Dennis sees money in digital

Dennis Publishing chief James Tye has predicted that the publisher of The Week and Maxim will generate more than half of its advertising revenue from online within two years.
Dennis profile

Celeb bodies shift print

The twin obsessions of celebrity and body image are driving sales of the best-selling magazines in Australia. Celeb gossip titles have combined sales of 1.4 million copies a week and readership of almost 6.5 million.

Emap sells trade titles for £1bn

Emap has done a U-turn and sold its business-to-business magazines to Guardian Media Group and private equity firm Apax – which owns Incisive – for £1bn. The new company is to be called Incisive-Emap.

The sudden move came only two weeks after the company had scrapped the division’s sale and vowed to carry on as a trade publisher after selling its consumer magazines and radio stations to H Bauer.

But GMG, publisher of the Guardian and Observer, and Apax returned with a higher offer. Guardian report; formal release.

Incisive profile

Magazine design conference at St Bride’s

St Bride’s printing library – next door to the journalists’ church at the east end of Fleet Street – is running a one-day conference about magazine design  on Friday January 25. Last year’s on newspapers was excellent. Speakers will include Tony Chambers (Wallpaper*), Luke Hayman (New Yorker, Time), Jeremy Leslie (MagCulture blog, author of magCulture and design director at John Brown), William Owen (author of Modern Magazine Design), Paul Rennie (Central St Martin’s) and Simon Esterson (Blueprint, Eye and one of the UK’s 200 RDIs).

Christmas present for Joan Collins fans

The mention of Joan Collins a few months ago brought her fans out of the woodwork, so I’ve added a Picture Post cover to the Collins page – Merry Christmas Jaypeg!

Whither Emap?

The thought of Emap focusing on business magazines doesn’t inspire staff according to one insider quoted by Press Gazette: ‘The thing that worries staff is the people who got us into that mess in the first place are still here and are now running the entire company. If there will be significant change, it will be at senior management level.’

Call a doctor

Elsevier is to close three of its weekly titles Doctor, Hospital Doctor and Update (Press Gazette). I worked on the first two of these titles – when they ran a combined 200-plus tabloid pages a week from Guildford High Street competing with Haymarket’s GP and (then) Morgan Grampian’s Pulse.

They were then cash cows for small publisher Sutton-Seibert, full of adverts by drug companies. What happened?

Howarth’s Telegraph role

Former Esquire editor Peter Howarth has popped up working for the Sunday Telegraph‘s soon-to-be-launched men’s magazine, ST Men (logo above). He runs Show Media.

Digital turn-on

CBS in the US has identified ‘some truly unique, next-generation items capable of exciting even the non-techie’ for Christmas presents. They include Amazon’s Kindle reader and a wallet with a digital photo display.

The rise of customer magazines

Four of Sweden’s top 10 magazines by circulation are now customer titles. In the UK, the figure is eight and in the Netherlands, five, according to a feature in FT Deutschland. The paper’s website has the article in English with German translations that pop up for tricky words such as ‘mushroomed’ (wie Pilze aus dem Boden schießen). And as long as it uses phrases such as ‘heavy-handed encomium’ it’s going to need that glossary.