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.
June 9, 2009
February 16, 2009
Out of gas
As the motoring industry power slides into a full-blown depression (have you seen the figures for new car sales? They make even house prices seem buoyant) it can only be a matter of time before one of the car mags fails its MOT. (more…)
September 19, 2008
More! is less
Tin hats on everyone, particularly if you work for More. This from Media Week:
Bauer Media’s weekly women’s magazine More is set to relaunch for the second time within a year in an attempt to reverse its plummeting circulation.
There are often very valid reasons to redesign and relaunch, but to do it twice within a year is really desperate stuff. No More! ideas. No More! hope. No More! time.
Update 07/10/08 Ping! An email arrives from Chantelle Horton, the deputy editor of More
We thought you might like to know that far from being desperate or having ‘no more ideas’, the magazine changed last year because we entered a new market and became weekly. It was always our intention to do a content and design overhaul once we’d settled into the market and taken our existing readers along with us.
As I’m sure you’ll probably place this response up verbatim, you might want to post this up too: more! launched in 1988 as a fortnightly. It increased frequency to weekly in September 2007 and now sells over 700k copies per month based on its most recent (and first weekly) ABC of 162,544 per week JJ08
Touching though it is that Chantelle can spare time from her busy schedule to answer me yet not get Media Week to retract the ‘plummeting sales’ gag, one might have thought that this carefully considered “two relaunch” strategy (“it was always our intention” etc) could have been better publicised last year. For it to happen now either implies panic at falling sales (my contention) or a huge cock up with the original redesign (see Music Week). We’ll see which might be which in the next couple of ABC releases.
