Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 July 1999 Issue No. 437
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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1000 Words in Pictures frequency: monthly publisher: Mohamed El-Dakhakhni regular features: nature, photo contest, environment, cuisine sample article: Floating Hotels, a New Threat to the Red Sea alive frequency: monthly publisher: Tamer Sayed Ahmed regular features: interviews, experiments, articles sample article: Suicide Son sample quote: "We collected an assortment of chairs and placed them in a room. We asked people from different backgrounds to enter the room and fill out a form. Then we took a photograph of them in the chair they chose." Al Bayroni Geographia frequency: monthly publisher: Hatem Abdel-Aziz El-Sayed regular features: breakthroughs, book review, country profile sample article: Castles of the Assassins sample quote: "Just who are the Japanese? Where did they come from and when? The answers are difficult to come by, though not impossible. The real problem is that the Japanese themselves may not want to know." Choice frequency: quarterly publisher: Hani Selim regular features: restaurant reviews, hotel business news, profiles of leading figures in the food and travel industry sample article: Risotti: In Search of Italy's Great Rice sample quote: "A question that has bothered humanity for millennia is how to boost or restore flagging sexual energy. But, sexual desire or performance can decrease with age, energy, stress, drugs, and medicine. So, how can a healthy sex drive be extended throughout life without the use of wonder drugs?" Cleo frequency: monthly publisher: Allied Publishers Ltd, Cyprus regular features: this issue's best dressed individual, objects of desire, secrets of a master chef sample article: Johnny Zahra: The Secret behind the Smile sample quote: "Day to day life is filled with business anxieties and pressures; a relaxing weekend should be something more than an occasional outing, rather an imaginative and aesthetic escape. From playing golf to basking in the warm sun of the Red Sea, hiding out helps us put aside the coming week's agenda of tiresome duties, while re-energizing us so that we can actually accomplish them." Egypt Today frequency: monthly publisher: Ann Marie Harrison regular features: nature notes, what's on, what's new sample article: The Many Faces of Poverty sample quote: "Located right at the foot of the Eastern Desert plateau on the north end of the Gulf of Suez, Ain Sukhna has always attracted swimmers, campers and fishermen. A short two-hour drive from Cairo, it is the perfect place for weekend jaunts to unwind from the stress of city life." Egypt's Insight frequency: monthly publisher: Insight Publishing House, Limited, UK regular features: books, motoring, cuisine, travel sample article: The Camel King of Farafra sample quote: "My own initiation into old-style Cairo communication was probably fairly representative: a payphone which had obviously seen better days, a pile of barizas, a faint line maddeningly flickering on and off like a strobe and after ten minutes of fiddling and cursing -- complete failure to reach the elusive simsar." Golf in Egypt frequency: bi-monthly publisher: Tom Olson regular features: signature holes series, profiles of local and international golfers sample article: Golf Stocks: To Invest or Not to Invest sample quote: "If you look at the list of any golf club members in Egypt, you will find a lot of ladies. One of them is Se-un Kwan. If you ask this beautiful woman why she plays golf, she smiles. 'I like to walk,' is the answer. But of course that's not all." he frequency: quarterly publisher: Amr Selim regular features: health and fitness, fashion, cars, travel sample article: Armored Cars: No-Fear Driving sample quote: "You want to impress a date or a client. It has been settled that you will meet for dinner. You pick the place. Oh, oh. Pressure's on. How do you decide? How can you tell what's a good restaurant and what's not? Here are some simple things to keep in mind as you wander through the culinary conundrum." Teen Stuff frequency: monthly publisher: El-Tarek Company regular features: ask the young psychiatrist, poems, book reviews, star corner sample article: What Do Girls Hate Most in Guys? sample quote: "In order to get into the groove of this discussion, we have to know what teens think. A series of questionnaires were distributed in order to reveal how teens define 'freedom'. The outcome was an interesting and confusing combination of opinions and demands."

Instant publishing

Is that yet another English-language magazine you see on the newsstands? Tarek Atia reports from the core of a rapidly churning machine

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One day, in the not too distant future, some misguided soul will probably publish a magazine called Egyptian Motorbike. About 10 people will buy it and, after a few issues, the publisher will decide to call it quits.

Unless, that is, he's somehow convinced a major advertiser that there's a market for this kind of thing, that motorcycle culture is on the upswing, and that it's bound to be Egypt's next big fad. To show his generosity, he agrees to major discounts, to "advertorial" tie-ins, to publishing photos taken by the advertiser's cousin's best friend.

There's been a lot of this sort of "instant publishing" going on in the past few years.

