A wee whisper reached Private Frazer’s ears at last night’s PPA Awards (I was one of the waiters) that certain of NatMags’ titles are having a less than pleasant time on the newsstands. The words ‘Cosmopolitan’ and ‘way, way, down’ hung together in one particularly memorable sentence.
An email to NatMags has gone unanswered thus far, but I’ll post any comments that I receive.
More generally, there wasn’t a circulation manager in sight who was looking forward to the next ABCs. “12% down is the new up.” was the best consolation that any of them could manage.
Sport Media Group is looking to sell its lads magazine Front a year after acquiring the title, reports Media Week.
Just what sort of numpty would you have to be to buy a monthly lads mag in the current market?
Distill, the global style magazine geared towards creative professionals, has ceased publication less than a year after its launch. [Media Week]
Private Frazer is a little baffled at this announcement. The magazine was meant to be bi-monthly, but there were only two issues – in September and December last year. Have they only just realised that they’d forgotten to publish the others?
The Advertising Association have just released their stats on last year’s advertising expenditure. (That’s as in 2008 – prompt or what?) They show a 4% total drop in spend and a decline in newspapers and magazines of 11.8%.
Compared to what we’re all used to, that doesn’t seem so bad, but remember that in April last year, the AA was forecasting that 2008 would see overall growth of over 3%.
As mentioned before, it’s worth taking all AA forecasts with a bucket of salt.
Interesting times over at Greater London House.
First Apax partners, who bought the B2B side of EMAP with the Guardian after the consumer divisions got sold off to Bauer, wrote down its investment in the company to zero.
Then Neil Bradford, co-chief executive of Emap Data and Insight, left the company suddenly.
And now EMAP Inform (the ink on paper bit) announces another 35 job losses. 40 jobs went at the end of last year, so the two rounds of redundancies will mean that the group has got rid of around 20% of its workforce in the past nine months.
Group M don’t half churn out the reports don’t they? Their latest effort gets the big headline “GroupM forecasts modest global ad recovery next year” in Media Week – but the key word here is ‘global’.
Western Europe’s advertising is forecast to be down 11.1% this year and down a further 3.5% in 2010.
And remember that this is for all advertising. How many of you are only down 11% year on year?
The Pink Paper is to cease publication in a print format and become an online-only publication according to Brand Republic. It is an ad-funded freebie, so no real surprise.
This is the second title that the publishers Millivres Prowler have closed in the past year (see Bona Closure from last October). Any more to come?
File under “predictable”. Archant have folded Oxfordshire Life into Cotswolds Life, and FHP Magazine, a freebie for Nottingham, has gone south.
Two unconnected, but not unrelated, news stories:
PrintWeek: Demand for paper to fall dramatically by 2020
Magazine demand is estimated to decline by 32% as a result of a rise in online publishing and impact on advertising, along with the impact of digital media on the business magazine sector.
Rupert Murdoch: “I can see the day maybe 20 years away where you don’t actually have paper and ink and printing presses.”
H Bauer’s new monthly cookery title, Eat In, recorded news-stand sales of fewer than 30,000 for its launch issue – half its target circulation, according to unaudited circulation data disclosed to Media Week.
