[Y]ankee Magazine and the Vermont Country Store have teamed up to start producing a digital magazine called Our Vermont.
Yankee Magazine publisher Brook Holmberg said the new magazine is a custom publication that will run lifestyle and feature stories aimed at showing and promoting Vermont culture and tradition.
The company will have editorial control; the magazine will be emailed to the 1 million people who have signed up to receive emails from the store, said Geof Brown, executive vice president of the Weston-based Vermont Country Store.
For now, most of the content is pulled from the Yankee Magazine archives, but Holmberg said he will run some new feature pieces in each issue. The first edition came out in May and the second in September; the creators hope to make it a quarterly. It will focus on southern Vermont. Yankee is based in Dublin, N.H.
Individual companies won’t pay to be featured in stories, and sponsored content and ads will be clearly marked as such, Holmberg said. But “it’s a custom product,” he said. “It’s Yankee content but approved by Vermont Country Store because they’re in that sense the buyer, so we give them stories to look at, they tell us which ones they like the best.”
Brown said Our Vermont is intended as an advertising vehicle for southern Vermont events and places. A notice on the masthead tells readers that Yankee Magazine is producing the publication for the Vermont Country Store.
“This is truly a lifestyle feature magazine,” he said. “Editorial independence is really not part of what the thought process is behind this; it really is about fun, engaging, and more aspirational stories than anything else.”
Private companies are increasingly using traditional-seeming media such as magazines to create their own advertising products. One reason is that traditional publications themselves are shrinking, said Dan Kennedy, an associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University who often speaks about business models for news.
“The money for independent journalism is growing scarcer and scarcer, and for a company that wants to subsidize something like that for its own commercial interests, it makes sense they would try to fill the void being left behind by independent journalism that just can’t pay for itself,” Kennedy said.
It’s critical that this type of publication disclose to readers that it’s not editorially independent, he noted. “An awful lot of problems go away when you have really full and forthright disclosure,” Kennedy said.
The magazine is online-only now, but Holmberg said the creators will consider a print edition if they find the sponsors and subscribers to pay for that move in the future.
Brown said the idea for the magazine came about because the two companies have worked together before.
“There’s a lot of history between the two companies going many years back,” he said. “Their company is family-held just like this one is; they have a lot of the same ways of viewing business, our community, being responsible to New England.”
