Interview: Greg Gutfeld, Maxim editor
By David Rowan
The men's magazines face a circulation war, but Maxim's brash new editor is no stranger to fighting dirty Punching his weight for the lads The men's magazines face a circulation war, but Maxim's brash new editor is no stranger to fighting dirty THE war of the lads' mags is turning personal. Circulation figures next month are due to show the newcomer weeklies hammering the monthlies, Bauer is launching a third men's weekly and Jack has thrown in the towel.
Now, Greg Gutfeld, a troublemaking American, has been brought in by Felix Dennis to reinvigorate Maxim - and he's lost no time in making a pile of enemies.
After publicly demanding free suits "like that old, bald guy at GQ" [Dylan Jones], he claims that a furious Jones threatened to beat him up. Gutfeld then published pictures of "origami porn" fashioned from Anthony Noguera's Editor's Letter in Arena. He offered a prize for readers who called a telephone number claiming to have found the " embarrassingly tiny" genitalia hidden in his own pages. He failed to mention that the number was Noguera's.
It is not the first time that Gutfeld, a loud, fast-talking 39-yearold, has riled the media establishment. His current challenge, starting with the September issue, is to boost UK Maxim's circulation, which is expected to fall next month to well below the current 243,000.
The market has been rocked by the launch this year of Emap's Zoo and IPC's Nuts, which between them sell more than 400,000 each week. Their heavily marketed arrival has also hit monthly titles such as Loaded (currently claiming 263,000 sales) and the market leader, FHM (601,000).
Gutfeld believes that the answer lies in confounding readers' expectations. His strategy for Maxim, he says, is to assume that readers have seen everything before.
"They've read all those how-toget-laid pieces," he says. "Most of these magazines have become pretty boring, with few expectations of the reader. I'm trying to aim a little higher and make the magazine a bit more surprising, unpredictable, and funnier. We're starting with the truth, questioning everything and seeing what we can add."
He has reshuffled the magazine to expand music, motoring, sport and gaming, so that it focuses less on "how great it is to be a guy" in favour of suggesting useful things for readers to do, listen to, drive or watch.
Its point of view will invoke "the unspeakable truth": affirming a man's private thoughts, such as, he suggests, the guilty attraction on seeing newspaper photographs of an abducted woman.
Yes, there will be stunts - a previous jape involved sending three crisp- munching dwarves to disrupt a magazine industry conference - but there will also be his brand of dark, occasionally cruel humour.
As the butt of an earlier campaign, Art Cooper, the late editor of US Esquire, wrote to Dennis denouncing Gutfeld as "the boorish personification of Nietzsche's observation that 'there is nothing more frightening than ignorance in action'," and demanding that he be sacked from Stuff. Instead, Gutfeld printed the letter and had Cooper's handwriting analysed to show that he "fears ridicule".
So the results of Gutfeld's strategy are of variable taste. There is a surreally deadpan "joke page" (a blonde calls a plumber ... who proceeds to unblock her sink); there is also the Courtney Love "Death Clock", ticking away to an arbitrary date when she is supposed to die. Beyond the predictable babe galleries, there are also less comfortable features offering prizes for readers' accounts of "Roying", in which "young straight men seduce older straight men with heterosexual lures". This, Gutfeld declares, is his favourite section.
"I used to do that kind of thing when I was bored and at a bar," he says. "I'd aggressively chat up a businessman, until both of us felt uncomfortable. It was a test of how far you could go before you even scared yourself." He explains that he has a girlfriend.
BUT how will such innovat ions help Maxim compete against the weeklies? "They deliver exactly what's expected of them, but I'm not surprised when I read them," he says. "When you walk by the men's section of the newsstand, it's as though you're being yelled at by a bunch of simpleminded drunks, all screaming for attention and all selling the same, desperate wares. Magazines like FHM are dated. But if a magazine has a strong point of view, it won't have to yell." Maxim, he suggests, now has that confidence "to speak softly".
Is that enough to boost circulation, down from a peak of 328,000? "I'm more interested in the readers' mindset than their demographic," he explains. "I assume they're the guys sitting in the middle of the bar watching other guys make fools out of themselves and thinking about things,
with a smarter point of view. I don't want to go chasing readers by becoming obvious. I'd rather they came to us because they heard about us, that Maxim was as funny as hell. So it becomes an obsession."
Since arriving in May, he has found journalism here to be " grittier and tougher" than in New York, and is grateful that editors "take themselves less seriously".
But British magazines are facing a crisis, he suggests. "It's funny, everybody I talk to in the business is really bored doing the same old stuff. It so feels it's ripe for change. I've never met a more talented group of people, but maybe the marketing aspect of magazines took over for a while and they got real safe with their formulas."
Still, Gutfeld knows that it can be a ruthless world for editors who deviate too far from what is expected. Even after lifting Stuff 's circulation from 750,000 to 1.2 million, he was moved aside to be "director of brand development" last year amid concerns over the magazine's editorial eccentricities. He was also previously fired as editor of Men's Health in the US - although he did manage to slip some vengeful mischief into his final editor's letter, which caused the publishers to stop the presses once they belatedly discovered it.
It is a thread of troublemaking that has followed him ever since he was expelled from school in California for lighting a firework in class. A stocky, shortish man, he admits to being bullied at school - but he is uncomfortable being "psychoanalysed" in search of his motivation.
There is, he says, a simpler explanation to his relentless mischiefmaking.
"You can make fun of anybody in any business, but in publishing they think you've got a mean-spirited purpose and are being dark or mean. You should be able to have fun - even at the subtle expense of other people."
Let's see if his British rivals can be persuaded to see the joke.
