Emap throws in the towel

This morning’s press release from Emap was phrased in the language of the City, but to those used to reading the runes, it spells the end of the company as a major force in magazine publishing:

‘The Board of Emap today announces that, in response to various unsolicited proposals it has received recently for parts of the Group, it is undertaking a review of Emap’s group structure and portfolio of assets. All options to maximise shareholder value will be examined, including a possible sale or demerger of some or all of its constituent businesses. Citi and Lazard have been retained by the Board of Emap to assist on the review’

How did they manage to piss it all away?

It looks as if chairman Alun Cathcart will oversee the group being split into three parts – consumer titles, B2B magazines and radio so it can more easily be sold off.

After Tom Moloney went in May I said that Emap was ‘unlikely to be spoilt for choice’ for a new chief executive. That has proved the case – the company is still looking, but why bother now?

I’m in Canada at present (Halifax to be precise with Montreal to come). I’ve just read Tim Holmes pondering when teenagers switch from print to digital media. It tweaked a nerve that had been awoken at an exhibition of books that have won Alcuin Society design awards (at NSCAD university – well worth a visit).

Picking up the winner in the children’s category – When You Were Small – immediately had me sitting at home reading to one of my kids when they were small. The book – and hence reading – forms an emotional bond between infant and parent that no computer has yet come near to breaking.

Yet, the judges’ comments seemed to deny the emotion that books engender. The comments were very dry, discussing the typography and half-titles, but they gave the game away in one section when they discussed a title not being as ‘exciting’ as others. And the in-your-face vividness of the illustrations by Joe Morse in Casey at the Bat was, for me, a strength in terms of appealing to a teen audience bought up a the so-solid world of Banksy’s grafitti.

The show moves on to several Canadian cities before the winners represent Canada at the Leipzig and Hanover book fairs next year.   

More praise for ‘little boxy things’

An earlier blog about Emap quoted David Hepworth on everybody reading pithy boxes, but the real importance of boxes, pull-outs, read-throughs or whatever you want to call them is that they get people into the articles and/or are remembered.

I ran InterCity magazines in the late 1980s at BBC/Redwood where it was by far the best-read title the publisher produced, despite having a comparatively low circulation. I lost count of the times people that I met at conferences pulled boxes from their wallets that they had culled from its pages, especially summaries from the ‘Captains of Industry’ series.

The prime example was related to me by the recently-retired chairman of ICI, Sir Denys Henderson. He had been awarded an honorary degree by Manchester University. At the ceremony, the chancellor had quoted the box that accompanied InterCity‘s profile of him a few months before almost word for word.

Alas, ICI – like InterCity - are no longer the forces they once were.

What Emap has lost

David Hepworth knows his magazines. It’s an impression that is reinforced every time I read his Guardian column. He – and his Emap alumni at Development Hell – are also a reminder of what Emap has lost.

Twenty years ago, East Midland Allied Press was a regional newspaper running around biting the ankles of IPC with magazines such as Smash Hits and PC User (and demonstrating the digital future with Micronet). But in 1999 it tried to throw its weight around in the US. In retrospect, the £700m loss on Petersen was a shock that destroyed the company’s corporate touch.

It is fours years since Emap last demonstrated how launching a magazine should be done – Grazia was inspired. Now, it seems to have forgotten how to run a company – just look at the way its French arm went down the tubes. It’s been bad news all over, with closures galore, the demise of FHM in the US, and Emap couldn’t even pick the right paper size for the Car relaunch.

So Tom Moloney’s departure was no surprise.

He’s come a long way since he arrived with the company as advertisement director of Educational Computing. David Arculus, who with Robin Miller led the expansion of magazines at Emap, has called Moloney ‘the most talented person I’d ever met’. (Though Moloney is not the only advertising boss of Educational Computing who could lay claim to such a title – Seven Publishing founder Seamus Geoghegan being the other.)

Emap cast around for six months before appointing Moloney in 2003, but had been spoilt for choice – between Arculus and Miller – in 1997. It’s unlikely to be spoilt for choice now.

As for Hepworth, his latest column gives a thumbs-up to ‘classic glossy’ Portfolio as a lure for wealthy readers but feels Monocle should be a TV programme (which, ironically, is what founder Tyler Brûlé tried to do before the magazine). Condé Nast’s Portfolio is ‘full of long pieces that nobody will read and little boxy things that everybody will’. If only everything were that simple.