Spectator speaks out on Press control

Spectator magazine cover

A day before the Leveson inquiry report is published, the Spectator has set itself against any statutory scheme to control the press apart from self-regulation:

‘If the press agrees a new form of self-regulation, perhaps contractually binding this time, we will happily take part. But we would not sign up to anything enforced by government.’

Magazines have been given little coverage in the controversy, but several were called to give evidence to the Leveson inquiry, including Hello!, Heat and OK!

The Spectator has lived under government control – it was founded in 1828 – and Stamp Duty, which was used to control distribution of newspapers and magazines, was not abolished until 1855.

This change created a free Press, enabled expansion and a way of meeting demand for reading material from the public – it’s easily forgotten that the works of many of the great Victorian writers were first published in magazines, from Dickens to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. In the newspaper world, the Guardian went from twice weekly to daily publication.

The fortunes made by the magazine magnates – Alfred Harmsworth and Arthur Cyril Pearson – built on the invention of the New Journalism in magazines to found the popular daily press – the Daily Mail, the Express and the Mirror.

Sam Delaney, a former editor of Heat, has warned that Leveson could end up muzzling the celebrity magazines:

‘Brace yourselves. By 2013, every title on the newsstand may well feature a gushing profile of Nancy Dell’Olio, lounging on a chaise longue “inside her beautiful home”.’

As the leaders of the political parties pore over the six copies of the Leveson report that were delivered to parliament this afternoon, the whole of the media awaits the next stage of the fallout from the phone-hacking scandal.

UK newspapers: Times readers run the country

Magazine timeline

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

More mobile phones in India than toilets

That’s my fact of the day. It comes at the end of a summary of a presentation by Enders analyst Benedict Evans about mobile media strategies. It includes contributions from Immediate Media (BBC Magazines), the Financial Times and Informa.

Digital magazine developments

Is the digital Daily Mail really in profit?

Media Week reports that the Daily Mail’s website has gone into profit and Roy Greenslade has run a comment. But how exactly has it happened? MW reports:

The site’s unparallelled growth in vistors over the past five years has been achieved by fewer than 30 people in the UK, a team of 20 in New York, and 10 in Los Angeles.

But 60 is far too low a headcount for be writing all that copy, which suggests only journalists working directly on the site are costed. All the content of the Daily Mail – and journalism does not come cheap – must come across for free. The website is spiced up with totty frothy stories but the paper’s content gives it the coverage to be an online force. To give an idea of the size of the operation, DMGT, the parent company, cut 105 jobs in the quarter – but still employs 3,809 people across the Mail, its Euromoney financial division and other operations.

The paper’s turnover was £435m - MailOnline is set to generate just £30m this year. It may be in profit but it is still a pimple on the print empire – and wholly dependent on it.

Industry profile: UK newspapers

Books about magazines

When you’re writing a book, you end up researching and reading a lot of books. One place I looked is Google Books to see who might be quoting Magforum.com and so writing about magazines.  A search for “Magforum” suggests that no fewer than 73 books mention the site. However, like most Google searches these days, this one does not do what you want it to do and seems to return some results because they are books mentioned BY Magforum or are also about magazines!

Nevertheless, I know the following mention Magforum, some because I’ve lent them magazines for photography or provided quotations; others list Magforum as a general resource; and others quote from Magforum as a reliable source of evidence or to build an argument.

Among the many nice things said is this quote by Branded Male: Marketing to Men by Mark Tungate (Kogan Page, 2008): ‘The splendidly comprehensive Magforum.com’ in his chapter on men’s magazines.

Several books on culture, gender and sexualisation quote Magforum’s pages on men’s magazines and women’s magazines, including:

• The Sexualization of Childhood (Childhood in America) by Sharna Olfman (ABC-CLIO, 2009);
• Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918-1963 (Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories) by Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher (Cambridge University Press, 2010);
• The Day of the Peacock: Style for Men 1963 – 73 by Geoffrey Aquilina Ross (V&A Publishing, 2011); and
• Women’s Work, Men’s Cultures: Overcoming Resistance and Changing Organizational Cultures by Sarah Rutherford (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

And the property magazine pages on Magforum are recommending for global investors: ‘Magforum lists all magazines published in the UK, together with circulation figures and some pithy comments on reliability. The site is put together by hand and the editor, Tony Quinn … processes everything’, says Colin Barrow in The Global Property Investor’s Toolkit 2007-2008: A Sourcebook for Successful Decision Making (John Wiley, 2008). Obviously a man who recognises the results of a lot of hard work.

Of course, Magforum is a big source for people in the magazine industry, academics and students. Some of the books that use it as such are:

• The Media: An Introduction by Daniele Albertazzi and Paul Cobley (Pearson Education, 2010)
• Magazine Production (Media Skills) by Jason Whittaker (Taylor & Francis, 2008)
• Get Your Articles Published: Teach Yourself by Lesley Bown (Hachette UK, 2010)
• Setting Up a Successful Photography Business: How to be a Professional Photographer (Setting Up Guides)  by Lisa Pritchard (A&C Black, 2012)
• Mapping the Magazine: Comparative studies in magazine journalism, edited by Tim Holmes (Routledge, 2008). Tim runs the magazine side of the postgraduate diploma in journalism at Cardiff University
• Editorial Design by Yolanda Zappaterra (Laurence King, 2007), who teaches at Central St Martins in London.

