Whatever you do, don’t mess about with fancy typefaces in marketing letters - it can cut response by 20%! Moving away from Courier is one of the 15 marketing blunders in Peter Hobday’s article for the Nov/Dec issue of In Circulation magazine. Fancy four-colour promotions are also a waste of money: ‘The words do the selling, not the gloss,’ he says.
The Editorial Design Organisation credits Mark Porter as being creative director of Conde Nast UK. The Guardian design department doesn’t know that (it thinks he’s their creative director) and the magazine gurus in Vogue House don’t know it. Meanwhile, Porter himself is away. Get along to the December EDO meeting to discover whether it’s truth, a publicity stunt or a literal…
Porter is down to debate the topic ‘The web needs magazines more than magazines need the web’ next year alongside Haymarket’s Simon Kanter. Kanter has a long history with new media. As long ago as 1993, he produced a CD-Rom holding a review of a Saab saloon for Haymarket’s What Car? and XYZ magazines.
Drat… Mark has responded - ‘Oops no idea how that happened … I’m Creative Director of Guardian News & Media, and I expect to be for some time!’
Bang goes that piece of gossip!
The Times launched Luxx, a luxury supplement in both print and digital formats, at the weekend. It’s clearly a way of taking a pop at the FT’s How to Spent It - and features two of that title’s creators in its make-up. Times editor Robert Thomson, who made his name expanding the FT’s Saturday edition, which carried HTSI, has written an intro for the title and one of the writers is Lucia van der Post, who was the original editor.
Times magazine style director Tina Gaudoin - who famously revealed in the Guardian that her son’s first words were ‘daddy’ and ‘taxi’ as she ran the ‘SAS assault course’ that was her life editing Frank magazine in 1998 - is Luxx editor.
It’s interesting to look at the two digital editions, both of which use ‘page-turning’ software. However, HTSI seems to work more elegantly and its page layouts are more elegant too. Luxx looks like a cut-down version of a magazine, more there to put the ads online than the real magazine. The limited amount of text does make it easier to read however.
Unlike HTSI, Luxx has animated elements with the cover model seeming to bow her head and video sequences built into the pages.
Overall though, the simplistic look of Luxx and almost childish interactive elements seem more redolent of Dennis’s Monkey than a top-of-the-market freebie (except the ads, of course).
Two good features to listen to on the Radio 4 website before they run out. First, Andrew Neil on the great editors of Fleet Street, from CP Scott to Kelvin McKenzie. His theme is that the best editors were big characters who imposed their character on their papers and made their readers share their enthusiasms - however, they had to have the backing of their proprietors.
One of the best bits is a rarely heard Mail editor Paul Dacre on Desert Island Discs. His luxury - a subscription to the Guardian because its sanctimonious twaddle would be enough to drive him to get off the island!
Second, very different, Katherine Whitehorn reading her autobiography Selective Memory (’Who’s that plummy voice? I was asked as I listened this morning). The episode has her looking back on her time as assistant editor of Woman in 1959. What frustrated her was what the magazine left out - including mentions of the words ’sex’ and ‘masturbation’ to ensure it didn’t upset the Catholic Church in Ireland.
That was what drove her to leave to end up on the Observer for 40 years and change the way women were catered for by newspapers.
Look for the Listen Again section on the Radio 4 website.
Portraits taken for Vanity Fair covering the period 1913-36 and 1983-2008 are to go on show at the National Portrait Gallery in February.
Virginia Woolf, Demi Moore, Louis Armstrong, Noel Coward and Gloria Swanson (pictured above in 1924) are among the 150 images chosen for the exhibition.
Terence Pepper, curator of photographs at the gallery, is regarded as having shaken up its exhibitions - until 1970, only portraits of those who had been dead for 10 years were admitted to the collection.
NPG decisions that have made the news include the Mario Testino exhibition in 2002; replacing a photograph of Peter Mandelson with one of Victoria and David Beckham in 2002; a pop exhibition in 1999; and using a BMX rider in 2006.
IPC’s Woman is claiming to be the first of the traditional weekly titles to run a celebrity wedding on its cover. In this case, editor Jackie Hatton has no doubt paid millions for an exclusive on Coleen Nolan’s tie-up with Ray Fensome.
It will be intriguing to see whether linking up with the presenter of afternoon TV show Loose Women, who was a singer with The Nolans and was once married to Shane Richie, has a column in Woman, and appears in Iceland adverts, will turn the title’s declining sales around (down from 417,362 in the first half of 1996 to 369,982 in the same period for this year).
Celebrity and teen magazines are fuelling a culture that is causing schoolgirls to develop a “distorted” body image, a senior teacher has suggested. The Telegraph reports that Kate Moss is seen as a role model.
Press Gazette reports that Emap has asked potential bidders interested in its business-to-business magazines to consider buying the company’s PLC structure as well.
The new Editorial Design group set up by Paul Harpin (Haymarket) and Jeremy Leslie (John Brown, Magculture blog) didn’t manage to get off the ground on Nov 22. However, a Christmas drink is planned at IPC’s Blue Fin building on December 10 and Neville Brody is to join a debate next year.
It might sound a bit rich coming from someone who works for Rupert Murdoch, but Times Online editor Anne Spackman has accused Google of acting ‘a little bit too much like Big Brother’.
Journalism.co.uk reports her telling the Society of Editors conference: ‘I think Google is hugely dangerous. Its move into DNA is a massive threat. I wonder whether we will all start feeling that they are behaving a little bit too much like big brother.’
