The Business of Magazines

[XavierRaphael]

I hope it's a W but with wearable stuff

 

[tigerrouge]

From Media Guardian, news about UK Marie Claire:

Trish Halpin to edit Marie Claire

IPC Media has appointed Trish Halpin as the new editor of its flagship women's glossy Marie Claire. Currently editor of IPC's In Style magazine, Halpin will take up her new position on 2 February.

She replaces Marie O'Riordan, who announced in October that she would stand down as Marie Claire editor at Christmas after overseeing the title for more than seven years.

Halpin joined IPC's women's magazine division, Southbank, as In Style editor in September 2006. Prior to that she had held posts as editor of Red and as deputy editor of both New Woman and More! magazines.

The UK version of Marie Claire was launched in 1988 as the thinking woman's glossy. However, its sales have traditionally trailed behind rivals Cosmopolitan and Glamour. As well as the UK, it is now published in 30 other countries around the world. Circulation of the UK edition showed a fall of 4.8% year on year to 316,765 copies for the first half of 2008, according to the latest ABC figures.

IPC Media said that Halpin's successor as In Style editor would be announced in due course.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/dec/12/trish-halpin-appointed-editor-marie-claire

 

[tigerrouge]

An Indian Harper's Bazaar...

India Today Group to launch Harper's Bazaar and Robb Report news

The India Today Group is planning to launch Harper's Bazaar and Robb Report in the Indian market. Both titles are awaiting approval from the I&B ministry.
Harper's Bazaar is a American fashion magazine and will pose as competition to Conde Nast's fashion brand Vogue.

The Harper Brothers launched it in 1867 as a weekly in New York. The upmarket weekly became a monthly in 1901, and in 1913, was relaunched as Harper's Bazaar by William Randolph Hearst. Harper's Bazaar considers itself to be the style resource for 'the well-dressed woman and the well-dressed mind'.

Robb Report is claimed to be the international authority on luxury lifestyle. Robb Report India would unite CurtCo Media with the India Today Groupin targetting the country's most affluent readers, with a focus on luxury goods and services offered both internationally and in India. The publication will include existing Robb Report content, as well as information specifically for the Indian market.

The India Today Group brings out Indian editions of foreign journals such as Harvard Business Review, Golf Digest, Scientific American, Prevention, Good Housekeeping, Auto Bild and Cosmopolitan, among others.

The government's latest move of allowing Indian editions of foreign news and current affairs magazines will further open up the market to overseas publishers. Also, there is a noticeable trend that the magazine market is moving towards niche as consumer needs are not general anymore.

http://www.domain-b.com/industry/Publishing/20081209_india_today_group.html

 

[frieda]

Does anyone know offhand the website that lists magazine circulation projections? Thanks!

 

[tigerrouge]

This article by Cathy Horyn in The New York Times touchs on everything anyone has ever said about Anna and the current version of US Vogue:

What’s Wrong With Vogue?

No one at Vogue, least of all its editor in chief, Anna Wintour, could have been seriously stung by a recent letter from a reader complaining that the magazine was in a rut. After all, Ms. Wintour chose to publish the letter, which chided the magazine for featuring the same women — “Gwyneth Paltrow, Caroline Trentini, Gisele Bündchen, Nicole Kidman, Sienna Miller, blah, blah, blah,” as the reader, Kathryn Williams of San Diego, said. “I could make a calendar of your cover girls, and it would probably repeat year after year.” She added: “Let’s face it: Vogue is getting a bit stale. It is a pity, too — because the magazine is still much better than the others.”

What is remarkable — given the rumors last month that Ms. Wintour was going to be replaced by the French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld — is that she was able to include not merely a critical view but one that accurately identifies the problem with the magazine. Vogue has become stale and predictable, and it has happened in spite of some of the best editors, writers and photographers in the business. And it has happened in spite of a leader who “only cares what readers care about,” according to a long-time staff member.

Because of her intimidating presence, heightened by an almost unvarying personal style — the bob, the sunglasses, the extra armor of her Cheeverish clothes — Ms. Wintour, 59, is considered the ultimate fashion editor. In fact, her instincts are really those of a journalist. She has periodically updated Vogue over the last 20 years to reflect changes in the world and in women’s lives. She has introduced new photographers, beginning in the late 1980s with Peter Lindbergh and Steven Meisel. At the same time she has a deep respect for the work of Irving Penn, as if she knows that Mr. Penn, however contemporary his pictures, is part of the mysterious link to Vogue’s — and fashion’s — past.

