by Ted Sherman

Created on: August 01, 2008   Last Updated: August 04, 2008

OK, you're a great writer and your burning ambition is to originate your own magazine. First of all, you'd have to be out of your mind to start up a print magazine today. Unless you've been living in a candle-lit remote cabin somewhere in the back woods, you must know the era of the ink'n'paper magazine, newspaper and just about every other periodical in print is over. Instead of trying to publish a new magazine, you'd do better starting a buggy whip factory with the hope that horse-drawn carriages pulled by Dobbin are coming back.

There's a very glaring recent example of someone who didn't realize print magazines were on their way out. In 2000, Rosie O'Donnell, whose ego is almost as big as her waistline, shelled out $10 million to take over and update the hundred-year-old women's magazine, McCall's. She changed the name to, what else, Rosie, and sat back to watch the dollars roll in. Rosie the magazine never did catch on with its intended audience, women age 18 to 45. Even its competitors, the matronly Good Housekeeping and Ladies' Home Journal continued to post better circulation figures.

Rosie the magazine, produced by a highly-skilled editorial staff, featured articles about her life, opinions and gripes, as well as the usual gossip and kitchen kitsch. But the enterprise soon proved that by comparison to Rosie's arrogance, Donald Trump's is a shrinking violet. Maybe in the days before the internet, a new print magazine published by a high-profile celebrity could have worked, but within three years,Rosie the magazine, which never achieved profitable circulation, had folded in a mess of lawsuits involving bitter battles among Rosie, the editorial staff and other investors.

Perhaps another problem was that Rosie, who was never known for her originality, had blatantly copied the idea for a personal magazine from Oprah Winfrey. Ms. Winfrey's magazine, titled O, had hit the stands several years before Rosie's. In almost ten years, O the magazine has not had a profitable year, but Oprah keeps pumping money and her ego into it, and it struggles along like all other print magazines against the overwhelming competition from online magazines and the simple fact that published print is dying. In its best year, 2004, O's circulation was at 2.7 million. This year it's below two million and falling.

If you have several million bucks you want to risk on publishing a print magazine, you should investigate the potential of the only money-making ones still on the corner news

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