If anyone thought that the age of cyberspace and satellite TV had dealt a death blow to the power of the written word, they can think again. A few months ago, an American friend of mine who has been living in Egypt for a long time told me he couldn't believe the number of English-language magazines that had suddenly appeared on the scene. He seemed to be in anguish as he cried "Who reads these things?" over the phone.

WHO FUNDS THESE THINGS? "Many media analysts believe that the English-language market is too small for two, three or even four publications in the same local market," warns Business Middle East's 16-28 February 1998 issue.

Not many publishers are heeding that advice.

Heading for the supermarket checkout line, the covers beckon, attempting to draw you into a neat little world. Sports and Fitness. Cleo. Egypt Today. Hospitality. Egypt's Insight. Egyptian Reporter. Cairo Times. Alive. Image. Selections. Mother-to-Be. Black and White. 1000 Words in Pictures. Choice. Teen Stuff.

And, as if the endless string of articles about Egypt's new golf craze in all the magazines that already exist wasn't enough, a few months ago someone actually decided to start up a Golf in Egypt magazine. At 12 pounds a pop for only 44 pages, it's hard to imagine how many people would buy, let alone read such a thing.

But maybe there is a market after all. Golf in Egypt would hardly make sense if there weren't so many golf courses sprouting in the desert. It is probably de rigueur for a golf club's lounge to have it lying around on the teak furniture. And of course, the golf addict businessman needs it to show all his friends where he plays.

The publishers of these magazines are banking on the hope that, if you're a foreigner or an Egyptian who has either lived abroad or been schooled in English here, you'll be so desperate for reading material that's in English and reasonably priced (foreign magazines like GQ, Better Homes and Gardens, Cosmopolitan, Practical Photographer, etc. range anywhere from a hefty LE25 to 45 per issue), that you'll give one, two, or maybe all the "local" magazines a try.

While some of the magazines make an honest attempt to specialise and offer decent stories and advice, anyone who has picked up any one of the dozen or more magazines that have suddenly appeared on the scene in the past few years knows they are mostly all made of the same stuff. They inevitably feature cars, social problems, tourist sites, and the thousand and one "staples" that always seem to reappear: Coptic Cairo, the whirling dervishes, Alexandria's glorious past, etc.

While the potential reader may be tricked into buying the magazine once on a whim, in most cases a quick read by the pool reveals that what's really been bought is nothing more than a series of ads divided by a whole lot of pointless fluff.

IMAGE IS EVERYTHING: The ad on the back cover says it all. The fancy cars and luxury jeeps racing through the streets, or else posing majestically, surrounded by gorgeous mountains and nature, the pretty girl waiting expectantly for her favorite soft drink. The back page ads are the status symbols each magazine wears like a brand name.

Inside, it's all about that same lifestyle. The fashion spreads, promos of films showing in the multiplexes, profiles of entrepreneurs (the same types of people who start magazines), interviews with successful career women, photos of the rich and famous frolicking with their families, girlfriends and dogs, are all facets of the "modern Egypt" image the content-producers of these magazines wholeheartedly live and love.

Since that image is drenched in consumer culture, it's advertising that matters most in the budgets of the entrepreneurs who decide to open up a magazine. They know that circulation doesn't have to be that high for an advertiser to decide to shell out the cash to display his wares.

"Porsche would probably see the exact same benefit in placing an ad in Sports and Fitness as in Al-Ahram," says Basil Ramzy, who started a magazine called Alive a few years ago. After dropping out of the market several times, Alive, which has chosen an editorial path based mainly on interviews, is aiming for a larger international market and now looks set to become a monthly. "The ad in the English-language magazine is significantly cheaper. One sale resulting from it would be enough to cover its costs and more. It's the same thing with Cartier watches. They're not trying to sell them to everybody."

"Businessmen are looking for an image," explains Mursi Saad El-Din, Al-Ahram Weekly columnist and culture editor, and the editor-in-chief of several English-language magazines. "Instead of spending half a million on a few ads in the Arabic papers, they put out an English-language magazine."

"We all target the 18-35 age group," says one publisher. "If we just take AUC, which graduates about 1,000 students a year, then just from that one place you have a potential readership base of 17,000." AUC aside, however, no one can miss the growing importance of English as the language of development, education, business and technology. In the decade or so since Al-Ahram Organisation launched the Weekly, the market has exploded.

Still, at the newsstands the Egyptian English-language magazines often get lost in the sea of Arabic and foreign magazines. As a genre they are still not prominent enough to command real space of their own. There are a lot of them, but they don't have the regularity of the giant, more established selections of both Arabic and foreign publications. They seem to fall in and out of the market, change names, reappear, and sometimes even show up in the middle of the month instead of the beginning.