“That’s the main reason I keep looking in the magazine, to see a photograph by Penn,” said Magnus Berger, an editor in his 30s who, with Tenzin Wild, recently started a publication called The Last Magazine, an oversize journal that is a blend of art book and newspaper and which its founders hope will be a platform for young talent.

This sense of history, which enriches Vogue, is much less evident today in other fashion glossies. It has been nearly wiped away at Harper’s Bazaar.

An avid follower of politics, as well as sports, she has broadened Vogue’s coverage in both arenas and put a first lady on the cover. It was one of the first national publications to write about Sarah Palin. For all the fantasy in Vogue, especially the fairy-tale kind produced by Grace Coddington, the creative director, and Annie Leibovitz, the magazine is actually quite serious. There are things to read, long pieces, from writers with distinct voices: Julia Reed on politics, Jeffrey Steingarten on food, Sarah Mower on the Paris collections.

And unlike many of her rivals, Ms. Wintour, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has largely resisted the pressure to break down content to lists and small bites. Though this faster, drive-thru approach to editorial consumption may be what more people want.

According to a writer at Condé Nast, who requested anonymity because he works at a sister publication, “Anna’s two great talents are that she understands her readers and she speaks with this incredible authority to advertisers.” Indeed, as the writer points out, Condé Nast, having monopolized high-end magazines, has a rather odd relationship with luxury advertisers — which is that these advertisers cannot afford to go somewhere else, bad economy or not. Luxury brands haven’t yet found a formula for success in digital media. Their relationship, then, with Condé Nast creates an “interesting ecology,” as the writer put it. “They keep each other in business.”

Meanwhile, though, many people have all but abandoned traditional media for Web sites and blogs. This is the locus of Ms. Wintour’s harshest critics and where rumors first surfaced that she was going to be replaced by the 50ish Ms. Roitfeld, who has made French Vogue exciting in part by drawing on the sexiness of her own act. She knows how to play with fashion’s self-referential habits.

The rumors were silly — Ms. Roitfeld runs a magazine with a circulation of 133,000, in contrast to American Vogue’s 1.2 million. But silly or not, they were extravagantly denied by Condé Nast, which took out a two-page ad in The New York Times to show Ms. Wintour’s record. It cited figures showing that Vogue had the highest number of advertising pages of any fashion magazine. Yet, in 2008, Vogue’s ad pages were down 9.6 percent, Mediaweek said, compared with an average 8 percent decline for other fashion magazines. Rivals like Elle and Harper’s Bazaar, which have adopted a pell-mell style that encourages value-for-money nibbling, have fared better. The very qualities that set Vogue apart — consummate fashion judgment, a comfortableness with ideas in the shallow pool of celebrity and weight-loss articles — now seem to be narrowing its view, like an aperture shutting down.

There are too many stories about socialites — or, at any rate, too few such stories that sufficiently demonstrate why we should care about these creatures. What once felt like a jolly skip through Bergdorf now feels like an intravenous feed. To read Vogue in recent years is to wonder about the peculiar fascination for the “villa in Tuscany” story. Ditto staff-member accounts of spa treatments and haircuts.

 

[LANZO_358]

^^
Wow good read.

 

[tigerrouge]

And there's more! Part two...

It’s embarrassing to see how Vogue deals with the recession. For the December issue, it sent a writer off to discover the “charms” of Wal-Mart and Target. A similar obtuseness permeates a fashion spread in the January issue, where a model and a child are portrayed on a weekend outing with a Superman figure. Is a ’50s suburban frock emblematic of the mortgage meltdown?

To ask what works in Vogue is in a sense to ask the same of all fashion magazines. Many do not seem to know how to relate to women in their 20s, except to throw celebrity pictures and clothes at them. Although the median age of its readers has hovered around 34 since Ms. Wintour became editor, in 1988, you don’t feel that the magazine has considered how changes like social networks and Web-based subcultures have influenced women’s ideas about themselves. This lack of awareness is reflected in Vogue’s pages.

Also, people are likely to be short of money in the coming years. Vogue, along with the fashion industry, must find a way to deal with this reality, said Grace Mirabella, who ran Vogue for 17 years until she was replaced by Ms. Wintour. “You’ve got a fashion market that doesn’t know how to do good, inexpensive clothes,” she said. “That is something which should stop whether there is a recession or not.”

