Owen Lipstein: fitness of body, mind and magazine - American Health; Psychology Today; Smart; Mother Earth News

Owen Lipstein: Fitness of body, mind and magazine

New York City--As late afternoon sunlight filters through the windows, spotlighting a canvas punching bag that hangs from the 14th Street office ceiling, Owen Lipstein ponders the future of his magazines. He wears a wrinkled purple knit shirt and an extra day's worth of unshaved stubble, having flown in that morning from a Detroit business trip. The past year has been a breathless one.

Lipstein, who launched American Health in 1981, now controls four magazines--two acquired since last May. Each of the four has different investors, with Lipstein owning a controlling share in all but American Health, where his stake is closer to 25 percent.

Given the choice, Lipstein would have taken more time between acquisitions, but "when these things come up, you either take them or you don't," he says. Psychology Today came into the fold last spring with a $6.5 million price tag, and Lipstein bought part of Smart last fall for an undisclosed amount. The new titles make his overall operation--which has no official name--a company with $60 million annual sales and 150 employees.

Growth, however, has brought major challenges. Both American Health and Psychology Today need fresh editorial and graphic approaches--the former to maintain its maturing market position against rising competition, the latter to reassert its viability after years under the American Psychological Association. The start-up project, Smart, must prove itself both to advertisers and readers as it begins bimonthly production in March. Mother Earth News "almost runs itself," but then it was redesigned only two years ago when Lipstein and partners acquired it. Finally, ancillary businesses, which include a variety of books, videos, health club wall media and several single-sponsor annual magazines, are expected to expand from roughly 10 percent of total revenues to 30 percent within a few years.

A master plan

Lipstein is pulling all of this into a master plan, an advertising package buy temporarily called "The Personal Best Media Network." The network will offer advertisers some 14 million baby boomers--based on three million cumulative circulation, multiplied by an average 3.5 readers per copy, plus four million people who pass through health clubs where the "American Health Magazine Fitness Bulletin" hangs on the walls. It's a well-heeled yuppie audience with only 8 percent reader duplication, according to Jay H. Burzon, executive vice president/group publishing.

Lipstein now has his magazines on a health and fitness program of their own, backed by a $23 million refinancing he secured when he purchased Psychology Today. That magazine, for instance, needs to add "sex, drugs and rock and roll"; Psychology Today came with 975,000 readers despite boring editorial, he says. Adding excitement, he notes, shouldn't be difficult for editor Julia Kagan, newly arrived from Working Woman, and editor in chief T George Harris, who edited the magazine in the early seventies before Ziff-Davies bought it and fired him. Harris will also continue as editor in chief at American Health.

Smart, on the other hand, puts Lipstein into a start-up situation he hasn't been in since 1981 with American Health. He downplays the dangers, citing track records for himself and founder Terry McDonell, who spent two years each as managing editor of Rolling Stone and back-of-the-book editor at Newsweek before leaving in 1985 to work on Smart. Financing apparently is no problem either. Don Welsh, publisher of Barbie and Muppet Magazine, among others, put up much of the money for the first issue, and Lipstein has now joined as the controlling shareholder.

Already, Lipstein has plans for an editorial shift. Smart's somewhat ponderous literary bent is unlike "the undergraduate humor" of Spy, which Lipstein admires, the "lightness" of Esquire, which he's gotten tired of, or the visual vacuity of the fashion magazines. But he wants Smart to become "a male version of Vanity Fair"--intelligent, witty, and sometimes outrageous, without being silly. The next issue will replace one major editorial piece with 25 pages of men's fashion. That will make it more visual and "more recognizably" a man's title, Lipstein says.

By contrast, American Health faces the problems of its own success. The magazine has been copied enough to spoil its appeal, he maintains.

To freshen the formula, Lipstein bought out founding partners and art directors Will Hopkins and Ira Friedlander last fall, replacing them with a new art director for each of the magazines. "I don't believe in shared art directors anymore," he asserts, referring to their work on all of Lipstein's first three titles. A redesign of American Health, introduced in December, was to make the book cleaner and "more intimate," Lipstein concludes.

The redesign may be especially important as the flagship faces powerful new competition in the form of Time Inc.'s acquisition of half of each of Hippocrates (for $9 million) and Whittle Communications (for $185 million) last summer.

Like American Health, Hippocrates is a precocious youngster that won a National Magazine Award for Excellence in its first year. Lipstein notes that American Health continues to "dominate" its category, and Hippocrates' circulation at 416,000 is less than half of American Health's at 1.2 million.

Although Time's acquisition gives Hippocrates tremendous expansion capital, Lipstein maintains it helps reestablish the value of American Health. "If Time was willing to pay that much for a magazine with half our circulation, it makes us look pretty good."

Chris Whittle, however, is another matter. The Knoxville-based publisher's Special Reports, a package of six titles distributed to doctors' waiting rooms free if the physician agrees to limit other subscriptions, enrages Lipstein. It's not the competition for advertisers that bugs him, he says; it's the idea of American Health being thrown out of a doctor's office. The magazine's 100,000-plus waiting room copies receive high pass-along readership and are important to the Personal Best Network's overall numbers. Lipstein hasn't withdrawn the lawsuit threat he made months ago over Whittle's exclusivity program, but he's not as vocal as he has been. It's time to put up or shut up, he admits.

Competition with Whittle has even become a personal matter. More than a half-dozen American Health employees have left for the higher-paying Whittle Communications. Chris Whittle is rumored to be making piles of money, and his wall media in 1,500 health clubs outpaces Lipstein's 1,200. Perhaps worst of all, Whitlle has been stealing the limelight as the industry's brash young maverick, a reputation coveted by both publishers, according to sources.

Neither the challenges ahead nor the growing diversity of his titles appear to worry Lipstein. "I don't know if it has to make sense to anyone else but me," he says. "The magazines round out the four corners of my life: mind, body, spirit, style."

American Health, for example, grew out of his master's thesis, which discussed the opposing forces in the friendship of the cerebral Aldous Huxley and the gutsy D. H. Lawrence. The theme was picked up in the magazine's tag line, "Fitness of Body and Mind." Mother Earth News, he maintains, tied in his country home in Catskill, New York, and his desire, "like a lot of people, to be able to wield a wrench." The Psychology Today acquisition coincided with a failed romance, and Smart appealed to the aging student of literature who listens to Shakespeare tapes while jogging.

Those who know him say Lipstein is a fighter--boxing lessons, a fascination with Rambo movies and an admiration of Muhammed Ali give some indication. A column he wrote in a February 1988 American Health supplement is self-revealing: "In my judgment, males are incorrigible showoffs. We fight, start wars, start companies or take them over because we seek to impress, an impulse designed both to attract women and intimidate other men."

There's an intelligence under Lipstein's adolescent image that competitors shouldn't underestimate, say sources. "He's like a bad teenager, the one who boasts the most, drinks the most, goes out with the sleazy good-looking women, and still makes straight As," says a former employee, who now works for Whittle.

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