Of course, far from being a monumental screw-up by a bunch of incompetent chancers, this is being spun as a natural progression as “the digital market where the real reader and advertiser action is”.

Zip was published by Blue Publishing, the company run by Paul Baxendale-Walker, which bought two brands from the now-defunct Vitality Publishing. Vitality went bust last year owing nearly £1 million.

On the basis of this Press Gazette interview, Baxendale-Walker could very well be the biggest tosser in magazine publishing – and that’s a highly competitive field.

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.

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!

Ordinarily, this would mean that the odds on the title getting to its next issue would be very long indeed, but when you’re owned by a billionaire heiress the normal rules probably don’t apply – in all sorts of ways.

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”?

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.

Who’s playing dummy?

But as usual, as the attached letter to subscribers shows, this is not a retreat, but a victory!

If magazine publishing continues to have triumphs such as this, by the end of the decade only one edition of one magazine will be published – but it will be the best thing in the whole wide world.

H/T to JK

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.

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)