Each (some?) Friday(s?), I’ll post an interview with someone far more knowledgeable than myself on specific marketing and publicity subjects. This week, The Nation’s Publicity Director Ben Wyskida on what publicizing a publication actually entails, preaching to the choir, and the best/worst publicity moments of the presidential campaigns.
Ben Wyskida is the Publicity Director for The Nation. Additionally, he edits the politics and culture blog Pinko Magazine. Before joining The Nation, Ben was a community organizer in addition to working in publicity and communications strategy in the politics/social justice realm. Previous organizations include Design for Social Impact in Philly, the human rights group Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in California; and for political candidates and major progressive organizations.
The Nation is one of the oldest publications in the US, yes? What’s the secret to its success?
Yes! July 4th was our 143rd birthday and we’re the oldest weekly news magazine in the country. The secret to The Nation’s success, I think, is our politics. We were founded by abolitionists, and we have always been real champions for a progressive, populist agenda. People respect that and see the need for it, and support us because they know it’s important to have a publication out there that stands up to injustice. We may not be as fun as, say … an US Weekly, but US Weekly wasn’t born out of a deep desire to break the bonds of slavery and oppression. There will always be an audience drawn to a credible and principled journalism, especially if the writing is strong.
How do you market the publication? It’s an interesting thing, right, because marketing The Nation kind of means changing peoples’ political persuasions? (assuming you’re not only reaching out to people who are of the same persuasion but not yet subscribing?)
Hm. I’ll say this: Our marketing strategy actually is to preach to the choir. When it comes to tactics like direct mail, TV ads, etc. we tend to look for audiences that are pre-disposed to agree with us. Our political strategy, though, is much different. My job here isn’t to “market” or publicize the magazine for the sake of upping subscriptions; my job here is to keep the magazine politically and culturally relevant and to influence the political conversation in the country. So the magazine is invested organizationally (and financially) in catapulting our content outside the bounds of our readers.
I’ll give you a couple examples. During the election, I’ve been booking writers on CNN and NPR. But I also have a whole project to send writers on air in swing states, on community radio stations, on right-leaning and mainstream local radio. Some of the writers hate it … being run around the country like that. But my directive here is to make sure our ideas are reaching new audiences. Take something like syndication, which is the resale of our articles to daily newspapers. We sell to some likely outlets (The Guardian, dailies in progressive towns) but our best new partner has been The Metro, that free paper on the subway. Knowing that millions of people up and down the East Coast are reading William Greider’s latest tirade against the Paulson and the bailout … that just makes my whole day.
Has there been increased pressure to add online content recently? What has been added? What will be added? The “Student Nation” section on the site is really interesting, I think.
Thank you! Please tell some actual students. There is pressure, of course, but it’s an opportunity. The Nation has a lot more readers online than we do in print, 1.2 million/month vs. 200k subscribers, so we have a ton of web-only content, blogs and online features. We are getting increasingly savvy about video; we do some great podcasts including a weekly radio program I produce. So all the pieces are all there. Our problem is presentation. We did a redesign in April that hasn’t gone over as well as we’d hoped, so the next big step for us is to improve the design. What you will see over the next year or so is a very intentional effort to present the content we have more effectively.
I would encourage people to follow our Campaign ’08 blog between now and the Election; that has been strong. Also our Books/Arts section is a gem, and our archive is wild. I was looking up articles the other day from the 1950’s about “the homosexual.” It was totally fun.
The magazine has a substantial arts (and books) section; has this always been part of The Nation, or was it added more recently? How important is the arts and books section in delivering The Nation’s overall message? Conversely, do you think the arts industry and/or artists are doing enough to further political messages in contemporary society?
We’ve had a books & arts section from the very beginning. In our first issue we reviewed Matthew Arnold‘s essays (which were quite a sensation that summer) and sent an art critic to the 40th Annual Expo at the National Institute of Design. He loved it. The interesting thing about our cultural coverage is that it isn’t explicitly political. Sometimes it can be; we did this piece in June about the political impact of a book in Guatemala that was great. Generally though The Nation is a magazine of ideas as much as politics, so our back of the book is pretty broad. We had a great essay reviewing some books about baseball; Arthur Danto is our art critic and he’s a legend. My favorite writer for the whole magazine is our film guy, Stuart Klawans. He won the National Magazine Award for best critic last year and just stunned everyone. He writes about “political movies” and indie films (this review of that 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days thing is even more brutal than the movie, but he also writes about … Live Free or Die Hard. He’s so good.
I’m not as sure we’ve hit our stride covering music of late, but we had a good piece about Benjamin Britten and a fairly provocative essay on Amy Winehouse, as a couple examples.
