Emap - what next?

Emap’s share price jumped 12% on Friday after it said it would carve itself up. Such is the value the managers have destroyed that analysts reckon the company could be worth more than £2.6bn once split - getting on for double its market capitalisation a week ago. The Times and Sunday Times report that private equity goup Apax wants the B2B division for £1.3bn.

In a follow-up piece, the paper reckons that ‘The fundamental problem with Emap is that nobody has been able to explain satisfactorily how the various parts of its empire click.’

And things have got so bad that ‘Emap is keen to avoid … being left with the more difficult magazine assets’ - by which it means the consumer magazines such as FHM!

Bed, bog, bath and calculators

Stevie Spring insisted that magazines would  always have a place because they had a ‘bed, bog, bath’ element in a Times interview just after she had taken over as Future boss.

It was a good line then and it’s a good one now. Peter Preston has looked at such things from a newspaper point of view in Today’s Observer. He considers the pros and cons of ‘paperless’ newspapers (isn’t there one too many papers in that phrase?)  but points out that there is no concensus in the industry on the way to go. The weakest papers - Independent, Expresses - who you might think would want to make the jump, have made the weakest investment in the digital media. It will take a newcomer without print baggage to shift things.

Media Week did its feature ‘10 reasons why magazines have a great future’ a couple of weeks ago.

But remember the 2000 campaign Microsoft ran in US magazines such as Brill’s Content for its e-book reader? (What’s an e-book reader? I hear you cry.) It ran:

‘2005: The sales of e-book titles, e-magazines and e-newspapers top $1 billion’; and

‘2020 Ninety per cent of all titles are now sold in electronic as well as paper form. Websters [US dictionary] alters its first definition of the word ‘book’ to refer to e-book titles read on screen.’

(Can’t give you a web link for this because it has, strangely, disappeared from Microsoft’s website.)

The thing about forecasting change is that some unseen technology comes along (or in the case of the e-book reader fails to come along very well) to mess it all up and make the forecasts look ridiculous.

Another good example was Gerry Anderson’s UFO from 1970. This had aliens invading earth met by a secret defence force with bases on the moon, submarines shooting interceptor aircraft into the air and artificially-intelligent satellites. There were wireless phones and everyone had a strange object attached to their belts.  What were these things? Slide-rules - the inventor of Thunderbirds had never thought of calculators!

Emap throws in the towel

This morning’s press release from Emap was phrased in the language of the City, but to those used to reading the runes, it spells the end of the company as a major force in magazine publishing:

‘The Board of Emap today announces that, in response to various unsolicited proposals it has received recently for parts of the Group, it is undertaking a review of Emap’s group structure and portfolio of assets. All options to maximise shareholder value will be examined, including a possible sale or demerger of some or all of its constituent businesses. Citi and Lazard have been retained by the Board of Emap to assist on the review’

How did they manage to piss it all away?

It looks as if chairman Alun Cathcart will oversee the group being split into three parts - consumer titles, B2B magazines and radio so it can more easily be sold off.

After Tom Moloney went in May I said that Emap was ‘unlikely to be spoilt for choice’ for a new chief executive. That has proved the case - the company is still looking, but why bother now?

Emap switches tack

Emap’s website describes the company as ‘Consumer magazines, b2b, commercial radio, television’. Yet a press release today uses the description ‘Emap plc, the B2B and consumer media group’ even though the release is about a music TV deal. So is B2B the way it wants to go?

Writ large

I came across a copy of Reader’s Digest in a large print edition. Take the usual A5-ish format and blow it up to A4-ish size. It’s also printed on matt paper to reduce reflection from the pages. With a massive expansion in the over-50s population, this has to be a growing market. Which title will be next? Glamour?

Dow Jones and Murdoch: be afraid, be very afraid

The Business has reported that Murdoch has got his Dow Jones deal to take over the Wall Street Journal with only some loose ends to tie up. Note this part of the story:

‘The arrangement [to protect editorial independence] is a tougher version of the one put in place by the British government when Murdoch bought The Times and The Sunday Times in 1981. Murdoch will have less control over the independent directors at the Journal than he does at Times Newspapers, where they are regarded as weak and ineffectual. But one source, acting for the Bancrofts, admitted privately that the Dow independent panel was only a “fig leaf” to facilitate the sale and that over time Murdoch would get round it.

‘John Biffen, the Tory cabinet minister who signed off on 1981 deal to establish independent directors for Times Newspapers in London, has since conceded that the arrangement was also a “fig leaf” designed to allow the sale to proceed.’

The report was written by Andrew Neil and James Forsyth. Neil should know about such things - he was editor of the Sunday Times under Murdoch.

Murdoch forced out Harry Evans, editor of the Times, even though he had appointed him from the Sunday Times. According to Murdoch, Evans went from being a great editor on the Sunday to a bad one on the daily. Does the same fate await Robert Thomson, who lost out in the race for editorship of the Financial Times, but was taken on by Murdoch as Times editor and is now tipped for the top job at the Wall St Journal?

Eye-catching

Best cover I’ve seen this week in Canada goes to the June issue of French magazine Philosophie, which has a girl with beetles for eyes! Looking at the back issues, it does a good line in surreal covers.

A better Daily Grind

This posting again comes from Halifax in canada, where I’ve just come in from The Daily Grind. In this case, that’s a big news agent with a coffee shop at the back, a book shop next door and a pub above.

Among my reading is Macleans - a Canadian news weekly from Rogers, the country’s biggest magazine publisher - and The Walrus, which looks just like The New Yorker.

The cover story on Macleans  is about trying to forecast the end of the Harry Potter series (Will Harry Die?). The story that caught my eye was that of a soldier, Chris Karigiannis,  who had written in to praise a wistful-looking girl on a recent cover of the magazine but had been killed in Afghanistan.  

Going digital

The US title publishing trade title Folio has been advertising its digital magazines channel on Magforum.com. The channel is very heavily sponsored but there’s some interesting stuff in the articles archive. Anyone who lived through the hype around CD-Rom - remember all those multimedia digital magazine such as Blender from Dennis and IPC’s Unzip circa 1985?- will have the requisite level of scepticism.

Agency or publisher?

There’s been some debate around about whether a contract publisher is an agency (as in advertising) or a publisher with editorial credibility (see Folio). For Mike Potter, one of the founders of Redwood, the answer was definitely ‘agency’ (he came from ad sales at Haymarket) but the company had editorial credibility in Chris Ward - former editor of the Daily Express (whose big splash was ‘Intruder at the Queen’s bedside). The company also hired big names such as Peter Crookston (former editor of both Nova and the Observer Magazine) and Tony Hilton (Times Washington correspondent).

Being owned by the BBC for several years and launching most of the BBC titles didn’t do any harm either. It was Potter who drove the establishment of the Association of Publishing Agencies and Redwood is now owned by an advertising agency.

But a piece on the APA website really marks the divide: ‘Proof that Redwood is an agency rather than a traditional publisher, lies in employee benefits that include a company yoga teacher and reflexologist, birthdays off and a Christmas shopping half-day.’