The critic Vince Aletti, who is a curator of “Weird Beauty,” an exhibition of recent fashion images that will open this month at the International Center of Photography, thinks that Vogue under Ms. Wintour is still the leader in a lot of ways. “For me any magazine that publishes Penn is great, and she has been publishing some amazing work by Annie Leibovitz,” he said. Referring to Condé Nast, he added: “I think they would be crazy to get rid of Wintour, although I think the magazine needs something different. I don’t think it’s a bad-looking magazine, but it hasn’t changed in quite some time in a significant way.”

To people inside Condé Nast, like Michael Roberts, the fashion director of Vanity Fair and a friend of Ms. Wintour’s, it’s hard to imagine that Ms. Roitfeld would be in line to replace her unless, as he said, someone “has spiked the Kool-Aid.” If such an event were to happen, he said: “There’s a whole financial machine that would come crashing down, I would say. I’d like to see Carine talking to the people from North Beach Leather or St. John knits. It’s all very professional and businesslike at American Vogue.” As Ms. Roitfeld herself once said, with typical candor, “I’m not a business girl.”

But there is something more in Ms. Wintour’s background that makes it hard to replace her, though, inevitably, it will happen. “In newspaper terms, she is old news — the Nuclear Wintour story,” Mr. Roberts said wearily. Editors of Ms. Wintour’s generation, like the designers they champion and the photographers they protect, have a depth of knowledge not easily reproduced. Mr. Roberts said: “I’ve never seen anything from Carine that astonishes me the way that I have in American Vogue. I’ve seen kinky, sexy but not astonishing. But I did see astonishing in Vogue when Anna published a picture of Nadia Auermann having sex with a swan.” He was referring to the Helmut Newton picture from the early ’90s. That kind of subversion made American Vogue really cutting edge, Mr. Roberts said. “He’s never been replaced.”

It's worth checking out the article at the site itself, because there are a few pictures: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/fashion/01ANNA.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

And "Nadia Auermann having sex with a swan" is a reference to the Greek myth of Leda and the swan, which has been used in art and poetry down the ages, yet when people talk about that photograph, they don't ever seem to connect that's the inspiration behind it, it's quite a classical image, rather than something saucy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leda_and_the_Swan

 

[vogue28]

congrats to the letter writer, anna needed to hear it.

 

[Miss Dalloway]

This article by Cathy Horyn in The New York Times touchs on everything anyone has ever said about Anna and the current version of US Vogue:

So true, that was brilliant, and made me happy, i love that it wasnt all criticism.Honestly this article could have been written by us lot here at TFS (not as brilliantly as Miss Horyn of course, but still....), we sure went through those points many,many times before, here.

I really do hope powers that be, read this, because i think Wintour is doing a great magazine, she just needs to import more variety and change few things.The same cover girls and model casting need to go, i have hope for Us Vogue in 2009, as Wintour said in December; "Out of bad times can come great magazines.", in particular this makes me excited for the future, "Right now we're in difficult times, but I think it makes you a little edgier,". I hope i wont be dissappointed in the end, and no changes come to the magazine.

 

[lucy92]

i agree with horyn 100%. there is altogether too much society coverage in vogue. its embarrasing.

 

[MissMagAddict]

Source | The New York Times

January 5, 2009
Advertising

Prominent Magazines Lose Weight, Shedding Nearly Half Their Ads
By Stephanie Clifford

At a glance, the covers of Allure magazine from January 2008 and January 2009 do not look very different from each other. The 2008 issue trumpeted headlines like “Mega Makeover Issue” and “Insanely Flawless Skin,” and 2009 has “Big Makeover Issue” and “Powerful Skin Care.”

Inside the magazine it was a different story: the January 2008 issue had almost 70 pages of ads, while the January 2009 issue had 41, according to the Media Industry Newsletter, a decline of 41 percent.
It was an ugly January not just for Allure, but also for Condé Nast magazines in general.

January issues tend to be thin even in good years, and most magazines posted a decline in ad pages. But the average decline across all monthly magazines was only 17 percent, and most Condé Nast magazines fared much worse, according to analysis of Media Industry Newsletter data.

Wired, which is usually thick with consumer electronics ads, was the worst hit, down 47 percent from a year ago to 43.6 ad pages. Architectural Digest fell 46 percent, to 63.2, from 116.8. Vogue and Lucky were both down about 44 percent.