More eclectic users of Magforum include:

• Magic Moments: Life-changing Encounters with Books, Film, Music… by John Sutherland (Profile Books, 2008), former Booker prize chair, Desert Island Discs subject and  former  Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College, London – the name of the founder of Answers and the Daily Mail lives on in that title
• Personal Reputation Management: Making the Internet Work for You by Louis Halpern and Roy Murphy (Halpern Cowan, 2009)

Finally, I don’t know what this means, buy, heh, it must be good! I’d be grateful for a translation:

Bewertung crossmedialer Verflechtungen im Medienkonzentrationsrecht: Eine rechtsvergleichende Untersuchung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Deutschlands, Großbritanniens sowie der Entwicklung in der EU by Harald Bretschneider (Peter Lang, 2010)

Google turns to magazines

Google’s new Nexus 2 tablet has taken a leaf out of Apple and Amazon’s book by making sure it will have ‘content’ on stream, including magazines from its Google Play app store, from US publishers Hearst and Condé Nast, such as Popular Science, Food Network, and Conde Nast Traveler.

PPA to run Edinburgh magazine festival

PPA Scotland is to hold an international event celebrating magazines during the Edinburgh Festival, on August 26 and 27. MagFest will include creative workshops, an industry conference and an exhibition with speakers such as Christopher Ward, Redwood co-founder; The Big Issue’s John Bird MBE, magazine blogger Andrew Losowsky and ShortList’s Matt Phare.

 

PPA to run Edinburgh magazine festival

PPA Scotland is to hold an international event celebrating magazines during the Edinburgh Festival, on August 26 and 27. MagFest will include creative workshops, an industry conference and an exhibition with speakers such as Christopher Ward, Redwood co-founder; The Big Issue’s John Bird MBE, magazine blogger Andrew Losowsky and ShortList’s Matt Phare.

 

Madonna on Vogue covers

Been hammering away on the book I’m writing about the history of magazine design and looking through some old Vogue covers. How’s this for the first cover (May 1989) of Madonna in the US edition:

Anna Wintour was told this Madonna cover would not sell

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fashion Indie notes that editor Anna Wintour says she was told ‘[Madonna]’ll never sell’, but, in fact, newsstand sales rose 40%. Strange that Wintour hadn’t checked with Liz Tilberis, her successor at the British sister magazine – ‘Brogue’ – which had run this cover in February:

British Vogue beat the US edition in having a Madonna front cover four months earlier

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first cover under Liz Tilberis was of Naomi Campbell – her first appearance on the front of Vogue.

History of women’s glossies

British Vogue cover archive - search on date, model, photographer or editor, but not all covers are up

Shulman steel beneath Vogue’s nice girl veneer

Ferguson portrait of Alexandra Shulman in the FT

Next weekend marks the first Vogue festival at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington with the likes of Stella McCartney, Diane Von Furstenberg, Tom Ford, Nigella Lawson and Kirsty Young chatting before the magazine masses.

It’s an idea led by the fashion magazine’s editor Alexander Shulman, who also has a book coming out.

That’s why there have been profiles of Shulman in the Observer Magazine last Sunday and today’s FT, where Carola Long, the FT’s deputy fashion editor, has lunch with the Vogue editor.

Shulman is portrayed as down to earth, almost girl next door, with both profiles putting across the image of a woman ‘happy in Vogue’.

‘…her hair is an untamed mishmash of outgrown highlights. Her clothes are discreetly fashionable but unintimidating: a navy-blue cardigan, a knee-length patterned skirt and comfortable-looking Anya Hindmarch heels. And – shock, horror! – she eats’ gushes Elizabeth Day in the Observer mag

But the articles are so similar that you wonder whether the interviewers have just swallowed the PR line.

There are hints, though, that more is afoot. The FT piece starts talking about the choice of restaurant:

Alexandra Shulman was also expecting a little privacy but the editor of British Vogue is scarcely going undercover by nipping round the corner from her Hanover Square office to this smart new steakhouse. In bounces well-connected foodie Tom Parker Bowles (‘Is this your new haunt?’ he asks), followed by restaurant critic AA Gill (‘Hi Adrian’, ‘Hi darling’). ‘Rather more people here than I expected,’ Shulman says, jaw tense, voice dropping to a near-whisper

But does it look like a navy-blue cardigan below? She leaves the Observer interviewer and seems to change into a grey cardigan that looks, to my non-fashionista eye, like a designer job.

Alexandra Shulman. Photograph: Julian Broad for the Observer

She tells the FT:

‘I’ve got to the point where I don’t judge myself [on my appearance] because that way madness lies,’ she says, convincingly. ‘I know so many people who are upset about not looking as good as they used to but you’ve got to realise that’s what happens and find something else to be interested in.’

All very nice and reasonable. She does have a go at someone, however. In the Observer:

In fact, the most pronounced change she has noticed during her time at Vogue is … the increased control exerted by PRs and celebrities. ‘Somebody like Jennifer Aniston will only do an interview with copy approval and picture approval,’ she says. ‘I’ve never had anybody on the cover, ever, who’s had copy approval and picture approval. I just don’t think it’s a proper thing if you do.

‘It’s this thing of people just basically treating you as if you’re bound to be doing something that is in some way going to be insulting to their client. I just find that so offensive.’

Who could disagree with that. But then why pick on Aniston? Could it be that the Friends actor was the preview launch cover choice of weekly fashion rival Grazia?

After reading these two pieces, I’d be wary of the PR gloss and cut to the FT quote:

If she could have her time again, she says, ‘I would have got rid of the people who didn’t want to work with me, sooner.’ It’s a hint of the steeliness that must have helped keep her at the top in a fickle industry.

What I do like, though, is the FT  portrait by James Ferguson. His cartoons always have an edge to them. In this one, she’s got her heart not just on her sleeve but all over her top. The drink is the £5.50 Virgin Mary she has at 34 Restaurant. And there’s no attempt to flatter. It’s as if he’s taken her words to heart: ‘I’ve got to the point where I don’t judge myself [on my appearance].’

Vogue profile