If you’ve got time on Friday 25 Feb, get along to the magazine design conference at St Bride’s Library in Fleet St. Great set of speakers - Monocle, Wallpaper, New York, Esterson, Leslie among them. I’ll be in Suffolk - so don’t forget to pop along to the Old Cheshire Cheese after (north side of Fleet St just west past the Telegraph up an alleyway) for a Sam Smith’s at £1.76 a pint!
A good point came up in Jarvis Cocker’s history of fanzines on Radio 4 this week (you can still listen to the second part if you’re quick). It was pointed out that the sort of people who produce these magazines wouldn’t be seen dead doing it on MySpace, so feeding the profits of the industrial-military complex in the form of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
Of course, many people are happy with blogs and social networking sites and some have gone commercial - Viz growing from Chris Donald’s bedroom to a million sales an issue in the late 1980s (and first issues now fetch £950). Private Eye could be described as starting out as a zine too. However, the Luddites prefer paper with its intimacy and sense of personality that they feel cyberspace can’t give. Distribution is through art bookshops or hawking them around wherever will sell them.
The programme goes back to the 1980s in the days of cut and paste and Cow Gum driven by enthusiasm for punk. A mate of mine - Alan Pipes - did one in Guildford called Barbed Wire (The Vapours were the big local band then). Liverpool’s Mercy and Sheffield’s Go get a good mention from Cocker.
The survival - and even growth - of fanzines and non-commercial titles - enthusiastically covered by Jeremy Leslie at Magculture - may well be a sign of a backlash at the increasingly corporate nature of magazines. It’s also where a lot of the fun is being had in terms of freedom to write and design - just as Oz did 35 years ago. Handmade, argumentative, quirky and personal as they are, zines are not going away.
British Library pages on fanzines.
The Bulletin - Australia’s 128-year-old weekly news magazine - has closed. The demise of the ‘Bullie’ has been blamed on competition from websites and expanding weekend newspaper supplements.
ABC News described the title as having been ‘critical in defining Australianness’.
English language news weeklies have a hard time all over the world because of the strength of US titles such as Newsweek and Time - though even these are feeling pressure from online news.
The Week developed a successful UK business strategy, which has also worked in the US - so much so that Felix Dennis kept the title when he sold off the Maxim-based US arm of his magazine empire. However, The Week follows a Victorian model and keeps costs down by summarising other people’s news; it does not publish original writing from writers such as Peter Carey, as The Bulletin did.
The news comes just days after the sons of Australia’s two media dynasties - Lachlan Murdoch and James Packer - joined forces to take private Consolidated Media Holdings, the remnants of the late Kerry Packer’s media empire. CMH owns 25 per cent of PBL Media, which in turn owns Channel Nine, Bulletin publisher ACP and stakes in websites Ninemsn and Carsales.com.au.
Media commentator Harold Mitchell expressed surprise at the closure, given its closeness to the Packer family, which had owned the title since 1961, in a news report video.
However, media analyst Peter Cox said the magazine had been a favourite of the late media mogul Kerry Packer and upon his death, there had been no need to keep it open.
‘Quality journalism is an expensive product and it has low viewership and readership in Australia,’ he said. ‘It’s not a surprise to me at all.’
The issue of The Bulletin dated 23 January 2008 will be the last.
Profile of news weeklies in the UK.
Wal-Mart is cutting 1,000 titles from its magazine stocks - including the Economist, Business Week, Forbes and Fortune. The move will send a shiver through publishers on both sides of the Atlantic as retailers seek to earn more revenue from every square metre of their shops. The retailer sells one in every five of the copies sold in US shops - and owns Asda in the UK.
Quebecor World - printer of some of longest-run magazines and newspaper supplements in the UK - has filed for protection from creditors after failing to negotiate a rescue package from Quebecor, its Montreal-based parent, and a Canadian private-equity fund. Its main plant is at Corby in Northamptonshire and clients include Emap’s Heat.
