The first issues archive Premiere Issues has had a makeover, so it is easier to submit covers , comments and information. It’s been around since 2002 with Danielle Huthart doing all the hard work from Hong Kong. Between this and the launches pages at Magforum, anyone researching covers and first issues has a lot to get their teeth into.
Bids for Reed Elsevier’s Reed Business Information arm are expected to range from $2 billion to $2.5 billion (£1.25bn) and are due on August 11, Reuters reported last night.
Most of the potential bidders for the trade magazine division were expected to be private equity firms, the news agency’s sources said. Reed has not yet decided whether it will sell the unit as a whole or split it up by geographic region.
RBI’s titles include New Scientist, Flight International, Variety, Farmers Weekly and Estates Gazette. It is the largest business-to-business publisher in North America, with 2,500 employees and 80 magazines. It is the second large group to come up for sale in the past year, with the UK’s Emap having been dismembered in the spring.
The UK's best cover? Empire featured the breathing of Vader when the cover was opened
The UK’s magazine trade body, the PPA, has launched a trade website to publicise Magazine Week 2008, which runs from 29 September to 5 October. Events as part of the campaign include nominating the best magazine cover and an interactive consumer magazine directory.
Among covers nominated are an Autocar cover from 1895, Princess Diana on Vogue shortly after her death and a breathing Darth Vader on the front of Empire in 2005. Entries are judged on:
New Scientist is one of hundreds of Reed titles up for sale
Bidders look to be lining up for Reed Business Information, Reed Elsevier’s trade magazine arm, which is valued at £1.25bn. The Sunday Telegraph has two dozen companies expressing an interest. They include US publisher McGraw Hill and private equity firms Bain and TPG.
Reed, which wants to reduce its dependence on advertising revenue, is offering to lend £160m to the successful bidder for the publisher of New Scientist, Variety and Flight International.
New Yorker cover, July 21
US highbrow weekly The New Yorker has got its knickers twisted with its lastest cover showing presidential hopeful Barack Obama as a Muslim with his terrorist wife (complete with US flag burning in the fire of the Oval Room in the White House).
As cartoonist Chris Adams points out in the Telegraph, it’s an image that might work for the magazine’s regulars, but not anywhere else.
‘Any regular reader would immediately ‘get’ that cover as it was intended. A not too subtle lampoon of the exaggerated right wing smears Obama has been subjected to…
‘So the message should be clear.
‘But I’m afraid it isn’t, because taken out of context, it can mean whatever you want it to. And here we come to the internet … As a stand-alone image on the web, it really could be some right-wing website or magazine’s propaganda.’
The Columbia Journalism Review has posted reactions from cartoonists, such as:
‘I think the illustration misfired. The way it turned out it looked like [the cartoonist] was poking fun at the Obamas, and I don’t think that was the artist’s intention: I think he was trying to poke fun at the outrageous lies about the Obamas.’
‘It’s often hard to guess what kinds of misinterpretations people will have on our work. And there’s an element of willful misinterpretation that’s going on here. It’s part of the problem: people are deliberately misinterpreting it because they want to get riled up. It’s something that all editorial cartoons go through.’
‘I don’t think we have to be clear. It’s not up to us to hold people’s hands. There’s a tendency in political cartooning to really hammer down on people’s heads. I want people to be confused and pissed off.’
This cartoonist’s ink will run and run.
IPC has done a deal with Virgin Atlantic to put copies of Living Etc on flights. The publisher is careful to present the deal as a sampling exercise, keen for it not to be seen as just giving away freebies. The area has been a fraught one for newspapers, with such agreements often seen as devaluing sales figures.
Livingetc, Britain’s best-selling modern homes magazine is partnering with Virgin Atlantic to sample the magazine on all long haul Upper Class Virgin Atlantic flights from the UK, as of the August edition. Livingetc is one of only 6 titles being sampled on the flights and is the only home interest title. The copies are being bought from IPC by Dawson Media Direct who distributes the copies to Virgin.
An earlier blog mentioned the chilling effect libel lawyer Peter Carter-Ruck had on press reporting – now it’s the courts themselves that are erecting barriers to discourage reporters from doing their jobs. Press Gazette quotes Castlemorton freelance Sarah Limbrick whose costs for accessing court documents shot up from £660 to £2,481 in just three months.
‘It is government policy to ensure fees reflect the full recovery of the cost involved in providing the service,’ said Mark Cram of Her Majesty’s Courts Service. And damn the public interest in the process, no doubt.
Maxwell will be chuckling in his grave over this one.
In a former incarnation as an editor at BBC/Redwood I once arrived back at work after a holiday. I was in early and sat down to open the post. There was just one other person in the open-plan office. As I riffled through the pile of letters, one stood out – with the logo of ‘Peter Carter-Ruck & Partners’ on the outside. I swear my heart stopped.
Why was Britain’s most feared firm of libel lawyers (regularly lampooned in Private Eye with a nickname too obvious to mention) writing to me? I open the bottom drawer of my desk and pull out a bottle of Bell’s (kept for medicinal reasons, of course). My colleague comes over to see if I’m all right (she later said I had gone a funny colour).
Oh God! As I open the letter I see that it is even signed by him, not some minion. I go another funny colour, take a second slurp and start to read. ‘Dear Mr Quinn, Would you like to publish excerpts from my memoirs…’
I declined the offer – for such a colourful character, the work was mundane – but the BA magazine High-Life later took him up on it.
I was reminded of this by a piece in today’s Independent by legal editor Robert Verkaik, ‘Defame academy: the libel specialists.’ (Carter-Ruck died in 2003, but three lawyers from the firm he founded are in Verkaik’s list.) The article begins: ‘When legal letters threatening action for defamation arrive in an editor’s in-tray, the names of certain lawyers can induce a queasy feeling.’ So true.
Nice line in yesterday’s Guardian Weekend magazine by motoring writer Sam Wollaston, who gives a thumb’s down to Ford’s Kuga. ‘What next? The Kapree? The Ford Korteena? I preferred it in the olden days when Ford just named their cars after bad magazines for chaps: Escort, Fiesta … so why couldn’t they just carry on? Ford Penthouse, Ford Asian Babes…’ (he obviously knows his way round the top shelf.) And later ‘Anyway it’s a 4×4 (Ford Big Ones?)’
Of course, Ford isn’t unique – Range Rover Vogue – but it does seem to have made a habit of it (Ford Escort Cosmopolitan). It ran into problems with the Focus though in Germany in 1998. There, Focus is one of the biggest weeklies and a court ruled that the carmaker could not use the name. In the end, Ford paid DM1m (then about £330,000) to a charity chosen by Burda and agreed to work within marketing guidelines set by the publisher.
Stef Penney’s ‘Tenderness of Wolves’ prompts a query in its description of a Hudson Bay Company outpost in the outback of Canada. In one room, ‘Pinned to the walls are coloured pictures of race-horses and prizefighters, cut from magazines.’ Colour pin-ups? In 1867? Sounds a tad early, I said to myself, as I sat on a jet back from Spain. However, probably not. The Illustrated London News began printing its colour Christmas plates in 1855. And David Reed (‘The Popular Magazine’) discusses colour being used for promotions as ‘a common event’ by 1871 among US magazines.
