Magazine

Several new magazines have come to life in the Baltimore area. The women who brought us Maryland Family Magazine, The Best Darned Camp Guide Ever and The Guide to Area Services, Rudy Miller and Sylvia Shapiro, have published the premiere issue of Fifty Plus.The fact that baby boomers are (finally) growing up and will be turning 50 at the rate of about 4 million a year soon, prompted Rudy's group to get on the early bandwagon. Fifty Plus is filled with interesting articles about your options should you lose your job and stories on finances, health, travel and sex.It's a free quarterly magazine, available at about 350 locations in the metropolitan area.

Warfield's, a glossy, twice-monthly business magazine, will hit the newsstands in Baltimore for the last time tomorrow after five years of publication.Edwin Warfield 4th, publisher of the magazine, said yesterday the magazine will be replaced starting Jan. 10 with a new weekly newspaper called Warfield's Business Record.The tabloid-size paper will be a complement to Warfield's other publication, the Daily Record."Changing economic times call for a different approach, and in a never-ending quest to serve the local business community, we thought it time for something new," Warfield said.

'Urbanite,' a free monthly magazine focused on urban affairs in the Baltimore area, will go out of business at the end of September, publisher Tracy Ward said Friday.   She said the print magazine now on the street is the last, and that the website will most likely go dark as of Oct. 1 "for the foreseeable future," even though she herself will probably keep working through the end of the year to tie up loose ends. Ward has owned the publication for almost a decade.   "A lot of people rallied around it," she said in telephone interview Friday afternoon.

Baltimore-based Girls' Life magazine has agreed to pay $30,000 to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that the publication's Web site improperly collected personal information from its young readers. Two other companies that provide e-mail and message boards for young people also agreed to pay $35,000 each as part of the settlement of the FTC's first case accusing Web site operators of violating a year-old law aimed at protecting children's privacy online. Karen Bokram, editor and founder of Girls' Life, said the magazine requested addresses and telephone numbers online for change-of-address forms or when girls submitted poetry to the magazine.

Swing -- the latest slick-and-glossy magazine aimed at twentysomethings -- tries to buck the stereotype of Generation X slacking, offering instead a vision of twentysomething empowerment. If its founder and editor -- 23-year-old publishing neophyte David Lauren, son of Ralph -- has his way, media portrayal of disaffected twentysomething whining will be replaced with "I think I can, I think I can" derring-do."I want to inspire this generation," says Mr. Lauren from his New York office on Madison Avenue.

When she set out to start a new magazine, Linda Schafer brushed off thoughts of the shaky economy, shrinking advertising budgets and other publications' struggles.She had a more pressing concern on her mind -- meeting a nice guy.The attractive, 39-year-old mother of two figured she couldn't be the only single person too busy with work and children to meet anyone. Nor could she be the only one with no inclination to cruise the bars.But a magazine might work, she decided. So with no background in publishing and only limited business experience, she is launching Singles magazine from her Pasadena home.

Who can stake a claim to today's America? Is it American Magazine, a do-it-yourself publication out of Memphis with a relentlessly sunny, rural disposition? The magazine was muscled into existence last year by J. Mignonne Wright, an independent publishing executive, when she walked into a Wal-Mart with a few pages of ideas and came away with a commitment for distribution. Or is it America magazine, which uses a musical movement to assert its dominion over pop culture? This lush slab of a publication, conceived by Smokey D. Fontaine, a former editor of The Source, has the backing of the hip-hop entrepreneur Damon Dash.

Not content with using only traditional media to spread its economic development message, Baltimore has become one of the first four advertisers to post a commercial message on Business Week's new electronic magazine.Business Week Online, launched Dec. 30, is accessible through the America Online computer communications service, which reaches an estimated 1.5 million subscribers.Computer users who click on Baltimore's listing see a headline and block of text, illustrated by a color photograph of the Inner Harbor at night.

Student achiever: Lauren Won, 9. School: Waverly Elementary School. Special achievement: She had a poem and a story published in Discovery magazine as part of the Maryland Writing Project sponsored by Towson University. What she says about it: "My principal, JoanneFerguson, called my mom to tell, and my mom kept it a secret for a while. I didn't know that I was getting published until I saw the magazine at school. I was surprised and kind of proud." How she likes to spend her time: "I like to read, even in the car. I like to play with my younger sister, who has the same birthday I have.

If a new promotional gambit by Britain's venerable magazine The Economist proves successful, perhaps one day the quintessential marketing query "Will it play in Peoria?" will be supplanted by "Will it be boffo in Baltimore?" The Economist, a weekly published by the British company Pearson, is using Baltimore - chosen because it is a typical American market for the magazine - to test a new effort to increase newsstand and subscription sales, along with brand awareness. The test involves employees of the magazine and four agencies on both sides of the Atlantic.