Conde Nast is to relaunch Wired magazine, 12 years after an attempt by the Guardian failed. The title first appeared in the US in 1991 with Nicholas Negroponte - head of MIT´s Media Lab - as one of the founders. It boomed with the growth of the web but fell foul of the dotcom bust and was snapped up by the Vogue publisher, which broadened its brief and sought out a more mainstream advertising base.

The Guardian brought Wired to the UK with Tom Paine - one of the founding fathers of the US constitution -  on the cover. However, the UK market for such a US-centric title was too small. Whether it is now big enough to sustain the high fixed costs of the US approach remains to be seen.

The magazine is part of the history of the web, claiming the first banner advert and spinning off the HotBot search engine.

Conde nast profile

Dennis is to launch its third digital magazine on July 17 with free motoring title iMotor. The magazine will be sent out by email each fortnight with content based on test-drive videos, photographs, articles and reviews. The  target readership will be ABC1 men aged 30 and over.

Dennis was able to sign up more than 100,000 subscribers for the March launch of consumer technology digital magazine iGizmo by marketing it to its database of 1.5 million male readers. Digital men’s monthly Monkey has ABCe figure of 245,404 copies a week (Jan-Jun 2007).

Dennis profile

Monkey profile

Four Murdoch magazines that have come and gone - now Love It! is under threat

News International is understood to be set to close its consumer magazine division, after it made a loss of nearly £10m, Media Week reports.

The Chelsea-based unit was set up in 2005 to launch women’s weekly Love It! Plans for other mooted titles, such as a news weekly and a second women’s magazine failed to come to fruition. However, it did wrest the contract to publish seven million-circulation contract magazine Sky Magazine for its parent from John Brown. It also took back the contract for monthly paid-for title Sunday Times Travel from River Publishing.

If it does close the division, it won’t the first time Murdoch’s UK empire has lost enthusiasm for (and a lot of money on) magazines. In the mid-1980s it launched Elle, and Sky in partnership with Hachette, both of which were sold to Emap and Mirabella (launched 1990, closed 1991). TV Guide was another failed offering in that period.

More recently, Inside Out had another short tenure on the shelves (1996-97).

News Magazines profile

Book chain Borders is to run a buy-one-get-one-half-price offer on magazines for this year’s Magazine Week, from 29 September to 5 October, says Print Week.

The discounts will be available in all its 41 stores in support of the magazine industry’s promotional event and Borders will bring in editors to talk to customers.

The Guardian is quoting Reuters that United Business Media has ended talks with Informa about a possible merger, while Informa said it had received a fresh approach. Informa said in a statement “it has received a further approach from a third party that may or may not lead to a takeover offer in cash being made for the company”.

The retrial of Barry George rekindles one of the early theories about the murder of Jill dando - that the killing had been sparked by that week’s Radio Times cover.

Piers Hernu, launch editor of Front magazine for Cabal, has cast an eye over the monthly lads’ mags for Press Gazette. He finds a revived Loaded, a Maxim in terminal decline, ‘a tedious, nippleless nightmare’ in FHM and his old title ‘the cheekiest and most charming of the bunch’.

As joint founder and editorial director of customer publisher Redwood (not to mention former Daily Express editor when the job was still worth having), Christopher Ward was one of the most powerful figures in the industry, so - as one of his protégés - it’s a pleasure to be able to show the lad as he looked as a Petticoat columnist in 1971.

Redwood profile
Petticoat profile

Larry Viner of the Advertising Archives tells me that the Oz complete collection went for $5,700 in New York (estimate $4,000-$6,000). So anyone who paid the £9,999 asking price for an Ebay buy-it-now over here would be feeling really hard done-by!

Collecting magazines