The Power of Retail

Which of these articles from todays Wall Street Journal, page B-2, is more significant?

(1) Remember when CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity got leaked to the press via Bob Novak, creating a small scandal for the Administration and throwing dirt in the eyes of the CIA? Two other reporters are in a lawsuit against a federal special prosecutor over the question of whether the press has the right to keep confidential the "two administration officials" who leaked the information (i.e. by not testifying before a grand jury). At stake is press confidentiality and the public access to information it purportedly supplies.

or...

(2) British retailer Tesco, following in the footsteps of Wal-Mart is seeking to clean-up "Lad Mags" like Maxim, Nuts, Loaded, and Zoo. Whereas Wal-Mart just stopped selling the offending mags, Tesco is pressuring them to modify covers, making them less racy so as not to offend customers. Publishers have changed the wording of headlines and removed photos to appease the retailers. For their part, Tesco claims that it is attempting to "balance the interests of our customers and suppliers." Customers at Wal-Mart and Tesco, reportedly, complain that the racy magazines are offensive. Wal-Mart restricts its policy to U.S. not U.K. stores, while Tesco takes issue primarily with U.K. publishers, whose revenues -- incidentally -- come mostly from sales rather than advertisements.

If (2) were only about mens magazines, I would say that (1) is a bigger deal. While there are definitely disadvantages to source confidentiality and journalistic norms may encourage over-reliance on it, it does seem to be essential and legitimate for many occassions. Therefore, threats to it deserve to be taken very seriously.

But I think that what's at stake in story (2) is really considerably broader than racy photos on mens magazines. I have often been struck by the limited range of media available at Wal-Mart. If the existence of such chains is reducing people's exposure to bookstores, where wider ranges of materials are marketed, I think that we need be concerned about this limited range.

This point assumes, of course, that consumers choice of print media is effected by where and how it is marketed (and not only the reverse). Many, under the influence of free-market ideology, would deny this with knees-jerking. But the question should be readily answerable through experimentation and it seems quite important.

What evidence there is suggests that marketing influences choice. Publishers know that getting a book marketed at Wal-Mart will increase sales almost exponentially. Anecdotal evidence suggests that publishers classify books in two categories: (a) Wal-Mart material and (b) everything else. The expected profitability of class (a) books is... in a class by itself.

What gets marketed at Wal-Mart? In a Columbus Wal-Mart, I recently found no Time Magazine, no Atlantic Monthly, and no heady bestsellers. What they did have was an issue of U.S. News and World Report devoted entirely to The Divinci Code and some novels based on Revelation eschatology about which I had read a Nick Kristoff column in the Dispatch.

Is the kind of customer who buys magazines at Wal-Mart really such a clear type, a one-sided reader of home furnishing magaizines and low-brow Christian fare? I doubt it. However, I guess it could be that Wal-Mart's media marketing department is hiring the customers who complain about cleavage.