On your other question, what I would love to see is a really concerted effort from the arts industry to promote a WPA-style arts program in this country. There are plenty of artists doing political work, some very well and some not so well. And “arts activism” in the last couple decades has been relegated to fighting for a few more dollars in the budget or trying to stop program cuts. I think this economic collapse creates a real opportunity to put some robust, proactive ideas about arts funding back on the table, and the arts industry could lead that charge.
Did you see a surge in new subscribers after Bush was elected for a second term? I’m trying to think what would be akin to that in classical music…an unmitigated disaster resulting in box office rushes all across the country; maybe the economy collapsing? Worked for Depression-era theater…
Don’t say the word “surge”! But yes, we have had our best eight years in history and this has been the only era in which The Nation has ever made a profit. Our longtime Publisher/Editor Victor Navasky, who is amazing, once said that “what’s good for The Nation is bad for the nation.” If Obama wins, I may end up dancing on a pole for a living. Seriously though it’s like I said before; in times of crisis people want to know
that someone is speaking up. There’s that Brecht quote (“in the dark times will there be singing …”) and these are dark times. People may not read cover to cover every week but they see our editor on Larry King calling George Bush a war criminal and a liar and that’s something they respond to, because he is.
As for depression-era theater, remember that WPA theater, arts and music didn’t just happen! A lot of people had to fight for that and push the President to make it happen. Even if Obama wins and the economy tanks further, another WPA is by no means a foregone conclusion– we’ll have fight for it.
I assume tensions often run high between various writers; are those internal conflicts something you have to manage to maintain a united public face for the magazine, or do you think the public is interested in those behind-the-scenes aspects almost as much as they in the content itself?
As a publicist, I never mind when our writers bloggers attack each other because it’s the kind of thing Gawker might make fun of, but as a reader, I think it must seem pretty tedious. I don’t think people care that much as long as internal conflicts aren’t muzzling their favorite writers.
That said, if there is a really nasty intellectual debate going on than what you do is get the writers together, book a hall, invite C-Span and air it out. When Christopher Hitchens wrote for us that used to happen a lot, and the answer was never to hide those conflicts like an embarrassment. We write about big ideas, so there will be disagreement. The fun part is getting our audience involved in the debate as well.
Are there political publicists? For example, in addition to their communications team and media strategists or whatever, do politicians have a personal publicist(s), or is that just not how it works? How many publicist-esque figures does each 2008 Presidential candidate have, roughly?
There are too many to count! There are whole firms (Fenton Communications, Design for Social Impact) and media strategists and political media consultants and people who got fired from Ogilvy and want to “occupy the non-profit space.” In 2004, I was involved in a whole conference that existed just to coordinate the constellation of political publicists, public-interest designers and lefty online activists. It’s crazy. On the campaigns, though, most of those jobs are all in-house. Obama and McCain don’t have personal publicists; there is an advisor who is the head of media/communications for the whole campaign, and that person tries to control the message each day. Obama, for instance, has David Plouffe who runs the campaign (i.e. what staff gets sent where, how much money for pizza on election night) and David Axelrod. Axelrod is the message/communications guru. Then under him is a staff of dozens doing communications/publicity work, plus a media staff in each state. Now you have a whole staff doing “new media” too. So right now there are literally hundreds of people “doing media” and communications of some kind related to the campaign. Thousands if you count all the outside groups and non-profits trying to influence the outcome.
What have been the best and worst PR decisions each candidate has made this fall? McCain – best/worst, Obama – best/worst?
Haha.
Obama’s best? This photo op in the helicopter with General Petraeus. It’s so good. Also he has this fantastic under the radar radio ad campaign going, where he buys local ads on local issues and is really sticking it to McCain. In Colorado it’s water rights; In Ohio there are ads about one company that laid off workers. He’s going negative and going local, but because it’s local and it’s radio he doesn’t get any shit for it in the national media. Very smart.
Obama’s worst? This stupid Presidential-looking seal. Also his TV ads have been lackluster; not bad, but nothing special.
McCain’s best? Sarah Palin. PR was the only reason to put her on the ticket, and it worked for awhile.
McCain’s worst? There are so many! That infamous green background speech on the day Obama clinched the nomination. Not just because he looked like cottage cheese, but because the contrast between him and Obama was so stark. Big picture though, the whole campaign lacked a cohesive message. The heart of any good PR strategy is knowing your audience and engaging them with a strong message, and he has just been all over the place. Worse, he’s not comfortable running the negative campaign his PR people have drawn up. It’s lipstick on a pig, to borrow a phrase. I don’t think attacks and fear will fly this time.
Can you give us a sense of what your Election Day eve/day/day-after will be like? Will you be too busy to vote??
Nobody is ever too busy to vote!
