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)

Less Ink on Less Paper

News from Hammersmith as Haymarket offload Nursery World and Printweek to the Mark Allen Group. The value of the sale (which will be of interest to Haymarket debt watchers), is not mentioned.

Printweek will be relaunched as a fortnightly. (Presumably called Print2weeks)

Jane Macken, md of Haymarket Business Media is quoted as saying, “The sale of the titles allows HBM to concentrate on its core markets in line with the company’s group growth strategy.”

That’s growth as in “growth (sic)”.

 

h/t to Mr X (I suspect that’s not his real name)

 

Failed experiment

“See a dinosaur come to life” was one of the cover lines on the launch issue of Bonnier’s Science Illustrated UK.

One dinosaur that failed to show much life at all was the magazine itself, which seems to have met its own extinction event after less than six months. The Science Illustrated UK website tells its own story.

With the less than stellar sales of Bauer’s Wonderpedia (a million quid launch for 20,000 sales) perhaps publishers’ research into this category has been less than world class.