Press release from the InPublishing site
Saint Michael Studios launches ‘I Love Christian Music Magazine’ – the new bi-monthly A4 glossy featuring the latest Contemporary Christian Music news, interviews, articles, reviews, competitions and more.
Jesus wept.
Just when we all thought Centaur had forgotten how to shut something down, they surprise us by axing two high profile magazines in one day. So farewell, then Design Week and New Media Age (irony alert!) and adios to various monthlies which they are trying to sell. Again we see that print weeklies, formerly sustained by recruitment classifieds, are left shredded by the interweb. Any one want to bet on Marketing Week surviving the year?
Add that to UBM offloading a stack of titles and EMAP losing profits (and did you notice Simon Middleboe has now popped up at Centaur?) and life in B2B has suddenly become interesting to connoisseurs of closure once again.
A wee bit of news from last week that slipped almost unnoticed onto the wires: RBI have sold off Quadrant Subscription Services to the mailing company Air Business.
QSS are in the boring but important world of managing magazine subscriptions – banking money, answering queries, generating the data of who should be mailed each issue. It’s a low margin, volume-driven business with a diminishing number of major players.
What Air Business want to do with a company losing clients and operating a geriatric computer system is anyone’s guess, but the sale is indicative of RBI’s flight from the printed word. When they had dozens of titles that needed to be mailed out to subscribers it made sense to own the company that managed that reader relationship. Now they don’t, it doesn’t – QSS are ill-equipped to manage digital subscriptions (i.e. they can’t do it) and the investment needed to bring their systems up to date is huge.
Has anyone counted how many magazines remain at RBI? Does anyone want to place a bet on when the last one will close or be sold?
There’s been very little noise about the latest National Readership Survey results. Many publishers prefer to quote NRS figures over ABC as they give a more malleable view of a title’s penetration in the market, dealing as they do with ‘readership’ rather than ‘circulation’.
Perhaps everyone was too busy to pay much attention to the results? For anyone who is interested, here are some highlights from the Top Line data, comparing the periods a) April 2009 – March 2010 with b) April 2010 – March 2011.
Top 20 weeklies, total readership (more…)
Not a doomed magazine this time, but this little tale is so illustrative of the arrogance, greed, cynicism and stupidity that pollutes so much of publishing that it is worth recounting.
Tim Ireland has operated under the name ‘bloggerheads’ for the past ten years, so he was a little perturbed when the Times Higher started a new column with the same name.
Tim politely pointed out that he had been writing under this title for a decade and that the THE’s use of the name would cause confusion and diminish his brand – which is his main source of income.
The correspondence between Tim and various individuals at TSL can be seen here with some more detail here and here. There is a wonderful range of vices on display – ignorance, bullying, arrogance, buck passing, condescension – that does no favours to anyone at TSL. Take a bow Times Higher, you’re a credit to our industry!
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