No Angst or Shame in 'WSJ' Magazine Debut

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The Wall Street Journal's new luxury lifestyle magazine, WSJ*, had its official coming out this morning amid fighting words for two big competitors and a gratuitous shot at celebrity editor Tina Brown.

"I can think of a newspaper in New York that regards its glossy magazine as something of a house of ill repute," said Robert Thomson, the Journal's managing editor, in a clear reference to the The New York Times, whose lucrative T franchise is something of an embarrassment to many on the news side.

The Journal, said Thomson, has a different mindset -- not just about its glossy supplement, but about the whole state of the print economy. "The eschatological angst that characterizes much of the newspaper industry does not exist at Dow Jones," he said. "We don't have the fetid air of failure."

The magazine will be make its first appearance in the Journal this Saturday, being distributed to 800,000 subscribers in 17 top markets in the U.S., and to another 160,000 readers of the paper's Asian and European editions. It will have a quarterly frequency to start, accelerating to monthly next year. Of the 51 advertisers in the launch issue, 19 are new to the Journal.

WSJ's editor in chief is Tina Gaudoin, who was previously the editor of Luxx, a high-end supplement to the Times of London. Thomson introduced her as "the world's most talented, best magazine editor of British origin called 'Tina'." (Apparently he's not holding high hopes for The Daily Beast.) Its creative director, Tomaso Capuano, last worked on the Financial Times supplement How to Spend It, but Thomson said his work for the Journal is superior. "How to Spend It is like a BMW 3-series, and this is a BMW 7-series," he said.

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*Technically, the magazine is actually called WSJ., but I'm leading the movement to drop the annoying-to-type period from the name, just as I leave the exclamation point off Yahoo's name. Media reporters of the world, you have nothing to lose but an extra keystroke!

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