Town magazine – cover gallery

Town in December 1962

Magforum’s gallery of Town magazines is nearly complete – just two missing (February and March 1966). Thanks to Chris Gregory, Neil Raphael and Mark Isaacs for their contributions.

Anyone got the last two?

Tricky magazine cover design

Maxim foldout cover

Designing a magazine’s front cover can involve more than choosing an image and writing the cover lines. Now, Magforum, the magazine website, has put up several pages about the special effects and types of covers that publishers use to attract buyers – foldouts, dropdowns and gatefolds so far.

Hillman, Boxer, Puttnam and London Life

London Life cover

It should have been a dream team – David Hillman on design, Duffy, Donovan and Bailey as ‘photographic advisers, and Jean Shrimpton as  a guest fashion editor, all under editor Mark Boxer, with David Puttnam thrown in for fun. But weekly London Life – a Tatler for the swinging sixties – folded after a couple of years.

When you read the feature about it all in this month’s Creative Review, it becomes clear what went wrong – money flowing out of every orifice in the office. Hand-made type, hot metal setting, even a Burt Bacharach single written to promote it!

A copy of the subscriber-only supplement of London Life spreads and covers is already going on Ebay for £3.20 after 4 bids.

London Life at Magforum.com

Tip for the chaps from Men Only

A tip from cartoonist Wm Scully on how to attract the girls – read the Financial Times! Men Only was a pocket magazine and probably the best-selling men’s lifestyle monthly in 1955.

History of Men Only

Menzies closes digital arm

Menzies has  closed is digital magazines arm, Magazines On Demand, because of lack of demand.

Hello! and Mail take on OK! / Express

Hello cover

Celebrity weekly Hello! has signed a distribution deal with Daily Mail owner Associated Newspapers so it will appear in newsagents on Monday, a day before arch rival OK! – owned by Richard Desmond alongside the Daily and Sunday Express - and its other competitors, including Bauer’s Heat and IPC’s Now!.

Publishing director Charlotte Stockting tells the Observer it should boost Hello!’s 420,000 weekly sale by 20,000-30,000 copies.

Celeb mags have long fought using cover price, and by buying up big wedding exclusives; now it’s a race to get on the shelves.

New take on lack of black models

The opening up of the Eastern bloc in the 1990s spelled disaster for black models and their images on magazine covers, according to a report about a Women’s Library meeting. ‘The tall, willowy, “bland” blue-eyed look of models such as Natalia Vodianova became the aesthetic of choice for couture designers,’ says Nell Frizzell at Journalism.co.uk.

Women’s glossies A-Z

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Tyler Brule keeps focus on Monocle

Monocle May 2009 - issue 23

Tyler Brule has castigated newspapers for their lack of confidence in the face of the web onslaught. And according to a Times interview by Dan Sabbagh, he is showing them the way to go, with sales for his international monthly Monocle at 150,000. However, the piece fails to point out that this is the same figure quoted a year ago.

The strategy for ‘the ridiculously upmarket, black, perfect-bound monthly’ appears to be to find fans and then give them lots of ways to fill the magazine’s coffers – they can step into Monocle shops or pay extra as a subscriber or buy lots of branded products by post to demonstrate their continent-hopping lifestyles.  Newspapers, by contrast, fail to build on their ‘fan base’:

Compare this model with the way in which newspapers go about their business. Paying readers have a real emotional tie to the titles they buy – the fact newspapers are used for dating demonstrates that – but online the industry seems seduced by a different measure. The perpetual chase for monthly unique users makes the mistake of valuing each visitor equally, when Dorothy, a teenager from Kansas, reading a story about Britney found via Google News is not worth the same as Brendan from Brentwood who visits every day. And yet, all that is known about the loyal readers is their internet address, unless they have had the willpower to complete an online survey. It is daily unique vistors that really matter.

The piece exudes confidence on the part of Brule despite the stagnant sales. At least Monocle is still on the shelves while all around competing current affairs magazines are having a hard time – Conde Nast has closed Portfolio in the US and weekly Vanity Fair in Germany while Spectator Business has dropped its monthly frequency to quarterly.

Monocle launch and current affairs magazine

Now it’s virtual Buck for men

Pyjama style from Buck

Steve Doyle sank a chunk of his inheritance into launching men’s monthly style title Buck last year. But the cash ran out after three issues, the revenue wasn’t there and nor were any new investors. So he announced it was going twice yearly, but that plan has been dropped and instead the Buck team ‘decided our efforts would be better realised in a new-look website’.  Now, Buckstyle is the place to go.

Men’s magazines A-Z at Magforum

IPC puts finger on mercenary loyalty

IPC men's research

IPC has just put out research on men’s behaviour – Today’s Man. It covers brands and purchase decisions and includes the statistics:

• 48% are less likely to be loyal to brands since the credit crunch
• 79% agree they are now more likely to buy a brand if it’s on offer

and gives another example of the way marketing subverts and destroys language and meaning.

‘Loyal’ should mean ’showing firm and constant support or allegiance to a person or institution’ yet here it adds the rider: ‘as long as you pay me to be’. This mercenary attitude is best seen in ‘loyalty cards’.

You can add this to ‘housing estates’ – not long before the word ’sink’ creeps in;  ‘business parks’ – where’s the recreation in that?; and the claim that because people buy or use something, it is their ‘favourite’.

No wonder so many MPs seem to think ‘expenses’ means ‘part of my salary’.