to continue to write about movies and then return some day to print. After having built an audience online who enjoys what we do, I would never consider returning to the world of print for several reasons:

1) Speed to market. If something important happens on the internet in the next 30 seconds, I can write about it on my site and you’d know about it. In the world of national print magazines, that window of time is about six days. For monthly magazines like Premiere, the time period is almost six weeks and, on long lead feature stories, it can be months. In a world of consumers trained to consume data at a feverish pace, six weeks is a lifetime.
2) Catering to mainstream tastes. One thing I found fascinating about working on magazines were the odd rules that distributors seemed to adhere to. For example, all magazine covers must contain a recognizable face shot in a way as to be looking directly at the reader. The idea being that the subject was making eye contact with the potential buyer. And the movie/celeb had to be recognizable. For me, that was incredibly limiting – especially when my preference was to write about obscure underground films rather than the latest Tom Cruise movie.
3) Limitations of the medium. Print is confined by the number of pages contained within the magazine itself. 100 pages of print means that, well, that’s it. Once those 100 pages are filled, there’s no more room. Stories must be limited in size, so nothing is liable to go over 5,000 words. If you want depth, read a book. Or if you want to explore a topic, go to a library. The beauty of the web is that there is not limit in terms of length or depth. Read into that what you will.
4) Waste. When I first began working in the print magazine business, I remember being shocked at the amount of waste. I was told that a 30% sell-through rate was considered a huge success, meaning, if a publisher printed 100,000 magazines, and only 30,000 sold, that magazine was a hit. And the 70,000 magazines that did not sell were thrown out or returned to be destroyed, or, hopefully, recycled. I remember feeling incredibly guilty about all the trees that were needlessly destroyed in the interests of making that quota of magazines shipped.

When Film Threat closed its doors ten years ago, we shut down along with a slew of what were considered “counter-culture” magazines such as The Nose from San Francisco. This wave of alt-mags going under was not due to decreasing ad pages, but simply the price of paper. (And don’t get me started on hemp. If the U.S. government would simply allow hemp to be more widely used in the process of making magazines and newspapers, this replenishable resource would see print return at an affordable rate.)

The only thing I can say to Premiere and the hard-working staffers is… I feel terrible and... what took you so long?

Gore gone.

Chris_Gore is an author, a filmmaker, the creator of Film Threat, and prefers his media paperless. NOTE: Gore is on a plane to the Film and Music Festival, so expect a full report next week.
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