Adweek editor: Michael Wolff ‘saved’ the magazine (but don’t call it a trade)

On Saturday night, Michael Wolff, the pugnacious Vanity Fair columnist and editorial director of Adweek, hosted a dinner party for the magazine's employees and their loved ones at his swank apartment in Manhattan's East Village. Wolff prepared most of the food, which a troop of chiseled cater-waiters circulated to his 60 or so guests. The menu featured a roasted endive lentil salad; ravioli; tomato, mozzarella and basil bites; and a Roman-style roast pig. There was also a giant sheet cake adorned with a scan of Adweek's latest cover.

For veteran staffers, more accustomed to paying for their own drinks at the Irish bar down the street, the soiree was a welcome reflection of the changing culture underway at the 33-year-old advertising trade pub. Adweek is newly infused with cash, manpower, and a top-to-bottom design and editorial overhaul that debuted Monday in print and online.

As James Cooper, Adweek's executive editor, told The Cutline while putting this week's issue to bed on Friday: "The energy of the place has never been higher."

Adweek has been in makeover mode for the past six months. Last October, Richard Beckman, the former Conde Nast executive who now heads the magazine's parent publisher, Prometheus Global Media, installed Wolff as its captain. The move came less than a year after Prometheus, previously e5 Global Media, bought Adweek and its stable of sister trades from Nielsen, where they'd been languishing. Wolff's mission dovetails with a similar transformation Beckman instigated at The Hollywood Reporter: Broaden the audience. Bring in new readers and do a better job of serving the existing ones. Refine the staff. Give it a voice. Be bold, modern, buzzy. In short--make Adweek relevant.

"Welcome to the new Adweek--not your father's trade magazine," Wolff proclaims in an essay introducing the finished product. (Wolff's father was, in fact, an ad man.) "The reinvention here at Adweek needs to be as total as any in the media world. ... In minute-by-minute reporting on the Web and in close analysis and profiles in the magazine, we will tell the story of the uncertain transformation of our business. We need to be more Tolstoy than trade reporter."

As part of that reinvention, Adweek's longtime companion magazines, Mediaweek and Brandweek, have been folded into the flagship, which is thicker than it has been in years. Circulation is 47,000, versus a combined circulation of 63,121 for all three publications in 2008, around the time of Adweek's last redesign. The magazine, which is said to have been making $2 million a year, now has triple the content of its previous incarnation, with more photos and illustrations; new columns and recurring weekly features; longer, more writerly articles; trendy conceptual packages like this week's cover story about the migration of ad agencies from Madison Avenue to Brooklyn; and, yes, sex appeal: "Legendarily coiffed, she's as fond of girlish ruffles and racy black lace as she is of pantsuits--and is not above flaunting her yoga-toned limbs," reads Hephzibah Anderson's column on Arianna Huffington as sex symbol.

"He came in from day one and basically said, 'What you've been doing in the past is [garbage]. Ditch this robotic trade journalism thing you've been used to, throw out your AP style guide, try to strengthen your writing. If you do that and work hard here, we'll succeed; if you don't, we'll fail," said Cooper, a 13-year veteran who previously edited Mediaweek, but was recently promoted to helm the newly-consolidated Adweek. "Everyone sort of rallied around that."

Well, almost everyone. A handful of employees, including Brandweek editor Todd Wasserman and longtime ad critic Barbara Lippert, apparently didn't fit in with the direction Adweek was taking. More than a dozen new staffers, meanwhile, including Salon alum Alex Koppelman and former Politico and New York Observer media editor Hillary Frey, were brought in from the outside. (Disclosure: I used to work with Frey at The Observer.) Tom Wolfe's daughter, Alexandra Wolfe, also has been added to the masthead; others have joined from outlets including the New York Post, Reuters, American Lawyer and ABC News. There were 32 newsroom staffers when Wolff showed up; the staff will top off at 50 within the next few weeks, he said.

"We are only growing at this point," said Wolff. "What we have to do is produce a publication which at the very least is on the level of the most resourceful and sophisticated business news outlets."

To achieve that, Wolff said, the print edition will continue to cater to its core audience of media buyers and sellers who pay $150 for a yearly subscription. The website, on the other hand, will "vastly expand that audience in the Politico model," Wolff explained, by churning out comprehensive media, tech and advertising industry coverage that appeals to the chattering (and Twitter-ing) classes and search engines.

Adweek got a head start during the lead up to this week's relaunch, when it hit the ground running with a series of acerbic take-downs of New York media and tech figures. While the negative coverage certainly made a splash, it also left some wondering whether Wolff's Adweek is all wet.

"I guess [Prometheus Global Media] thought Michael would at least bring them some buzz, which he has in a way, but probably not the kind they were hoping for," said recently installed New York Observer editor Elizabeth Spiers, a former colleague of Wolff's, and a target of one of the recent hits. "You're not going to compete with [rival trade] AdAge by having Michael pick fights with small circulation regional newspapers."

Of course fighting is what Wolff is known for. Here he is butting heads with Rupert Murdoch; sparring with former publishing doyenne Judith Regan; shooting spitballs on the grave of late Upper East Side restaurateur Elaine Kaufman; getting kicked out of at least 10 other restaurants in that neighborhood, where he used to live.

Have Wolff's gloves come off in the newsroom?

"He's been very demanding," said Cooper. "He knows what he wants, and if you fall short of that, he's gonna let you know. He'll be blunt about it: 'This is bad, and I want you to do good work, not bad work.' He pushes his people, and that's never a bad thing in a newsroom environment." Cooper added: "I would say he saved Adweek."

Wolff's boss is giving it a little more time before he jumps to that conclusion, though he seems confident.

"It's 9:30 on the morning of the launch, so I think it's a little early for me to be making judgments," Beckman told The Cutline Monday. "It's a significant upgrade from his predecessors, but we'll see how we do. No good art gets created without making some mistakes."

Adweek's perennial rival, AdAge, which is the older and more dominant of the two publications, isn't exactly shaking in its boots.

"I'm not sure there will even be a ton of overlap between AdAge and the 'new' Adweek," said AdAge editor Abbey Klaassen in an email. "It has made it very clear it does not want to play in the 'trade' space. In fact, it probably really hates the comparison folks are making."

Wolff agrees.

"I don't really read AdAge. I think it's wholly in the agency and marketing world. I'm sure it's a useful publication, but it's not what we're trying to do," he said. "The next exciting thing is, having set this bar as high as we've set it, to stay there and surpass it. That means good journalism and good writers convincing people that Adweek is not a trade magazine, that Adweek is a place to tell this incredible story. I expect that we will be telling it in more detail and with more insight and drama than anybody."