After 280 years as an ink on paper product, Lloyd’s List is weighing anchor as a newspaper and sailing into the sunset, and will become ‘digital only’ from 20 December.
At Lloyd’s when there’s bad news to be announced they ring the Lutine Bell.
Publishers: it tolls for thee.
There’s a distinct lack of inner calm among the readers of Yoga and Health magazine as it seems the publishers have gone out of business.
They’re not the first company to find themselves stuck in an unfortunate financial position and they won’t be the last.
Bauer’s Golf Illustrated magazine has thrown its clubs into the lake and announced that it won’t see its second birthday.
Golf Illustrated was launched in December 2011 as an exciting new journal … and took the reader on a journey into the game.
That ‘journey’ seems to have been similar to Tiger Woods’ famous car trip – short, confused and ending in a write-off.
While we were all looking the other way, Future have airbrushed Practical Photoshop out of their portfolio.
In the Jan-Dec 2012 ABCs the title reported a circulation of just 8, 265. Even then, this was not Future’s lowest-selling magazine.
Smile please!
However bloody the redundancies at Future, at least they are giving staff notice that they’re facing the bullet.
The same can’t be said of Publicservice.co.uk the publishers of Public Servant magazine, whose 180 staff found out that their jobs had gone when the administrators turned up. As this was the day before pay day, no one got their wages.
One employee … said: “Some of us knew the company was in trouble. It’s always a giveaway when you can’t order stationery without the direct permission of management.”
[h/t to Press Gazette]
With an inevitability that would make an Ancient Greek dramatist utter a long, low whistle of appreciation, the ongoing tragedy of Future Publishing moves into yet another act.
This week Mark “Dead” Wood has announced 55 redundancies – on top of the vacancies that haven’t been filled since it introduced a recruitment freeze in July. Dead has blamed (again) the delay in the launches of new games consoles (an argument wonderfully skewered by MCV in July) and the bumpiness of the road to digital. And expect both these arguments to be taken out for long walks again later in the year.
The underlying problems of Future are twofold – the short termism that being a publicly-quoted company engenders, forever chasing a positive spin to put onto its City trading updates, and the fact that Future has always had pretensions to be a Premiership side when really they’re towards the foot of the Championship. They are not Celtic or Aberdeen, more a Morton or a Cowdenbeath. (more…)
And another B2B controlled circulation title creaks and falls with the news that PRWeek is now no longer weekly.
Of course, as this is a magazine for flacks you expect a positive spin to be put on things, which is why this isn’t a diminution but a “landmark relaunch”. So what radical editorial departures can we expect from the new version of the title?
The monthly magazine will offer in-depth features, expert opinion and authoritative analysis covering everything from big business issues to the minutiae of life in the comms industry. There will also be coverage of the lighter side of PR along with creative inspiration and even an agony uncle.
A PR agony uncle! I have a question:
Dear Uncle Rupert, my media company is heavily in debt and the circulation of all my products continues to fall. How can I put the reverses that the business continues to face in the best possible light without being accused of actually lying?
