Red-faced at Time

The US magazine Time is celebrating 90 years since its founding, which the managing editor describes as ’90 years inside the red border’ on his Editor’s Desk page. But Time did not introduce its red border until 1927. So much for accuracy. Before that, the earliest issues had ruled boxes, reminiscent of the British magazine Pall Mall 20 years earlier.

Pall Mall magazine from 1905

The first Time cover from 1923

In between, Time experimented with both a red and a green strip down the left side, the red being a ‘warm’ red as used by Pall Mall and the green similar to that used by Tit-Bits.

Green stripe Time magazine cover from 26 April 1926

There’s a video showing the progress of Time’s covers.

 

Mayfair first issue fetches £434 on eBay

Mayfair men’s magazine launch issue cover from 1966 with Raquel Welch

A copy of the 1966 first issue of Mayfair has just sold on eBay for £434 with 43 bidders. The men’s magazine’s cover has a single cover line below a picture of Raquel Welsh wearing a pink leotard inside a male symbol (derived from the shield and spear of the Roman god Mars): ‘The incredible revolution of sex in the sixties.’ It was the year she appeared clad in an animal skin bikini in One Million Years BC.

Mayfair profile

Buying and selling magazines on eBay

Town rides again, and again

First, there was Man About Town:

Man About Town autumn 1958

Then, it became About Town:

About Town september 1961

and then, Town:

Town magazine June 1964

which enlivened the sixties but was too expensive to survive. But then, in 2007:

 

Man About Town cover as part of Magculture review

Man About Town now lives again, from Wonderland publisher Creative Talent, and this month we have London quarterly, Town from Brave New World Publishing:

Town summer 2012

 See how they all compare with the 1950s/60s variants.

 

Free fashion monthly for London

The streets of London are expecting the launch of aMUSE – a free monthly fashion/beauty/culture title for women – on April 30. A circulation of 120,000 is planned (about a quarter that of Stylist, but the Shortlist Media goes to 10 cities) from aMUSE Media. The editor is Sasha Slater and publisher is Stephen Murphy, former founder of Square Mile. Men’s weekly Shortlist and fashion weekly Stylist have established the ‘freemium’ sector and there’s a long history of free weeklies such as Girl About Town in the 1970s. Readers expect a glossier feel from monthlies, so it’ll be interesting to see how aMUSE addresses this.

Video interview with Shortlist founder Mike Soutar

Dazed & Confused at Somerset House

Dazed & Confused magazine is to celebrate 2o years on the news stands with an exhibition at Somerset House in London and a book (shown above with Kate Moss on the cover).

‘Making It Up As We Go Along’ will run from 4 November 2011 to 29 January 2012 and is being curated by Jefferson Hack (who founded the title with photographer Rankin) and Emma Reeves in collaboration with Somerset House.

The exhibition features Dazed & Confused magazine’s ‘most infamous visual stories, legendary photoshoots, iconic covers, controversial editorial content and artwork from influential photographers, designers, and artists’.

Work includes commissions by Rankin, Nick Knight, David Sims and Terry Richardson, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Damien Hirst and Sam Taylor-Wood, Katie Grand, Katy England, Alister Mackie and Nicola Formichetti, Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood and Gareth Pugh.

This exhibition coincides with a book on 20 years of Dazed & Confused published by Rizzoli.

Split cover problem for Outdoor fitness

Split covers can be a devil to get right – when used well, they really stand out, but a publisher can be at the mercy of its printer, as demonstrated by this example of Bauer’s latest launch Outdoor Fitness.

Dummy cover for Outdoor Fitness from Bauer

Cover of Outdoor Fitness, as it should look

Matching colour is one problem but then register is another. Joanathan Manning, editor, and art director Mark Tucker will have been spitting at this result from the presses at Polestar Chantry.

Outdoor Fitness split cover ruined by poor registration and/or binding

The colour effect is deliberate (I assume!) but the register or binding is way out – a good 2-3mm. Hopefully, it only affected part of the run, but in this case it was all the copies in WHSmith at Euston I could see.

Still, Outdoor Fitness is a rare launch these days, attempting to segment the men’s health and fitness sector so dominated by NatMag/Rodale’s quarter-of-a-million-selling  Men’s Health. In this case, carving out ‘Middle-Aged Men in Lycra’, apparently known as MAMILs.

Magazine cover secrets

IPC relaunches Woman with Holden cover

Woman Feb 11 cover

New look for Woman in shops May 10

Having sold off several magazines – from Loaded to Cage & Aviary Bird to Aeroplane – last year, IPC is now turning to investing in its other titles. Woman relaunches tomorrow with a strategy ‘to exploit a gap in the market for a more positive and aspirational weekly magazine for women aged 35-plus’.

Amanda Holden (who turned 40 in February) is the cover celebrity of choice: ‘How Simon, Piers and girlfriends are helping her to get through’.

No figure is put on the cost. However, when sister title Woman was relaunched in May 2006, IPC spent £3.2m. When Woman’s Own was relaunched in April 2007, it spent £2m.  The year 2007, saw the title repositioned from:

A modern mix of inspiring practicals, surprising real life and riveting celebrity reads combined with in depth advice you can trust.

To:

Woman is a must-have weekly fix of hot celebrity news, juicy TV insider gossip, compelling real life stories and body confident fashion and beauty.

