Great post and right on the money. Unfortunately Dave, James is right in thinking the mag would die if your format was adopted.jamesmcdonnell wrote:Some interesting points dave, but I think your contradicting yourself in places, and also failing to understand Boxing New's dillema.
Boxing is not a mainstream sport any more, and the estab;lished fanbase is small and possibly shrinking as it is. They are also suffering in that one of the core reasons for buying the magazine, which was to get all the news every week from around the UK is being eaten away by the growth of internet sites and the increasing quality and depth of internet coverage.
Boxing News is also part of a huge company which owns dozens of magazines, and I am sure they have to toe the line drawn for them by their scottish paymasters. I am unsure who took the decision to change the format of the magazine, but I am sure it was prompted by the gradual decline in sales figures for the magazine over the last decade.
It's all well and good saying that you could bring costs down by printing it on pulp, but it's going to be very hard to attract the requisite advertising to something which looks outmoded and is covering a sport which is frankly considered a fringe interest outside of it's fanbase.
I think this makes it very difficult for them to please everyone. Their existing readership might be happy for them to produce a bald, factual, newspaper style read, with much more content and less style, but how then do they attract the younger and increasingly aesthetically demanding demographic coming through.
Look at the successful magazine formats for other sports, they all look like glossy lads mags these days, because this is what the readership expects.
I think the other problem for Boxing News is that they have a small staff who are also responsible for producing the layout as well as the editoriall, and they don't have a huge budget to pay staff for all of this more underground coverage that you think would benefit the magazine.
Internet websites prosper because they pay their writers little or nothing generally speaking, and also because they charge little or nothing for their services and they can have their content constantly updated and have an army of writers providing much of their content without even paying for offices.
I see what you are saying about the format being more suitable for a monthly, but I think the route you are suggesting for their content would see the plug pulled on the magazine altogether by their owners in 5 years or less.
I don't work for BN owners so can't drill down into the detail, but I think you'll almost certainly find that in areas like print and production they've adopted a format that:
a) Fits with other mags in their portfolio, so they can make savings on the basis of the volumes they're buying in terms of paper stock
b) Allows them to justify a higher price point and so offset any decline in copy sales through an increased margin.
I think any attempts to 'grow' the market are admirable, but the reality is that the type of hardcore fan who is going to be committed enough to the sport to buy a magazine on it is never going to stretch much beyond the 10,000 mark.
Attempts to point out the number of people watching boxing (either live or on TV) and therefore the potential readership, are slightly misleading, as this is an issue affecting all sectors. To use just two examples, despite the huge appetite for football in this country, the industry can only support one adult football magazine (Four Four Two), while others such as Total Football have fallen by the wayside. Equally, the PlayStation 2 had an install base in the UK of around two million units (that's from memory, so I stand to be corrected), yet the Official Playstation 2 mag has always hovered around 100,000 in terms of copy sales.
It's always difficult for hardcore fans to accept that there are casual fans who don't feel as passionately about the sport as they do....