Election Day will be a total hustle. All day you follow the story and try to get your expert on CNN, or beg HuffPo to link to your report on voter intimidation. If Sarah Palin is gunning down voters in Cleveland, you need to get the closest Nation writer to Cleveland there in a hurry and make sure CNN knows it. So it can be crazy. Then around midday everything will quiet down and everyone will start obsessively checking exit polls, then not trusting them because the exits all said Kerry won in ’04. I will probably start drinking around 5:30; earlier if the polls look bad.
Finally and most importantly, I see the new James Taylor CD is being advertised on The Nation website! Are James Taylor listeners Nation readers?? Should we advertise classical music/concerts there as well?
If you threw James Taylor into a pit of Nation subscribers they would lick that man clean. There would be nothing left. Maybe a toe. The short answer is YES, and I’m surprised classical music isn’t advertised here more often. Shows might be hard because our readership is scattered (though something like Doctor Atomic is a no-brainer) but albums would do extremely well. Take something like those Daniel Variations or that Mahler No. 7 they’re hyping on iTunes or even that Berlioz that’s out … those would kill on our site. Our audience is older; it’s highly educated and culturally literate; it’s well to-do. It’s basically the same audience as The New Yorker but just more hyper-political.
What is the point of “preaching to the choir” for an entire marketing strategy? The choir is always going to read – or come to your performance. Isn’t part of the point to grab those people that aren’t already a part of your core group, and adjusting your message to speak to them.
Hi. What a nice long piece. I was stopped, though, by Wyskida’s perfunctory mention of the arts section, as well as a throwaway comment:
“Also our Books/Arts section is a gem, and our archive is wild. I was looking up articles the other day from the 1950’s about ‘the homosexual.’ It was totally fun.”
The arts section had been a gem, but that was quite some time ago, when the arts were covered in a driven way, as if they were crucial to political culture. The Nation’s arts writing is still fine, but there’s too little of it. Also, reviewing political books doesn’t really count as “arts” coverage, just because they’re books.
And I’m really curious what was “totally fun” in the archives about “the homosexual” in the ’50s. It was a horrible time to be queer, and the Nation did not exactly put the topic on its front burner until much, much later. What an odd, offhand thing to say.
Are those old archives easily available? I’ll find out.
All best, Jeff Weinstein
Hi Jeff, re: Ben’s “the homosexual” comment, without putting words in his mouth (or words in his fingers, in this case), I’m very sure he meant “totally fun” as a joke. Worth reading to see how things have changed, that is. Thanks for commenting! -AA
Hi — Ben here. Quick responses to the two comments (and thanks for commenting).
For Jeff: We have a poster on the wall of a cover from the 1950’s; the design is fascinating and the article is “The Homosexual: Challenge to Science.” On a slow afternoon I was looking at the cover and decided I was going to go through old Nation’s from the 40’s-50s to see how that issue was covered. I didn’t say there was anything fun about being queer in the 50s. What is fun (and I could have explained this better) is having a job where I’m surrounded by all of this history, and all of these ideas, and to have an afternoon where I could just do that. Even though the subject matter was difficult, sitting in that room looking through all those old magazines WAS fun. I am very into history, so I consider looking through archives of any time — bright or dark — to be “fun.”
For what it’s worth I actually found the coverage to be somewhat sympathetic.
As a last note, we only cover some political books. The bulk of our arts/books section is literature in general.
Anyway on the “fun” part I actually didn’t mean it as a joke. That afternoon, surrounded by magazines from decades was was fun and nobody can make me feel bad about it!
For Susan: Frankly the choir for left/liberal politics right now is massive, and lots of them aren’t reading us. If the whole choir read us we would have millions of readers, and we don’t. Take the audience of … MSNBC. That is our choir, and it’s massive, but we have to spend heavily on ads and book guests just to get even a fraction of them to read us (instead of … The Atlantic … Mother Jones … The New Yorker … Talking Points Memo … etc etc) because the market is now so large and so saturated. So step one of our “marketing” strategy, the strategy we have to employ to stay in business, is to reach as much of that choir as we possibly can. We don’t have the resources to go beyond that.
However the distinction I made is important. When we have an article that is politically important — an investigation that could really lead to reform … a profile that could shake up the election … a books piece that could spark debate in the literary community — than we go out of our way to make sure new and distinct audiences know about it somehow. There are a lot of strategies to do that and lots of them may never lead to new subscriptions. If they do that’s great, but a lot of my job as a “publicist” isn’t expected to lead to new subscriptions. It’s expected to make ripples in certain circles of power and influence large and small. Does that make sense? Not sure I’m explaining it well, but the point I was trying to make is that I commend the magazine, because on TOP of their marketing and advertising, they give me a paycheck to come to work everyday and make our content have some wider influence whether it impacts subscriptions or not.