Celebrations, a magazine for Disney fans, will launch in mid-October. The magazine is not owned by or affiliated with the Walt Disney Co.
The magazine will be distributed every other month to an international subscriber base of “several thousand” said Tim Foster, co-editor and founder of Celebrations. Additional copies will be distributed at various Disney fan meet-ups throughout the US.
“The Disney audience is obviously huge — something like 20 million people visit the parks every year — so it’s a big opportunity,” Foster said. “The other opportunity is that Disney had a magazine of its own, but it ceased publication a few years back. Since that time, there has been a void for a magazine like this, and people really want to have one to fill that gap.”
Foster and co-editor Lou Mongello are both authors of Disney guidebooks, as are many of Celebrations’ contributing writers. Initially, Celebrations will depend on the established Web sites and blogs of these writers for grassroots promotion to Disney fans. Mongello’s weekly Disney podcast, which draws in around 30,000 listeners, will also promote the magazine. Further PR and marketing activities will follow the magazine’s launch, and a robust Web site is in the works as well.
Eventually, Foster said, he would like the magazine’s audience to extend beyond the die-hard fans.
“There is a smaller group of loyal Disney fans that go to all the fan meets and listen to the podcasts, and up until now a lot of us have mostly dealt with those people,” Foster pointed out. “One thing we’re hoping to do with the magazine is reach well beyond that community to people who are Disney fans but might not be podcast listeners and go all over the country: the family that goes once a year, for example. We feel those people aren’t really addressed by a lot of us right now and that’s where all our PR and marketing will come in.”
The Walt Disney Co. launched a new fan magazine, Disney En Familia, in July of this year. It targets Hispanic moms in the US.
