Monocle loves analogue

I was in Instanbul a couple of weekends ago – with four days of snow and snowball fights till 2am. The Blue Mosque and river front looked superb in the snow. My teenage son was wielding the camera – shooting on 35mm film with an old Nikon. You can’t drag him off his iPod to vinyl, but he much prefers the look of film.

So he’ll no doubt latch on to the latest Monocle – ‘Make mine an analogue’ is the main cover line. There’s no doubt the magazine has a love for the retro – it’s only a couple of issues ago that editor Tyler Brûlé was heralding a great future for newspapers.

Zinio takes total to 850 digital titles

Zinio has launched Global Newsstand to make 850 titles available to buy and read online. The digital magazine publisher has agreements with IPC, Gruner & Jahr, Hachette Filipacchi and Natmags.

Zinio wants to increase the total to 2,000 this year through an agreement with Havas Media.

Digital magazines history

The deadly sins of publishing

‘Underperformance, cowardice, technophobia, inferiority, complacency, coziness, stinginess, cluelessness, disorganization and dullness’ are the 10 deadly sins of publishing listed by Frank Anton, boss of US trade publisher Hanley Wood in Folio.

Reader Paul Rowney responds with his list: ‘Mediocre, advertiser led editorial, lazy unprofessional ad sales executives who fear using the phone and now think you can sell ads by email, poor circulation information, editors for whom the invention of “cut and paste” means that few actually write anything, but merely regurgitate someone’s else’s copy. B to B is in decline because the whole quality of the product is going down hill.’

As UK trade publishing goes through its biggest changes in a decade – Emap’s dismemberment and Reed selling off its trade titles -  what would be on your list?

French and US Vogue – worlds apart

‘French Vogue is the polar opposite of most American fashion magazines,’ says Amy Larocca in New York magazine. ‘It is unconcerned with making fashion wearable or accessible to its readers. It is not inclusive: There is no advice on how to dress if you’re shaped like a pear or about to turn 50.’

‘In [editor Carine] Roitfeld’s world, models are never too skinny, diamonds are never too expensive. Covers are not devoted to whichever film star has a blockbuster to promote, but primarily to models…’

Langmead, Sands and Micklethwait

The Independent interviews Jeremy Langmead about why there’s more to men than masturbation, at least as far as Esquire‘s concerned. The Guardian has interviews with Sarah Sands, the former editor of the Sunday Telegraph who is taking over as editor-in-chief of Reader’s Digest in the UK, and John Micklethwait, editor of the Economist.

Guardian sells Money Observer to rival

Guardian Media Group is selling personal finance monthly Money Observer to rival Moneywise Publishing, which owns Moneywise and the Interactive Investor website.

The decision comes just a month after GMG combined with private equity group Apax Partners to buy the trade magazines arm of Emap.

With monthly sales of 23,827, Money Observer trails behind Moneywise‘s 30,151

Moneywise has been owned by Capital Accumulation since October 2004.  GMG bought Money Observer as part of its takeover of the Observer newspaper in 1993.

Personal finance magazines

PCW celebration fizzles out online

PCW magazine is celebrating 30 years as the best computer magazine in the UK. I went out and bought the issue. How sad then that the website is a print issue behind! Guy Kewney would be spitting.

Reed to sell business titles

Reed Elsevier – once the owner of IPC magazine with titles such as Woman’s Own and Loaded and the publisher of Winnie the Pooh – is to hone its strategy even more to concentrate on online media, says the FT.

It aims to reduce its exposure to print and advertising based products by selling Reed Business Information, whose magazines include New Scientist, Variety and Farmers Weekly. The business division depends on advertising for the majority of its revenues and online sales are only 30 per cent of revenues. In turn, it is spending £2 billion on ChoicePoint, a data provider.

In an analysis piece, the FT identifies several potential buyers for Reed’s New Scientist to Farmers Weekly division: Informa of the UK; Apax, the private equity group that has invested in Incisive and Emap; Veronis Suhler Stevenson, which yesterday bought Clarion Events; and private equity-backed competitors such as Nielsen and Springer. The going price is likely to be over £1 billion.

Reading behind the figures

Roy Greenslade is just as perplexed as David Hepworth when it comes to the latest ABC sales results. Greenslade identifies:

1. Winners: Esquire, OK!, Glamour and Good Housekeeping.
2. Losers: Hello!, Maxim, Now, Heat and FHM.
3. No breakthrough/jury’s out: Easy Living, Grazia and ShortList.

He quotes an International Federation of the Periodical Press report that predicts UK magazines’ share of ad spend is set to fall from 13% in 2007 to 12.6% this year. If that forecast does come true, the fight for revenue will result in what always happens: the leading titles in their sector will see off the weakest – and the same trend will occur among sectors.

Take mainstream men’s magazines. There have been two big cullings in the sector:

• in the mid-late 1950s when the biggest titles went to the wall – Lilliput, London Opinion, Esquire and Razzle.
• 10 years later, when Club, King, Men in Vogue, Town and Men Only all closed after a surge in launches in the Swinging Sixties. (Though many of these titles were bought up by porn publishers.)

The sector revived in the 1980s, so another cull is well due, with Maxim and Arena looking favourites to go.

For other magazines it has been a long, slow decline – Women and Woman’s Own alone sold 5.5 million copies a week between them in 1959; now they barely muster 750,000.  Today, the same is happening to Take a Break – the top-selling weekly – though it has stubbornly kept above the million mark so far.
The parallel between earlier decades and now is that of new technology – commercial television in 1954 followed by colour in the mid-1960s and the web, then social networking today. In 1960, magazines took a quarter of all advertising revenue but that has eroded to today’s 13%. The reason magazines have still thrived is that the overall advertising spending has risen so much and people have more money to spend buying them. If that carries on being the case, there is room for magazines and the web. It is when spending stagnates or falls for a lengthy time – a recession – that the pips really start to squeak.

Silver for Emap sell-out

Investors in Emap will get their piece of silver for selling out to H Bauer next month. Emap plc will pay a special dividend of 461 pence a share on 19 March to shareholders.