Although Ibrahim Nasr, Al-Ahram Organisation's head of distribution, thinks that "overall it's a good phenomenon," he knows, from the sales figures, that the industry "needs support. Better editing and design would help," Nasr says, "as would original concepts that don't merely imitate foreign magazines."

Or, in this case, imitate magazines begun by foreigners here in Egypt.

A HISTORY LESSON: In 1979, when Mursi Saad El-Din was head of the State Information Service, a woman from the American embassy asked him for permission to put out a bulletin about the American community's activities in Cairo. It was called Cairo Today, and it blossomed from a 16-page black and white leaflet to the over-100-page glossy ad-filled magazine that is now called Egypt Today. Saad El-Din became the editor-in-chief when the magazine went private. It is now the stalwart of an empire which includes Business Today and PC World. Their Sports and Fitness magazine was recently sold to publisher Amr Selim, who now also puts out he, a new men's quarterly.

At 20, Egypt Today is the real big daddy of them all; no one else is really past pre-school. That reflects itself well in both ads and circulation.

"Any new magazine needs to have a new concept," says Saad El-Din about the recent surge in magazine production. "There are too many people just imitating Egypt Today."

In a way, he is right. All the magazines, even the ones that aren't general interest like Egypt Today, end up using that magazine's format in their own specialised realm, introducing issues, locales and people with the same feel-good gloss as the mother magazine.

This makes sense when you consider that most of the magazines are started and staffed by people coming back to Egypt from the West, people who, as Rasha Foda, a graphic designer, points out, "are not here to appreciate the Arab world and its characteristics, or even recognise it. Instead, they're starting magazines that glorify the Western point of view."

There's no doubt that the rise of the magazines has gone hand in hand with the ever-expanding consumer choices in the Egyptian market. Many would argue that, along with movies and TV, they are helping to fuel the engine of new attitudes. "It's nice to know what's going on in Cairo," says Basma Hilal, whose family recently returned to Egypt from a 20-year stint in Kuwait. "There's a lot happening now -- things to buy, see and do that didn't exist even a few years ago. This way, I feel informed."

Foda helped create the look of many of the English-language publications that have hit the market in the past decade, including the erstwhile Pose. Although Pose, a fashion magazine that never really managed to get beyond its small, AUC-based cliquish content, eventually met its demise, it was in large part thanks to the efforts of its founders, Loren Osgood and Goya Gallagher, that an English-language magazine "industry" was born.

Pose proved that, with the help of the Cyprus clause, the offshore licensing trick publishers can use to avoid the healthy (36%) advertising revenues tax, and yet operate freely in Egypt through a representative office, a few hip 20-somethings in an apartment-turned-office could produce a magazine that on the surface looked almost as good as Cosmopolitan.

Inspired by Pose, a women's magazine called Live Colors soon appeared on the scene. Less pretentious, it became popular with housewives and young career women for a while, then disappeared.

Today there's Cleo, "Egypt's Modern Lifestyle Magazine". Its editor, Yasmine Shehata, believes it is her mission to show people "the good things in Egypt." She wants foreigners to see that "there are people who look nice, that we have nice restaurants... It's a happy magazine, it's meant to be inspiring."

Cleo is partly owned by Shafik Gabr, president of the Artoc Group and former head of the Egyptian-American Chamber of Commerce. The word is that Gabr plans on releasing two more "inspiring" magazines in the near future.

Today, in addition to the titles listed above, there's also The Croc, a free guide to what's on in Cairo, Community Times, also free, Mobile Guide, Heliopolis, and nearly half a dozen dining and satellite guides.

While the exact figures remain confidential, not many of the magazines can boast print runs over 3-5,000. Actual sales are a closely guarded secret, and huge returns from the distributor at the end of the month usually tone the publisher's ambitions down. The next print run is adjusted accordingly.

"It's remarkable that some really poor magazines with very low circulation have survived this long," Foda muses.

The reason, she believes, is that "advertisers are to this day ignorant. They have a budget to spend, and no way to gauge the impact of the medium."

Foda finds the rapid boom in vapid English-language publishing disturbing. "There's nothing that says a valuable journalistic publication can't be good for advertisers. In fact, it's the opposite, because if the bad magazine gets thrown in the trash, the advertiser does too."

Yet the engine keeps churning with little regard for that reality, or perhaps in spite of it.

"The worst impact it has is on the ability of high quality, substantial magazines to survive," Foda says, "because the bad magazines are consuming the ad budget."

 

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