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Smith Journal

Chris Flynn September 04

The world of magazines is fraught with danger—they’re expensive to produce and, unless it’s something particularly collectible, fairly disposable. In addition, they’re perfect for ‘flicking through’ in stores, rather than purchasing. In many ways even more dependent on advertising revenue than newspapers, it is small wonder magazine sales have been steadily dropping in recent years as purse strings are tightened and ten to twenty dollar luxury glossies are sacrificed.

Bucking the trend with alarum has been frankie magazine, whose circulation has been steadily heading in the opposite direction to everyone else’s (up 31.6% in 2009, 43.2% in 2010, giving them the highest growth of any Australian mag and handing a beatdown to behemoths like Harper’s Bazaar in the process.)

Building on this success, frankie press (itself an imprint of Morrison Media, a company whose titles mostly comprise surf, skateboard and trail bike mags) launched Smith Journal at the end of 2011, proclaimed by the yellow sticker on the cover of issue one as ‘a new magazine for men, and for ladies who like reading about men’. Now in its third issue and with a fourth under way, the large format quarterly has quickly proven to be popular, no easy task in a saturated market. A quick look at the diverse, almost nutty content is revealing – a considerable amount of risks are taken, but the sales payoff speaks volumes about how there is a huge market of male readers whose needs are not being met by aspirational mags filled with expensive watches and handsome actors in suits. Nor are they interested in pneumatic bikini babes and tales of drunken debauchery.

Smith

The latest issue opens with a sobering three-page article about a 1969 round the world boat race, bereft of glamour and punctuated by sadness. David Suzuki then talks about ten things he believes in. This is followed by an interview with Todd McLellan, who takes apart old radios and photographs their insides. A loo paper entrepreneur is up next, then a piece on cuckoo clocks, one on a guy who designs parking meters, an analysis of people’s hands, photos of bird’s nests and how to make a homemade tattoo kit. You get the picture. It’s eclectic and down to earth, remarkably free of pretension. Most tellingly, the content is neither aspirational or sensationalist. It’s not trying to sell or promote a lifestyle. The entire magazine is made up of stories that have fascinated its contributors and the editor (the prolific, hyper-intelligent Nadia Saccardo, who writes at least half a dozen diverse articles in each issue) have enough faith in what they’re trying to achieve to not worry about whether such content is ‘commercial’ enough. I found myself coming to the end of the first issue thinking, ‘that was a little weird’ before I realized that it’s not weird at all. It’s all the other magazines that are banal and hopeless and predictable and I’ve just got so used to ‘flicking through’ rubbish that I’ve almost lost the facility to appreciate decent, honest content. Smith Journal is in fact kind of astonishing, in that the editors have put together a magazine seemingly without worrying if anyone will like it or not. That it is already doing so well is vindication of such an attitude, testament to the editorial vision and satisfying for this man who has not found a magazine he actually enjoys reading – god forbid – in years.

Visit the Smith Journal site here.


 

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