Spring Break
The Daily OrangeQ & A with the editor of Maxim
By Payal Teli
Posted: 3/27/02, 1:57 AM EST Section: Feature
Keith Blanchard, the editor in chief of Maxim magazine, crawled from his cubicle to field a handful of questions about the deceptive world of publishing, weird Belgian ales and his intense love of gerbils.
How do you account for the magazine's wild success?
We launched at perhaps the darkest hour of men's magazines, when the three or four existing titles were unthinkably dusty, boring and irrelevant, with beautiful, provocative photos of ... Bret Favre and Keanu Reeves. The conventional wisdom was that men wouldn't read a general interest magazine, that we were only interested in topical titles: Rolling Stone for music, Road & Track for cars, etc. And then we presented this package of sexy girls, sports, irreverent humor, fascinating gadgets, and the rest of it; they flew off the rack as fast as we could restack them. It's been like printing money. So it turned out it was a supply problem, not a demand problem.
What do you have to say about the fact that some women feel it's a degrading publication?
We thought we'd get that argument but we never really did. We get so much positive mail from female readers that we started a column on the letters page, "Letters from Ladies." Because for all the titillation, if you actually read the mag's sex and relationship tips you find that we're so pro-relationship it's almost unseemly. We're out to make every aspect of our readers' lives better and easier, and relationships are no exception. If there are women who object, I'd suggest they're a little too focused on the visuals. Guys are visual creatures, and the competition at the newsstand is brutal.
How do you think of topics every month?
It's actually a lot easier than you think; in fact, we have a huge backlog of ideas we'll probably never get to. Maxim's really a kind of lens for looking at the world, and you can turn it toward practically anything you like. We try to get a good mix of stories: good reads, service pieces, sex and relationship, pure humor. We just write about whatever we're interested in.
How do you account for the magazine's wild success?
We launched at perhaps the darkest hour of men's magazines, when the three or four existing titles were unthinkably dusty, boring and irrelevant, with beautiful, provocative photos of ... Bret Favre and Keanu Reeves. The conventional wisdom was that men wouldn't read a general interest magazine, that we were only interested in topical titles: Rolling Stone for music, Road & Track for cars, etc. And then we presented this package of sexy girls, sports, irreverent humor, fascinating gadgets, and the rest of it; they flew off the rack as fast as we could restack them. It's been like printing money. So it turned out it was a supply problem, not a demand problem.
What do you have to say about the fact that some women feel it's a degrading publication?
We thought we'd get that argument but we never really did. We get so much positive mail from female readers that we started a column on the letters page, "Letters from Ladies." Because for all the titillation, if you actually read the mag's sex and relationship tips you find that we're so pro-relationship it's almost unseemly. We're out to make every aspect of our readers' lives better and easier, and relationships are no exception. If there are women who object, I'd suggest they're a little too focused on the visuals. Guys are visual creatures, and the competition at the newsstand is brutal.
How do you think of topics every month?
It's actually a lot easier than you think; in fact, we have a huge backlog of ideas we'll probably never get to. Maxim's really a kind of lens for looking at the world, and you can turn it toward practically anything you like. We try to get a good mix of stories: good reads, service pieces, sex and relationship, pure humor. We just write about whatever we're interested in.
