Unhappy families

There will be a bawlin’ and a greetin’ in Hammersmith if the news about Immediate Media proves to be correct.

Hot on the heels of Bauer casting out Pregnancy and Birth comes the word that Tom Bureau has come over all Richard III with regard to two of his little charges – Junior and Practical Parenting.

There has been no response to emails or tweets asking about the two titles, but they have been removed from the Immediate subscription site and banner ads on the individual title sites now lead to dead space.

This leaves a once-crowded category considerably thinner, with Immediate’s Prima Baby (last year’s buy-in from Hearst), Bauer’s Mother & Baby, and Media 10′s Gurgle, the last men toddling. Given that the year-on-year ABC performance of these three titles was, respectively  -24%, -22% and -4%, Private Frazer wouldn’t put a great deal of money on any of them making it into long trousers.

Eyes Down

Perhaps you can go broke by underestimating the intelligence of the public after all, as FeaturesExec reports that Full House magazine is being closed down by its owners Pep Publishing.

Even priced at just 55p the title lost nearly 20% of its circulation year on year, delivering a less than market-leading 138,158. Although perhaps I’m wrong about this as the magazine’s twitter bio says it is “Full House! the fastest growing ladies weekly mag”

Or perhaps the twitter page is updated by the same people who do Full House‘s website: the latest stories are from March, and the homepage splash is a Christmas gift guide.

Bingo!

Hard Life

Not even this old pessimist saw this one coming, but HRH Nicholas Coleridge has just announced the closure of Easy Living. Although, of course, it’s not closing, it’s suspended. And it’s definitely not closing, it’s going digital only. From the press release:

The print publication of Easy Living will be suspended from the July issue, …  Condé Nast will now enter a period of statutory consultation with the title’s team, following which a final decision will be made on the future of the print publication. [I think we probably know what this decision will be don't we boys and girls?]

Quoth his Nicholasness “… we see few encouraging signs in this part of the market, with challenges at newsstand and an increasing reliance in the sector on multi-bagged offerings.  Easy Living’s print edition has a significant loyal fan base and subscriber base whom we will be reluctant to disappoint, and a particularly talented editorial and publishing staff.  ”

Presumably, therefore, the “particularly talented editorial and publishing staff” have nothing to fear from the “period of statutory consultation”?

Clapped Out Old Bangers

So the inevitable has happened at Autotrader with five of their titles -Autotrader, Top Marques (geddit), Truck and Plant, Van Trader and Farm Trader – going to that great breakers yard in the sky. Even two years ago Autotrader was selling over 60,000 copies a week, but it is now down to just 27,000 – a stunning illustration of how cyberspace ((c) HM the Queen) has devastated the classifieds business, whether that is small ads, recruitment or listings.

Looking more broadly at the motoring category we can see that there are some vulnerable big names, with Dennis, Haymarket and Bauer all having multiple products that are leaking readers and advertisers like oil from a Mark 1 Escort. What, really, is the point of a weekly car magazine? Or a monthly ‘motoring news’ title? Exactly.

No More!

The sun’s out, so it’s spring cleaning time at Bauer with a two-for-one offer on magazine closures.

Last week they decided that Pregnancy and Birth was not the little bundle of joy that the accountants wanted (it was barely managing to sell 12,000 copies an issue), and now More! is less.

More!‘s fall is quite joyously spectacular. Its ABC for July-December 2010 was 188,000; for the same period last year it barely managed 92,000, a drop of more than half. Such a decline either suggests readers deserting in droves, or the switching off of a huge level of support and black hat circulation techniques. In the same period Grazia has lost 40,000 sales (17%) and Heat an impressive 110,000 (30%), none of which is going to endear Paul to the Germans.

Rumours are circulating that one, possibly two, other magazines in the Bauer portfolio may have announcements of their own in the coming weeks.

 

There’s no art to find

ArtsProfessional, the magazine of news, information and features about management, development and administration of the arts has gone digital only with no paywall and no subscription, and funded entirely by advertising.

They say “[T]he rapid trend towards digital consumption, the 24-hour online news culture, the sharp contraction of the cultural sector …, the squeezing of arts organisations’ budgets … and the rising costs of print and postage have conspired against the economics of print publishing.”

Private Frazer has a couple of other appropriate quotes: “Making money is art.” (Andy Warhol); “Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.” (Picasso)

First Round Exit

Last July Ken Monkou (“an ex-Chelsea player of the year”) launched a glossy quarterly magazine called Football Life.

It appears Mr Monkou’s concept of time is as elastic as stoppage time at Old Trafford as issue 2 has yet to haul itself off the bench, and the web address is redirecting to a design agency (www.footballlifemagazine.com).

From the launch PR:

In the football magazine genre, there is not a single publication that successfully gives a 360 degree world-view of the human stories and real life personalities behind the sport’s glamorous image.

And there still isn’t.

Back of the net!

(H/T to Michael)

Stall Velocity

It looks like I picked the wrong week to give up snark, as FeaturesExec report that Key’s Classic Aircraft has skittered off the end of the runway.

The exits are here, here and, specifically, here.

Absolute Pants

After 21 years the bottom has fallen out of the market for Lingerie Buyer, the magazine for everyone “trying to find out what is happening in the intimate apparel industry“.

As Private Frazer remains utterly ignorant of what’s happening in his own underwear, he is not likely to feel this loss of broader industry knowledge too keenly.

Pigeon Posted

The Stool Pigeon, a free bi-monthly music paper has wrung its own neck, saying:

running out 60,000 copies of a free newspaper six times a year and distributing them to 100 cities/towns across the UK has become untenable, and also increasingly less effective and exciting than publishing journalism online.