Tape-Of-the-month Club

By Richard Zoglin

Tom Selleck, lounging on the set of his movie An Innocent Man, talks about why he seeks diversity in his film roles. Loretta Swit fights back tears as she receives a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame. L.A. Law's Susan Ruttan reminisces about her days as a secretary. The fluffy show-biz features may be numbingly familiar to anyone who has ever watched Entertainment Tonight or read PEOPLE magazine. But this batch has been packaged in a way that could be groundbreaking. They are part of Persona, the most ambitious new entry in a small but blooming field: the video magazine.

The idea seems a natural. Like print magazines, video magazines are published on a regular basis (usually bimonthly or quarterly) and are sold by subscription as well as individually (average cost: about $20 an issue). The genre was launched in 1981 with Videofashion Monthly, a slick roundup of fashion news, and a handful of other video magazines came and went during the '80s. Now the proliferation of VCRs (in nearly 70% of U.S. homes today), and the growing number of people who are buying and not just renting tapes, have inspired a host of entrepreneurs to give the infant field another try.

Persona, a monthly potpourri of show-biz interviews and features, is getting the biggest push. After eight months of test-marketing, the magazine is poised for a nationwide rollout in June. Unlike most of its predecessors, Persona will be aimed at a mass audience. It will get wide distribution at supermarket check-out stands and other retail outlets. And it will be priced at a low, low $4.95. That is scarcely more than the cost of a blank cassette; Persona's advertising will even point out that the tape can be reused after viewing (as can all prerecorded tapes, with a little tinkering). Reason for the cut-rate price: the two-hour program includes 20 minutes of commercials.

Counterfuls of other video magazines are also sprouting. Inside Country Music, a Nashville-based bimonthly, will begin appearing in stores nationwide in mid-May (cost: $19.95 an issue, $59.95 for a year's subscription). Rock- oriented vidmagazines like Hard 'N' Heavy are doing good business at record stores. Video magazines are being produced on golf, sailing, fishing, hunting, motorcycling and horsemanship. Nintendo freaks can get how-to-win tips in Secret Video Game Tricks, Codes & Strategies. Expatriate Britons can actually catch up on the telly back home with BBC Video World, a biweekly compilation of the best from the BBC's two channels. "You can accomplish more in video magazines than you can in print magazines," contends Terry Jastrow, head of a joint ABC/Jack Nicklaus Productions venture that publishes the bimonthly Wide World of Golf. "And you have the time to do it in a video magazine that you don't have in a broadcast."

Because many of these magazines are cheaply produced (and look it), they can break even with a relatively small number of subscribers -- say, 10,000 or fewer. More buyers are needed for less specialized tapes, on which more must be spent for production and marketing to reach a mass audience. The question is whether the average consumer can be induced to plunk down the bucks every month for a product that may not be all that distinctive. But stranger things have happened in the annals of home video. Witness the success of America's Funniest Home Videos. Anyone for Funniest Videos to the Editor?

With reporting by William Tynan/New York