That Special Treatment

While some mass circulation magazines are having their troubles, with advertisers if not readers, specialty magazines are springing up all over, aimed at particular regions, races or interests. A sampling of newcomers:

BLACK SPORTS is a 50-c- monthly dedicated to providing depth and dimension to the coverage of black athletes--"something beyond salary figures and statistics," in the words of Publisher Allan Barren, a bush-bearded black from New Jersey who once ran a computer company. The first issue adds little to the public's considerable knowledge of such obvious star subjects as pro basketball's Lew Alcindor and Oscar Robertson and football's Matt Snell. But Barren hopes to develop other healthy heroes for young blacks, who, he claims, "now identify only with guys on the block, like pimps and pushers." Because he could not find a qualified black to serve as editor, Barren appointed a white friend, Freelancer Joseph Hemingway, to head an otherwise all-black editorial staff.

SEXUAL BEHAVIOR, a $1 monthly, bills itself as a "serious magazine devoted to authoritative information about sex" and appears to be inspired by the successful Psychology Today. Its editor, Dr. Harold Lief, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, feels that "Americans are estranged from sexuality. They are ashamed of their desires." Despite such spicy cover come-ons as "57 Reasons a Wife May Decline Sex" and "Are We a Nation of Breast Worshipers?". Sexual Behavior seems almost ashamed of its subject. Most of the articles are by M.D.s and Ph.D.s and so mustily mid-Victorian in style and tone that educated adults will not discover much they did not find out about in schoolyard bull sessions as kids.

ON THE SOUND is the brainchild of Editor Roy Rowan, a former assistant managing editor of LIFE. A slick monthly that sells for $2, it is aimed at the 4,000,000 people who live on or near Long Island Sound. "Our readers are genuinely affluent, educated people," Rowan says, "who share a certain location and lifestyle and have common interests." Subject matter is a mixture of leisure and concerned ecology, stressing to Sound dwellers the joy of sailing on it or swim ming in it and the horrors of bilge-blowing tankers befouling it.

AUDIENCE is a hard-cover bimonthly that virtually commands affluence from its readers. It costs $4.95 a copy and is a melange of Esquire and Horizon, with the flair of the long-dead peekaboo Flair. Book adaptations and artsy photographic portfolios are mixed with nonfiction articles that seem to have a very limited audience indeed. Example: "How I Rode with Harold Lewis on a Diesel Freight Train Down to Gridley, Kansas, and Back," which turns out to be exactly that.

CLEAR CREEK is perhaps the best of the many new ecology magazines. A quarter-fold tabloid in the manner of such hip-style San Francisco predecessors as Rolling Stone and the late Earth Times, the 500 monthly is described, somewhat pretentiously, by Editor Pennfield Jensen as "a journal of the bio-renaissance dedicated to positive thought and action. " The first issue examined in detail the whys and wherefores of the big January oil spill in San Francisco Bay and publicized a little-known fight to save an obscure Texas wilderness known as Big Thicket. The current number contains a well-documented article on the dangers of lead poisoning. Promised in an upcoming issue: a look at how Soviet socialism relates to its natural environment.

GRAND DIPLOME COOKING COURSE comes to the U.S. from Britain via Canada as a 72-week exercise in correspondence cookery, priced at 950 a weekly issue. It holds out hope that anyone who has ever hefted a hamburger can learn to cook at home "in the manner of the great French chefs." There are, of course, no guarantees. Each installment gets more difficult: last week's featured such goodies as haddock mousse and a passel of paellas. Julia Child, co-author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, says she thinks Grand Diplome looks "pretty good." The U.S. edition is published in Maple Plain, Minn., which is a long way from Paris no matter how you look at it.

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