Of the 10 monthlies with the worst declines in January, four were Condé Nast magazines: Wired, Architectural Digest, Vogue and Lucky. It was the only publisher with more than one title in the top 10. The other hardest-hit magazines were Boating, published by Hachette Filipacchi Media; Power & Motoryacht, published by Source Interlink Media; Everyday Food, published by Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia; Salt Water Sportsman, published by Bonnier Corporation; Texas Monthly, published by Emmis Communications; and Boys’ Life, published by the Boy Scouts of America.

•

Only two Condé Nast magazines did better than average: Glamour, which was down 15 percent, and Vanity Fair, down 5.9 percent. (W Magazine was down just 2.4 percent, but it is published by Fairchild Publications, a division of Condé Nast.) Condé Nast executives were unavailable to comment late last week because they were on vacation, their representatives said.

Condé Nast magazines casting wider nets for ads seemed to fare better. Allure and Glamour are both aimed at young women, for instance, but Allure carries mostly beauty and fashion ads, and Glamour carries those categories in addition to health, pharmaceuticals and food. And while Vogue features women’s fashion ads and GQ carries men’s fashion ads, Vanity Fair has both alongside ads for TV shows, cars and hotels.

Roberta Garfinkle, the senior vice president and director for print at TargetCast TCM, which buys and plans advertising placements for clients like Expedia and Sun-Maid Growers, said ads for Condé Nast’s January magazines must be submitted by October or November, which hurt the company this year, as there was so much financial uncertainty in play.

“January books with very early closes have always had a problem,” she said, “made worse this year by the fact that clients are slower to approve their budgets and that perhaps there are clients that are cutting back.”

While January issues are rarely bulging with ads, December issues are, as marketers try to reach holiday shoppers. But the Condé Nast magazines that published combined December-January issues, including Cookie and Condé Nast Portfolio, did not do well either. Cookie plummeted 45 percent to 93.2 pages, Portfolio fell 35 percent to 72 pages, Domino was down 26 percent to 60.9 pages, and Teen Vogue declined 29 percent to 105.4 pages.

“Some of the advertising they carry in luxury goods, certainly in the automotive arena, without being able to look at the numbers broken out by category, I think that’s why they’re hard hit. The fashion pages are down,” Ms. Garfinkle said. “Some clients cutting back on their budgets makes it that much worse.”

Unlike other publishers, Condé Nast is known for being inflexible on ad prices.

“The problem now is that some advertising agencies have come to realize that with the unnegotiability of Condé Nast’s titles, and the broader demographic group that are associated with the more mid- and downscale brands, you don’t have to buy Condé Nast,” said Steve Greenberger, chief executive of the advertising firm S. R. Greenberger & Associates. “You can buy Women’s Day, you can buy Parents. You can buy around it.”

•

But Jack Hanrahan, the former director of print at the agency OMD who is now publisher of the newsletter CircMatters, said that Condé Nast had a smart long-term strategy.

“In a negotiation environment, you’d be better off taking the hit now with regard to paging, but preserving your well-established, in their case long-term, pricing position of being equitable across advertisers and not really engaging in heavy discounting and widespread negotiations just to get a small schedule,” he said, using the industry term for an advertiser’s annual commitment to a magazine. “And you can do that when, one, you’re not a public company, and two, you have these larger bases of ad pages.”

Condé Nast is a private company, and does not report quarterly revenue, unlike Time Inc., Hachette Filipacchi Media and American Express Publishing, which are all part of public companies. Mr. Hanrahan said other publishers regularly offer heavy discounts to advertisers.

Condé Nast’s is “a fair approach to pricing and not this ‘I’ll do anything to get a schedule,’ which others do — and, I think, have paid for it,” Mr. Hanrahan said.

 

[MissMagAddict]

Source | Women's Wear Daily

Marie Claire Tries Again...

by WWD Staff
Posted Tuesday January 06, 2009

TRYING AGAIN: Marie Claire is hoping the third time’s a charm. The magazine is getting ready to relaunch its Web site to offer more content channels and, more importantly, hopefully attract more advertisers. Marieclaire.com — which has been redesigned twice during the past two years since it broke off from iVillage — will make its debut Jan. 15 with ads from Chevy, P&G, Always, Alberto Culver (Nexxus), Kao Ban, P&G Clairol, Sears and Wal-Mart. “We are expanding from three channels to eight, and this will provide more inventory to sell against,” said Ashley Parrish, senior Web editor. “Basically all of the magazine will be online as well as extra material such as the blogs, daily giveaways and horoscopes.” Parrish also plans to feature more video coverage, which will include video clips of Marie Claire’s forthcoming foray into reality TV, “Running in Heels.” Traffic has increased since the site’s last redesign, with 3.8 million unique visitors in December, compared with 461,000 visitors in December 2007. There were 17.4 million page views, versus 3.3 million during the same time frame in 2007, according to Omniture.