(Evening Standard, July 21 2004)
The men's magazines face a circulation war, but Maxim's brash new editor is no stranger to fighting dirty Punching his weight for the lads The men's magazines face a circulation war, but Maxim's brash new editor is no stranger to fighting dirty THE war of the lads' mags is turning personal. Circulation figures next month are due to show the newcomer weeklies hammering the monthlies, Bauer is launching a third men's weekly and Jack has thrown in the towel.
Now, Greg Gutfeld, a troublemaking American, has been brought in by Felix Dennis to reinvigorate Maxim - and he's lost no time in making a pile of enemies.
After publicly demanding free suits "like that old, bald guy at GQ" [Dylan Jones], he claims that a furious Jones threatened to beat him up. Gutfeld then published pictures of "origami porn" fashioned from Anthony Noguera's Editor's Letter in Arena. He offered a prize for readers who called a telephone number claiming to have found the " embarrassingly tiny" genitalia hidden in his own pages. He failed to mention that the number was Noguera's.
It is not the first time that Gutfeld, a loud, fast-talking 39-yearold, has riled the media establishment. His current challenge, starting with the September issue, is to boost UK Maxim's circulation, which is expected to fall next month to well below the current 243,000.
The market has been rocked by the launch this year of Emap's Zoo and IPC's Nuts, which between them sell more than 400,000 each week. Their heavily marketed arrival has also hit monthly titles such as Loaded (currently claiming 263,000 sales) and the market leader, FHM (601,000).
Gutfeld believes that the answer lies in confounding readers' expectations. His strategy for Maxim, he says, is to assume that readers have seen everything before.
"They've read all those how-toget-laid pieces," he says. "Most of these magazines have become pretty boring, with few expectations of the reader. I'm trying to aim a little higher and make the magazine a bit more surprising, unpredictable, and funnier. We're starting with the truth, questioning everything and seeing what we can add."
He has reshuffled the magazine to expand music, motoring, sport and gaming, so that it focuses less on "how great it is to be a guy" in favour of suggesting useful things for readers to do, listen to, drive or watch.
Its point of view will invoke "the unspeakable truth": affirming a man's private thoughts, such as, he suggests, the guilty attraction on seeing newspaper photographs of an abducted woman.
Yes, there will be stunts - a previous jape involved sending three crisp- munching dwarves to disrupt a magazine industry conference - but there will also be his brand of dark, occasionally cruel humour.
As the butt of an earlier campaign, Art Cooper, the late editor of US Esquire, wrote to Dennis denouncing Gutfeld as "the boorish personification of Nietzsche's observation that 'there is nothing more frightening than ignorance in action'," and demanding that he be sacked from Stuff. Instead, Gutfeld printed the letter and had Cooper's handwriting analysed to show that he "fears ridicule".
So the results of Gutfeld's strategy are of variable taste. There is a surreally deadpan "joke page" (a blonde calls a plumber ... who proceeds to unblock her sink); there is also the Courtney Love "Death Clock", ticking away to an arbitrary date when she is supposed to die. Beyond the predictable babe galleries, there are also less comfortable features offering prizes for readers' accounts of "Roying", in which "young straight men seduce older straight men with heterosexual lures". This, Gutfeld declares, is his favourite section.
"I used to do that kind of thing when I was bored and at a bar," he says. "I'd aggressively chat up a businessman, until both of us felt uncomfortable. It was a test of how far you could go before you even scared yourself." He explains that he has a girlfriend.
BUT how will such innovat ions help Maxim compete against the weeklies? "They deliver exactly what's expected of them, but I'm not surprised when I read them," he says. "When you walk by the men's section of the newsstand, it's as though you're being yelled at by a bunch of simpleminded drunks, all screaming for attention and all selling the same, desperate wares. Magazines like FHM are dated. But if a magazine has a strong point of view, it won't have to yell." Maxim, he suggests, now has that confidence "to speak softly".
Is that enough to boost circulation, down from a peak of 328,000? "I'm more interested in the readers' mindset than their demographic," he explains. "I assume they're the guys sitting in the middle of the bar watching other guys make fools out of themselves and thinking about things,
with a smarter point of view. I don't want to go chasing readers by becoming obvious. I'd rather they came to us because they heard about us, that Maxim was as funny as hell. So it becomes an obsession."
Since arriving in May, he has found journalism here to be " grittier and tougher" than in New York, and is grateful that editors "take themselves less seriously".
But British magazines are facing a crisis, he suggests. "It's funny, everybody I talk to in the business is really bored doing the same old stuff. It so feels it's ripe for change. I've never met a more talented group of people, but maybe the marketing aspect of magazines took over for a while and they got real safe with their formulas."
Still, Gutfeld knows that it can be a ruthless world for editors who deviate too far from what is expected. Even after lifting Stuff 's circulation from 750,000 to 1.2 million, he was moved aside to be "director of brand development" last year amid concerns over the magazine's editorial eccentricities. He was also previously fired as editor of Men's Health in the US - although he did manage to slip some vengeful mischief into his final editor's letter, which caused the publishers to stop the presses once they belatedly discovered it.
It is a thread of troublemaking that has followed him ever since he was expelled from school in California for lighting a firework in class. A stocky, shortish man, he admits to being bullied at school - but he is uncomfortable being "psychoanalysed" in search of his motivation.
There is, he says, a simpler explanation to his relentless mischiefmaking.
"You can make fun of anybody in any business, but in publishing they think you've got a mean-spirited purpose and are being dark or mean. You should be able to have fun - even at the subtle expense of other people."
Let's see if his British rivals can be persuaded to see the joke.
(Evening Standard, July 21 2004)
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