Is cover-mount frenzy finally on the wane? - that’s one of the questions for Elle’s editor-in-chief Lorraine Candy from James Silver in today’s Guardian (’Free handbags at dawn‘). Her reply:
‘No … cover-mounts and free gifts are not my favourite part of our business, but they are very much part of our culture now and there is no going back. We have to compete in our market and young women expect something extra with their magazine. That said, they are not something Elle has relied upon. Supplements, like this month’s new season fashion guide “the runway edit”, are what we’re about. And this year we’re going to be doing substantially more of them.’
Cover mounts may erode loyalty, but there’s little doubt they increase overall magazine sales. The Spanish women’s press did an experiment about 20 years ago when all the titles dropped their cover mounts for an issue. The result - an overall fall in sales of 30%. The publishers had their wrists slapped by the EU Competition Commission because it was seen as monopolistic behaviour and the experiment has never been repeated.
The News of the World is to launch a Closer-style magazine called Fabulous as part of its relaunch under new editor Colin Mylar. The news comes in an interview with him - ‘Sex, drugs and responsibilities’ in the Independent.
The title will be a glossy with high production values and come out on 3 February. The paper’s sales figure is 3.2m every week, giving the title one of the biggest print runs in the UK.
Myler ‘didn’t think [the previous magazine] was relevant to our women readers and I think it had completely lost touch with the market’. Fabulous will feature fashion, beauty, accessories, celebrity and real life. Myler adds: ‘Nobody has produced a magazine on the scale that we are doing, and of this quality – and it’s free. The market research from potential readers has shown one fact loud and clear – they said, not knowing it would be coming free with the News of the World, that they would have been prepared to pay between 70p and £1 for it as a standalone.’
Hmmm. Isn’t that what the Mail on Sunday said when it tried to sell You separately for £1? That lasted about six months. The fact is that the big nationals have had a hard time with this - the Mirror put a fortune into its M launch before that folded. What might make the NoW’s effort different is that News International has made a shift back to magazines with News Magazines running weekly Love It! and Sky.
Furthermore, Myler has taken on Mandy Appleyard from Emap as Fabulous editor and already has Jane Johnson, former editor of Closer, as his deputy. He says the supplement will have a staff of 23, with Johnson as editorial director.
Claire Atkinson in the Independent profiles Joanna Coles and sees the Yorkshire-bred ‘gritty’ editor of US Marie Claire as a potential new Tina Brown. The piece discusses the ups and downs of black art of choosing cover models:
Coles has also shaken up conventional wisdom about who should grace the covers of American Marie Claire in age when newsstands are heaving with celebrity cleavage and fly-away tresses. Some choices have had praise, others criticism. Media-industry blogs criticised choices like Maggie Gyllenhaal and Sarah Michelle Gellar as uninspiring, while another cover girl, Ashley Simpson, caused a stir when she told women to love themselves as they are, and then promptly turned around and got a nose job. Coles wrote a stern editor’s letter on that turn-about. Grey’s Anatomy star Sandra Oh, one of the first actresses of Asian descent to make the cover, raised both eyebrows and interest. The issue helped lift newsstand sales by 22 per cent. Ultimately though, staples such as Angelina Jolie (with whom Coles spent an afternoon) and Ashley Olsen have been the best sellers.
Future chief Stevie Spring claims that ‘the economics of Future are more comparable to those of a business to business publisher rather than those of a general business to consumer publisher. We are, arguably, a business to “professional consumer” – or “prosumer” – publisher.’
The quote, from the company’s latest annual report and carried in the Press Gazette, appear to mark an attempt to talk the company up in the eyes of investors and the City - shares in B2B publishers tend to enjoy higher margins than consumer publishers.
TSL Education has relaunched the Times Higher Education Supplement as Times Higher Education magazine and given a new look to the website.
The title dates back to 1971 and the word ’supplement’ refers to its being a spin-off from The Times. Rupert Murdoch’s News International sold TSL Education - which published the Times Educational Supplement (founded in 1910), the THES and Nursery World - to Exponent Private Equity in October 2005 for £235m. The Times supplements were seen as a highly profitable arm of Times Newspapers because of the classified advertising in the TES in particular. The group held on to the prestigious Times Literary Supplement (founded 1902).
In June, TSL sold Nursery World and its website to Haymarket.
