Is Wine X's Editor a Crybaby?

Mark Fisher, a friend of LENNDEOVURS and owner of Uncorked wrote an interesting post this morning in response to a Decanter.com story about  the demise of Wine X magazine and its editor’s complaints that the wine industry’s ignorance and short-sightedness doomed the magazine to failure after eight years.

Mark, never one to pull punches, refers to the editor as a crybaby and I tend to agree after reading the piece.

Is the wine industry often snobby, uppity, stuffy and "old school"? Yes. But I expect that anyone with the ambition to start a wine magazine would recognize that from the very beginning--not just complain about it after they were unable to succeed in it.

Given Wine X's target audience--younger, 'hipper' wine drinkers--why would they use the same ole delivery method that Wine Spectator uses for a vastly different--and more focused on--demographic?

I read at least 90% of my wine news/information online and my guess is that most people in my age group do the same.

So maybe instead of blaming the industry, Wine X should look at it's model and get a better understanding of it's target audience.

Not to mention, the few issues that I've picked up (and put back down) haven't impressed me. The writing tries way too hard to be trendy and hip and is often short on substance.

It's entirely possible that there isn't a market for a wine magazine that targets the "younger generation" but that doesn't mean that those people aren't hungry for wine information. You just need to be smart enough to get it in front of them. I think that publishing/publishers in general haven't quite caught on yet--and I'm not just talking about wine publications.

Comments

[Ruarri]

I couldn't agree with you more, it seems the general feeling about Wine X's demise is a medium vs. message paradigm. The message was right, but he couldn’t have been more off with the primary medium he chose to communicate it. Personally I haven’t subscribed to a magazine other than Decanter and Wine Spectator in 5 years. To try add another magazine to that heavyweight category was either brave or plain stupid. I think in these days of global warming and mass deforestation, the last thing the world needs is another physical magazine. With banks and corporations going paperless and switching to electronic-statements and PDF, its not a long before the Green crowd broadens their criticism of SUV’s and gas-guzzling and focuses their critical lens on the mass-wastage caused by daily-newspapers and magazines. We live in a world that is becoming waste-conscious, and once media tools like the iPHONE, Treo and Blackberry replace the ordinary cell-phone there will soon be no excuse to not switch to digital for news and culture consumption. The only time I ever read a physical newspaper is on the subway, because I don’t have a palmtop (something I hope to change.)

As Generation X grows older, the Millenials and echo-boomers storm in. We’re linked in with friends from afar and close through digital communities and our tastes for media consumption change everyday with Digg, there’s nothing we can’t find the answer to with Wikipedia and there’s virtually nothing we can’t have access to (except wine online.) Wine X failed because it’s a magazine, and their target market is already decreasing their consumption of magazines. Mr. Roberts’ assertion that the wine industry is stuck in the eighties is rather amusing, considering he himself seems to be deeply entrenched in the nineties. Y2K never happened and whilst we spent our last days in the nineties scared of what would happen when the bios clocks hit 2000, we could never have known how drastically the world would change.

I speak for myself, but I feel that this is true amongst many other millenials: I want to be hooked in, I want to learn something new everyday, I want to exchange ideas and I want to interact with the media I use. Having grown up around the wine industry in South Africa and now being in New York as a part of this exciting industry in this rapid and exhilarating time I can’t help but feel that Mr. Roberts was wrong. There is a great opportunity out there, someone just has to have the balls and the vision to grab it and make it happen. You can’t immediately interact with a magazine. You can’t connect with other readers of similar interest with a magazine. You can’t order wine directly from a magazine. You can’t watch videos and have unlimited access to all the audio-visual you could possibly wish for with a magazine. Magazines are a static medium, and we’re an electric generation. Thus I’d have to concur with the majority of today's posts about the loss of this magazine – Wine X’s failure was due to the fact that it didn’t live up to its promises, and the Wine Industry evolved before it had the chance to…

[Jake]

Spot on Ruarri...

Yes.. I think that Roberts is being a crybaby.. he can't blame an industry, that while yes it seems to be slow moving, for his lack of ability in execution. It's his fault somewhere along the line. The best out of this, is those who will pick up the pieces, and build a better machine..

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