ASME Plays Sheriff as Magazines Get Creative

These are busy times for the conscience of the magazine industry. As publishers face unprecedented pressures to their bottom lines, magazines are getting creative in pursuit of marketing dollars. For the American Society of Magazine Editors, that's meant a steady drip of judgment calls as to which magazines have violated the group's stricture against allowing advertising onto the cover, as well as criticism from those who think ASME is all bark and no bite -- and not all that much bark, either.

"[T]here are people who say ASME is out of touch, ASME just doesn't get it," acknowledges Sid Holt in a posting on ASME's website explaining the board's thinking in its recent rulings on Esquire, ESPN The Magazine and other titles.

"Admittedly, the system is a little loose -- there is no ASME police force, more like a couple of Altoids-chewing constables -- so some folks get pulled over for a stern lecture about the dangers of breaking the rules while other folks seem to whiz by. Fortunately, most editors and publishers, even ad execs, know the rules and respect them."

ASME returned "guilty" verdicts on ESPN ("The flap was the same as printing an ad on the cover....The copy was also misleading"), Scholastic Parent & Child ("[D]estroying what makes magazines valuable and unique is not the road to recovery") and Entertainment Weekly ("[T]he notch on EW served no apparent or conceivable editorial purpose"). It acquitted Ladies' Home Journal ("[T]here was no evidence to show that the subject appeared on the cover or inside the book in return for advertising"), Esquire ("The lingering concern among ASME members is, will competition force magazines to accommodate especially invasive ad executions on their covers") and Rolling Stone ("[T]he cover had not been expressly created to direct readers to an ad").

More Holt:

You can look at 250 years of consumer-magazine covers and not find a single ad. Why? Not because ASME has been stopping anybody, but because everyone knows that the editorial and circulation objectives the cover serves offset the temporary advantage of creating another ad position.