 

[MissMagAddict]

Source | Women's Wear Daily

Alef Mag's New Life...

by WWD Staff
Posted Tuesday January 06, 2009

ALEF’S NEW LIFE: Alef, the Middle Eastern fashion and lifestyle magazine backed by Villa Moda, has closed and will relaunch later in the first quarter, according to Villa Moda founder Majed Al-Sabah. Al-Sabah told WWD that Villa Moda’s new majority shareholder, Dubai International Financial Center, was consolidating Villa Moda’s businesses into separate divisions, and that Alef would be part of the new publishing arm. “We’re looking to relaunch Alef in March to coincide with Art Dubai, and I will personally be involved in the new project,” said Al-Sabah. “We are also looking to bring Alef’s headquarters back to the region. It’s silly for us not to have our head offices in the Middle East,” he said, adding the new offices may be in Dubai. Alef’s main office is currently in London, and the publisher and editorial director is Paul de Zwart. The last issue of the two-year-old Alef was in the summer. A notice on the magazine’s Web site alerts readers that publication has been suspended and that “Modern Middle East Publishing, the company which publishers Alef under license from Villa Moda, is unfortunately not in the process to give readers and advertisers news on a possible relaunch.” The notice adds that, “Despite showing a positive balance sheet and showing healthy growth, circumstances outside the publishing team’s control have led to its present suspension.”

 

[Miss Dalloway]

Oh MC just needs to let go.

And all magazines jumpin on reality show bandwagon is getting so old.

 

[MissMagAddict]

source | theguardian.co.uk | January 5, 2009 | by Oliver Luft

The year ahead in the magazine industry
Stuck in the middle

Volume sales or ultra-niche appeal will prove vital this year - and Bauer's Grazia could be a bellwether

It does not look like an easy 12 months ahead for the magazine industry. But by the time 2009 draws to a close, larger publishing houses in the business-to-business and consumer sectors will be looking increasingly dominant, while smaller, weaker titles will wither under the strain of the downturn. Publishers may be hoping to escape a big sales fall, but they are still gloomy about what 2009 might bring - not least if it's a severe advertising slump. Maintaining or increasing revenue from ads will be the biggest challenge for magazines from all sectors this year. Most insulated perhaps are the top-end glossies - the Vogues, GQs and Elles - which, while not recession-proof, are unlikely to be hit hard by a plunge in advertising revenue. Premium advertisers have limited places to promote their goods and will be concerned about losing front pages of the glossies - prime real-estate in their eyes - to rival brands.

Niche-appeal consumer titles that rely on devoted, engaged readerships are also more favourably placed than most when it comes to advertising. Mass- and mid-market consumer titles, many of which saw circulation decline in 2008, and where advertisers have a greater range of options, will find it more challenging. This year greater emphasis will be placed on editorial in these titles: get the quality of content wrong and magazines could find themselves in real trouble.

Large publishers such as IPC Media, Condé Nast and Future Publishing, which have invested in extending their brands into TV, web, mobile, radio or shopping, are more likely to weather the impact than those with standalone products or thinner portfolios of titles. Economies of scale help larger companies to spread costs, and the clout they can wield with suppliers also helps them into more favourable positions. In addition, advertisers are also likely to focus their budgets on key titles. Which could leave free magazines, with their heavy reliance on advertising as the primary source of income, with some real challenges.

For consumer publishers, then, the strong will get stronger and the weak will suffer most. And this is broadly the picture in the B2B sector too, which is likely to see some loss-making titles closed and the position of market leaders reemphasised. A point underlined by news last month that Reed Elsevier had abandoned the sale of its trade business unit, Reed Business Information, the publisher of Variety, New Scientist and Farmers Weekly. Sir Crispin Davis, chief executive, said the unit had more value than could be realised by a sale in the worsening economy. Reed will now look to sell it "in the medium-term when conditions are more favourable". This could be a while yet.

