What’s Going on at Inside Chicago?
We’re a long time getting around to writing about Inside Chicago. But it looked so low rent when it debuted in 1987. And we were preoccupied with Chicago Times, which soon appeared and has distracted us ever since with its stormy misadventures.
Clearly, Gershon Bassman did some of the key things right. “They seem to have focused on some reachable, identifiable audience segments,” says Jim Dolan, a media consultant who knows Chicago well. “If I had to position its audience, it’s a little older than the Reader’s, younger than Chicago Times’s is supposed to be, certainly younger than Chicago magazine’s. It’s an audience hardly anyone is delivering to advertisers. It lives downtown a lot, it’s got money in its pockets.”
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Bassman gave us his stats: present circulation, 60,000, about half of it controlled; readers are heavily 25 to 45 years old, $35,000-plus income, mostly single, clustered in town along the lake. Bassman is a lot surer of himself talking demographics than editorial purpose. Of course, editorial purpose is what we visited him to discuss.
“I took it off,” Bassman tells us, “primarily because I was getting a number of calls from people trying to get into the book for one reason or another. I didn’t want to get those calls.
Next on the masthead is managing editor Barbara J. Young, who’s been there since December of ’87, which in the context of Inside Chicago means close to forever (the magazine has gone through six art directors, according to Kristin Sagerstrom, who was one of them). What’s false here might be our assumption that Young’s experienced: Bassman hired her from the Lerner papers, not another magazine. “I want to go to the top of excellence and attract the stories nobody else will touch,” she gushed. Yeah, sure. Her departed minions do not hail her force of vision.
“I felt the Chicago market wasn’t a hip market for younger readers,” she says. “In LA and New York there are half a dozen magazines to choose from. I saw Interview in its early years. I thought ‘What a beautiful magazine!’ I saw LA Style. I thought, why not something like that here?
“I’m committed to it, and if I’m committed to it, it stays,” says Bassman. “I’m a very, very strong person. It’s shown its potential. It’s here. And as a matter of fact, I’m looking for the magazine to start supporting the nursing homes next year.
