Owen Lipstein: fitness of body, mind and magazine

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, March, 1989 by Margaret Hunter


Like American Health, Hippocrates is a precocious youngster that won a National Magazine Award for Excellence in its first year. Lipstein notes that American Health continues to "dominate" its category, and Hippocrates' circulation at 416,000 is less than half of American Health's at 1.2 million.

Although Time's acquisition gives Hippocrates tremendous expansion capital, Lipstein maintains it helps reestablish the value of American Health. "If Time was willing to pay that much for a magazine with half our circulation, it makes us look pretty good."


Chris Whittle, however, is another matter. The Knoxville-based publisher's Special Reports, a package of six titles distributed to doctors' waiting rooms free if the physician agrees to limit other subscriptions, enrages Lipstein. It's not the competition for advertisers that bugs him, he says; it's the idea of American Health being thrown out of a doctor's office. The magazine's 100,000-plus waiting room copies receive high pass-along readership and are important to the Personal Best Network's overall numbers. Lipstein hasn't withdrawn the lawsuit threat he made months ago over Whittle's exclusivity program, but he's not as vocal as he has been. It's time to put up or shut up, he admits.

Competition with Whittle has even become a personal matter. More than a half-dozen American Health employees have left for the higher-paying Whittle Communications. Chris Whittle is rumored to be making piles of money, and his wall media in 1,500 health clubs outpaces Lipstein's 1,200. Perhaps worst of all, Whitlle has been stealing the limelight as the industry's brash young maverick, a reputation coveted by both publishers, according to sources.

Neither the challenges ahead nor the growing diversity of his titles appear to worry Lipstein. "I don't know if it has to make sense to anyone else but me," he says. "The magazines round out the four corners of my life: mind, body, spirit, style."

American Health, for example, grew out of his master's thesis, which discussed the opposing forces in the friendship of the cerebral Aldous Huxley and the gutsy D. H. Lawrence. The theme was picked up in the magazine's tag line, "Fitness of Body and Mind." Mother Earth News, he maintains, tied in his country home in Catskill, New York, and his desire, "like a lot of people, to be able to wield a wrench." The Psychology Today acquisition coincided with a failed romance, and Smart appealed to the aging student of literature who listens to Shakespeare tapes while jogging.

Those who know him say Lipstein is a fighter--boxing lessons, a fascination with Rambo movies and an admiration of Muhammed Ali give some indication. A column he wrote in a February 1988 American Health supplement is self-revealing: "In my judgment, males are incorrigible showoffs. We fight, start wars, start companies or take them over because we seek to impress, an impulse designed both to attract women and intimidate other men."

There's an intelligence under Lipstein's adolescent image that competitors shouldn't underestimate, say sources. "He's like a bad teenager, the one who boasts the most, drinks the most, goes out with the sleazy good-looking women, and still makes straight As," says a former employee, who now works for Whittle.

COPYRIGHT 1989 Copyright by Media Central Inc., A PRIMEDIA Company. All rights reserved.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning