Swing dancing may be in, but Swing magazine is out.
President and Editor-in-Chief David Lauren, Trinity '93, pulled the plug this week on the nine-year-old publication, which he began as a student at the University.
The magazine, designed to appeal to people in their 20s, completed its four-year national run with its December/January issue.
Lauren said continuing to publish would have required editorial sacrifice. "To succeed in this business, to grow in this business, it requires a much more commercial magazine, and I didn't want to produce a more commercial magazine," he said, lamenting the recent media trend toward focusing on celebrities.
"Swing has always been more intelligent and much more highbrow," he said.
The magazine's circulation reached a plateau of about 100,000, Lauren said, most of which was in subscriptions. "I never thought we'd ever get past our first year," he said.
Lauren, the son of fashion designer Ralph Lauren, said he was proud of his accomplishments. "We were the first magazine and the only magazine which intelligently wrote about young leaders," he said. "We shook up the system."
But Lisa Granatstein, a senior editor at Mediaweek magazine, said Swing caused little more than a ripple in the magazine industry. "It never got the buzz," she said. "David Lauren is not JFK, Jr., as much as he wants to try in his pinstripe suit."
Granatstein added that the content was sometimes interesting and that it had several prominent advertisers. "I think [Swing's demise] has more to do with the business plan," she said. "They believed that it would succeed faster than it really could.... There was a lot of talk about how that magazine had no focus when it started."
Mike Orren, Trinity '93 and associate publisher of D magazine in Dallas, said Swing never really found a consistent audience or achieved name recognition. "An age group alone is not enough to create a magazine around," he said. "They were aiming at a demographic that is looked at traditionally as a non-reading demographic."
Orren, who chaired the Undergraduate Publications Board while Swing was published at the University, said commercialization is a constant pressure but not one that Swing ever really suffered from. "I'm actually shocked that they lasted as long as they did," Orren said. "The concept was very shaky."
For Lauren, the end of Swing means he will have a chance to think about his future. "I'm going to take a little time for myself, which I never had coming right out of college," he said, "and I'm exploring a couple offers which have been laid out."
In his letter from the editor in the final issue, Lauren wrote about what he learned in the magazine business. "In many ways, I have lived vicariously through Swing, learning not only how to develop a magazine but also to trust my own instincts and define my own values," he wrote. "As I wonder what the next five years will bring, I am comforted and energized by the confidence I have gained from producing Swing."
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