• WSJ (paid subscription required), Thursday, April 13, 2006 12 PM

Magazine mogul Jann Wenner is the subject of a good little Q&A in The Wall Street Journal in which he discusses everything from the coming shakeout in the celebrity magazine category to his obsession with neatness. Mostly, though, he and The Journal concentrate on the subject that currently bedevils just about everyone who's been in magazine for more than a decade--the Web. Says Wenner: "There is a lot that the magazine does better, particularly for certain kinds of advertisers who are interested in visual display. Cars are sold that way. Fashion is sold that way. Soft drinks are sold that way. Most of our key categories are sold with visual imagery. Those people who need to get a lot of data to a consumer--like warranty information, or where it makes sense to offer an opportunity to choose different colors and styles of a particular product--the Web does that great. We are kind of seeing a fad kind of reaction right now. It will all balance out, and those magazines that figure out how to make their Web product good and how to make it relate back to what's on that magazine page will be very successful."

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