Overall, the latesst new look is cleaner – despite cramming in all those vital cover lines – and classier with the white background. Ultimately though, this is not about the magazine looking better, but arresting the long-term decline in its sales.

IPC may claim it is ‘market leading women’s lifestyle magazine’ but take out that word ‘lifestyle’ and its sales of 291,700 a week pale against Take a Break‘s 833,522. And in its its 1950s heyday it would have sold 2 million copies a week, at a time when rival Woman (they were then owned by separate companies) was selling 3 million. To think that owner Odhams launched Woman’s Realm  in 1958 partly to take sales pressure off Woman – its sales were stretching the ability to print it! 

IPC Profile

Other magazine relaunches

Woman 2011 new look: Amanda Holden on the cover

Magazines expand revenue sources

In the 1980s, I worked as a sub and reporter for two weekly medical newspapers: Doctor and Hospital Doctor. In each issue of both, there was a spread of reader offers by post: one page for medical equipment, the other for general goods. It was a good source of income and an idea I copied at Redwood Publishing – I was later told the cash income from one offer saved the company from going bust.

But the idea of publishers selling goods off the page goes back far longer than that. Tit-Bits, that great Victorian pioneer of marketing and all these magazines, spun off books, puzzles and offers of all kinds. Publishers have always sought new sources of revenue because the margins are often far higher than the main publishing business – the trick is not to upset your advertisers.

And it’s still true today, with Future this week teaming up with the Telegraph to produce computer guides for the newspaper’s readers. Windows: The Official Magazine has developed Confident Computing supplements that will be published on Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 March, for the Daily Telegraph’s 1.68m readers and the Sunday Telegraph’s 1.45m readers. That’s a lot of publicity for the magazine, and Future will be hoping that the glossy, 52-page supplements will draw less tech-savvy users into the magazine with sections on email, online shopping, internet security and hardware and troubleshooting tips. Alongside the Saturday supplement will be a subscription deal offering three copies of Windows: The Official Magazine for just £1 each.

Future obviously sees potential growth in the magazine (seems strange, just as PC and laptop sales are being hit by the iPad frenzy) with a series of Official Windows Presents set for April, an example of ‘brand extension’ in today’s jargon. Each of these will focus on how computing can help people ‘get more from life’ in areas such as home entertainment, travel, buying and selling online and healthy living.

This is an area where Future has experience: in the 1990s, the Financial Times bought the publisher to pursue just such activities, but the idea floundered and Future took itself independent again.

Other recent ideas include:

• Bauer’s Empire: a three-day film extravaganza, Big Screen at London’s O2 in August;
• Conde Nast’s Vogue Cafe (Moscow), GQ Bar and Tatler club in Moscow and a Conde Nast Worldwide News shop next to its Soho HQ in London

But the title that’s really made a go of it in this area in Tyler Brule’s Monocle.

• shops selling its branded goods in London and four other cities;
• goods made by international brands, from a £20 Monocle notebook to a £370 blanket for sale online;
• Other products branded with its logo have included: a Comme des Garçons perfume; a bicycle; bags; and a Danish-made table. Its bags costs £155-£270. Media Week reckoned it had sold 2000. At £200 each, that’s an income of 400,000, comparable with the magazine selling 100,000 copies a month at £5 each;
• sponsored online video intervieews, reports and travel guide sponsored by the likes of Maurice Lacroix, Spanish tourism and Bloomberg.

Future to launch motoring quarterly

At first I thought it was a licensed version of Dennis’s digital car monthly, but that was iMotor, which lasted just a couple of years. It just seems everything has to have ‘i’ in the name this year (it was pod a c0uple of years ago). iCar is being launched by Future as a quarterly on May 18. It aims to address ‘growing consumer interest in more efficient, intelligent and technologically advanced cars’. it’s also described as the company’s first launch of 2011, so there may be more to come.

History of car magazines

Delayed Gratification (cheque in the post)

First there was slow food, then the FT’s Slow Lane column by Harry Eyres (the antidote to Tyler Brule’s Fast Lane alongside)* – and now there’s a slow magazine reacting to the give-away online world.

Delayed Gratification, a quarterly from The Slow Journalism Company, ‘distils three months of the UK’s political, cultural, scientific and sporting life into a witty magazine of record’. So it sounds like a cross betweeen the short-lived Snug of 2002 and Cover of 1997, the still-thriving Chap and The licence-to-print-money Week.

Though it comes from a slow viewpoint there are pages of easy-in, easy-out graphics, a nice angle on the late Norman Wisdom behind the Iron Curtain – in a long line of British comedians who are probably bigger in far flung places than here dating back to Freddie Frinton. But its attitude is not just slow, the editorial stating it is ‘our flag in the sand – a magazine of record from editors determined to swim against the electronic tide’.

But is the golf pic worth a double-page spread? And what about the word ‘Oct’ in a large brown circle taking up a whole page while the real meat is crammed in on the opposite spread? A magazine costing £12 a copy or £40 a sub (same as the British Journalism Review which is now an academic journal with an academic price to match – my relatives club together to get mine) needs to get a measure on such things very quickly.

Still my Paypal is in the electronic post.

(And I liked the bouncey drop-down menus on the home page!)

* Astoundingly, Poetry Editor of The Daily Express (1996-2001)