New Magazine Takes Aim at S. D. Yuppies

Jean Henshaw and Mark L. Barlow are well aware of the risk. Fledgling newspapers and magazines start up and fail as often as roses lose their bloom. Henshaw and Barlow insist their experience will be different, that their initiative will be stapled with success.

Henshaw is the editor, Barlow is the publisher. The magazine is The Source for San Diego, a weekly with a debut issue scheduled for mid-July.

They insist they won’t be competing with the well-entrenched San Diego Reader, but The Source plans a publication date of Thursday--same as the Reader. And the primary market The Source is aiming for is the same as that of the Reader--the ever-growing, happy-to-spend, corporate-ladder-climbing horde known as “yuppies.”

“We won’t be doing investigative reporting,” said Henshaw, 30, a veteran of several North County newspapers. “We’re not out to get anybody. We’re not out to find dirt. We’re not ’60 Minutes’. We’re out to enjoy things and show them to others. We want to know what the cleaning lady does with her day, the bus driver, the janitor . . . . We want to know what happens on a Friday night at Confetti. We want to know about the Wisconsin Club, the Iowa Club. The dailies do stories like this occasionally, but not nearly enough.”

A Little Bit Like a Small-Town Newspaper

“We want to be a little bit like a small-town newspaper,” Barlow said. “You know, where everybody sees their name and picture in the paper at least once a year.”

“Well, we don’t really want to be like a small-town paper,” Henshaw said.

Laughingly conceding that putting the names and photographs of more than a million people in the magazine might be a thorny task, Barlow quickly added that the emphasis of The Source will be “local, local, local. How often do you read in the dailies of the local triathlete or rugby star? The heroes of local lacrosse teams? Local bands, such as the Beat Farmers or Mojo Nixon? We want to be like the one-stop shopping publication, all things to all people.”

Barlow, 29, moved to San Diego eight years ago from Phoenix, where he helped start a franchise for the Florida-based Trader Publications. That’s an outfit that publishes glorified classified-ad magazines, such as Auto Trader, Truck Trader, House Trader and Cycle, Boat and RV Trader.

Brento Corp, which is based in San Diego and holds the franchise for San Diego’s Trader Publications, is the parent for Barlow’s new magazine. He and Henshaw say The Source will “piggyback” Trader publications, using the same newsstands on the same day. Thus, its distribution and circulation mechanism is already in place. Barlow calls that “half the battle” of any new venture in publishing.

He said The Source is hoping for a circulation in excess of 40,000 in two years but that no make-or-break “cutoff” has been talked about, much less assessed. He said The Source will be given at least a year. He, like Henshaw, is confident--at least publicly--of a much-longer run.

Potential Glut of Publications for Yuppies

He concedes a potential glut of yuppie-oriented publications, and with dozens of options now confronting them in their busy lives, when will such readers have time to see The Source?

“It could turn out that nobody likes the magazine,” Barlow said, “but I just can’t imagine that. We’ll have so many informative pieces. We’ll appeal to a broad range of people.”

The Source will run about 200 pages and cost $1.95 an issue. It will be available on a subscription basis, at about $1.25 an issue. (The Reader is free.) Barlow sees its “target group” as adults in the 18 to 40 range.

Henshaw said The Source will have “good writers, some of the best in the county.” Asked to name a few, she said, “Oh, just people I know.”

Much of the copy will be compiled by free-lance writers, with a few young, bright, optimistic staff members--full-time employees--already in place. These include associate editor Dan Bennett, who will double as entertainment editor and film critic; business editor Jim Hemphill; sports editor Marc Appleman, and art director Crystal Vanterve.

Henshaw hopes her writers will fill a void that she says local daily newspapers have created. She promises, in the countywide focus of The Source, an emphasis on “humor writing, of which the dailies do little. Certainly, they have columnists who do humor but not much. We’ll have parodies and puns, really sassy writing.”

“Sassy?” Barlow asked.

“OK, tongue-in-cheek,” Henshaw said.

“That’s better than sassy,” Barlow said.

“We want to have fun ,” Henshaw said. “We won’t be staid and stodgy. Not that the dailies are . . . but we’ll be far from it. We’ll be fun . I mean, why not a story on all the snowbirds gathered around the Marriott?

“You know, a lot of people say San Diego has no culture. But it’s teeming with culture. It’s just hidden. San Diego doesn’t really guffaw, it chuckles. It’s not a blatant place. It’s subtle, Horton Plaza to the contrary. San Diego doesn’t take itself seriously.”

Neither will The Source, Henshaw said, but Barlow added that it will be serious and “should” succeed. Looking out the window of his office in the Miramar area, he said The Source hopes to be like the “Top Gun” fighter jets climbing ever higher into the sky.

It hopes to ascend into the heavens, he said, with an edge the competition just doesn’t have.