Ian 'Mr' McNeilly wrote:E wrote:It has good pictures actually granted...... but that just makes it more slippery when wiping your arse.
Now come on, that's rather harsh.
Magazines are a very tricky market these days what with the net and all. Then again, however good the net gets, I'll always buy hard copy of stuff because I just like them. Maybe I'm old fashioned.
As for Farhood, I've always liked him and his rather off beat style. One of my faves.
Apologies, as this might be too 'geeky' for some, but those of you who are interested in the challenges facing magazines might be interested in this piece by David Hepworth (a man who really knows his onions) that appeared in Media Guardian today:
A few weeks ago I asked a well-known, recently retired industry figure whether he would be looking to pick up any titles in the proposed Emap sale. "I wouldn't buy a magazine these days," he said. "Not even in a newsagent."
There was some gallows humour of that kind around this year, particularly from people who had been used to selling a lot of magazines to young men. Even in the world of women's magazines it was clear to those who were paying attention that the virtues of the medium might no longer be quite so self-evident. I talked to a number of people at the helms of household-name titles who were watching their sales base erode and having to fight harder for advertising in what is becoming, for everyone but the phone company, a small-portions world. The vessel of human attention has only a certain capacity and at some point someone has to shout "when!".
The indisputably candid statement of the year came from Darren Styles of Brooklands, speaking in April after he had closed the magazine Popworld Pulp within two weeks of launch: "Frankly, the magazine has bombed in a way nobody connected with it could ever have envisaged." Brooklands put out more than 100,000 of the first issue and sold fewer than 4,000.
This is not because it was rubbish. It is because the public has never taken more persuading to put its hand in its pocket and try something new. The Popworld closure took place just days after the equally premature demise of the upmarket property magazine So London, which also gave up almost before it had started.
Launches not working is nothing new but this indifference was. Ever since the spring there has been little going on in the launch area. It is as if all the publishers recognise that the curiosity gap in which they used to flourish has been colonised by other media and the only new titles that seem to get traction are big weeklies. These are ruinously expensive to launch and consequently few and far between.
What are the alternatives? On the face of it the policy of actually stuffing your magazine in somebody's hand seems to get round the problem of the public's unwillingness to sample. The success of the free sports magazine Sport encouraged Mike Soutar to come in with his general men's weekly Shortlist and, as I type this, there is talk of Open Goal, which is to be given away at Premier League football grounds, and even a Jewish glossy, Jlifestyle.
We must assume that some time soon there will be a free weekly celeb title given away at travel points. However, because these free versions are compelled to offer more copies than the paid-for titles (which, in the case of the celebrity market, would be a great deal) they are going to run into the mother and father of a littering problem. This is going to be an issue for the whole print industry before very long.
Last week the German publisher Bauer succeeded with a late bid for Emap's consumer magazines, which was not the move the industry was expecting. Whether it will hang on to the whole portfolio - which ranges from Grazia to Motorcycle News - or will seek to dispose of all the titles that do not fit comfortably alongside the likes of TV Quick and Take a Break, it is unlikely it will do anything in a hurry. Bauer is a privately owned firm and the disappearance of Emap leaves Future as the only publisher of consumer magazines that is publicly quoted and therefore has to answer the City's questions.
Felix Dennis offloaded his American operation in the summer, but his UK business remains strong thanks to the steady growth of The Week, which now sells 150,000 copies every week. The fact that its entire readership sits down with it for the same two hours on a Saturday morning and only a small number of copies go through the news trade could be a lesson for the entire industry.
People love magazines just as much as they ever did. It is just that they bridle at being driven into newsagents to pay for them and they need to have the habit of reading them re-established.
Other medium to large companies, such as Future and Haymarket, reported good progress, helped by strict cost control, investment in well-aimed web services and limiting their exposure to the costly slugfests at the news stand.
Once it had managed to establish the celebrity and shopping weekly Look, IPC did not do much on the magazine front, instead concentrating its efforts on Nuts TV, with NME radio and the like rumoured to be not far behind. These are likely to provide work for glamour models and third-party suppliers long before they produce work for journalists or ad revenue for the bottom line, but there is something to be said for having something new to talk to your clients about.
It has been the same with the web. You couldn't afford not to, but you couldn't honestly see how to. The chief executive of one big publisher of women's weeklies told me that he had given up pretending with investors and was prepared to confess that he could not see a way that his company would ever make money out of the internet. History will either see this as a hopeless lack of vision or admirable good sense, depending on how things work out.
The senior magazine executives (as a group, among the least web-savvy in the media) making all the grand announcements do not know how well it is going to go, any more than their counterparts in newspapers, television or radio do. "Mapmaking in an earthquake zone," they used to call it. And that is the way it's going to be for everybody from now on. Could be fun.
· David Hepworth is editorial director of Development Hell