In other areas, finance titles are expected to see the greatest consolidation. Incisive Media's Mortgage Solutions magazine decided in December to suspend its print run for the first quarter of 2009 and to rely on its website and email alerts. In November, Centaur reduced the free distribution of its Mortgage Strategy magazine by 13%. The business titles that remain could well see more of these decisions as publishers cut distribution costs and rely on websites and targeted distribution.

But how to get online to pay? Business publishers may look at greater innovation online to find revenue that goes beyond the blunt approach of either subscription or open access. The Financial Times, for instance, allows users to access a certain number of stories free each month, while heavier use of the site and access to other editorial is limited to subscribers. Consumer titles are equally likely to look at their web operations - although the focus will be on ways to deliver more audience to print advertisers they want to bring over to the web. NatMags, through its web division, Hearst Digital, spent a large part of the past year developing online communities around its editorial output.

Publishers could also use relatively inexpensive web-based titles to experiment editorially, and integrate printed and web products to a greater degree. Eyes will be on a number of consumer fashion titles to see if they can win back some of the audience lost to independent fashion blogs.

Consumer launches will be few and far between as publishers keep their hands in their pockets. Launches that do occur will probably be for highly targeted groups - and it is likely to be a similar situation in the business sector. "Ultra niche" will be the watchword for any B2B launches.

Condé Nast is launching two niche consumer titles: Love, a twice-yearly fashion and style magazine under the eye of the former Pop publisher Katie Grand, and a UK version of the US technology magazine Wired.

Meanwhile, publishers will be eagerly looking at the subscription levels of entrenched monthlies as an indication of how they are faring in difficult times. Bauer's weekly high-end fashion magazine, Grazia, might prove an unusual kind of bellwether in the coming year. If it wants - or needs - to increase circulation it will need to run editorial that appeals more to the mass market. But mass-market editorial could put off some of its more luxurious advertisers. Watching where Grazia's priorities lie during the next 12 months may tell you about the and confidence of the sector.

But perhaps the most compelling mark on the horizon is the government's October powwow for the creative industries; a bright spot in what might well be a fairly gloomy year of cutbacks, closures and potential job losses.

The insider: 'The web is a hungry beast'

We have given up trying to guess what senior management is up to. Are they working out their redundancy packages while firing off CVs, or are they planning another "restructure", which means more job losses and cost-cutting at our business-to-business magazine?

There is one person who knows everything. He is the HR director, a man whose name I hardly knew until a few months ago. Like Gordon Brown, whose cheery disposition seems to increase as the economy worsens, the HR director has blossomed under his new workload. He has taken to wearing a tie and looking stressed.

When the senior managers and the HR director come out of their interminable meetings, they send us emails partly to remind us that they are still around, and partly to cheer us up. The emails contain bad news (the economy) and good news (we are doing better than our competitors). They promise clarity and transparency - and then the senior managers disappear back into another meeting.

This sense of panic is a new phenomenon and it's catching. Although I'd like to think that market knowledge, journalistic skills, a shelf full of awards, and a passion for my subject will stand me in good stead I am no longer so sure.

Yet B2B editors know their sector inside out and edit magazines that have been around for decades. We have loyal readers who rely on us for industry gossip, as well as taking up the cudgels to fight their corner. But is that enough?

B2B publishing may not be in freefall, but if the sector we are reporting on goes down, so do we. For six months we've watched as the economy has slid into recession, and we've done what every publisher and editor does when times get tough: take out headcount, cut costs and save on pages.
Though everyone has done all this, you can't help but get the feeling that as advertising revenues continue to nosedive, the bean counters will want more.

If this all seems too gloomy, the corollary to it is that many B2B titles are cyclical and if you edit a magazine whose industry is on its knees, all you can say is that it will come back. However, hovering over us - the reason this recession is different from any previous one - is the web.

The web is a hungry, predatory beast, which costs publishing organisations millions of pounds of investment. Very few people have managed to make the web profitable - but publishers love it.

It doesn't matter if your page impressions are only increasing thanks to the thousands of students around the world who are all writing the same thesis, because it's the only graph with a line going up, instead of down. But most of all, publishers love the web because, as a way of disseminating news, it's cheap.

The big question for publishers tapping next year's projected losses into their calculators is do you even need journalists?

Industry opinion

Stevie Spring
chief executive, Future Publishing

I'm expecting a mixed 2009 in the magazine market: general interest, bad; special interest, good. Nice to have, bad; need to have, good. Those publishers producing magazines that are embedded in people's lives, that play an important part in people's hobbies and interests, will weather the storms much better than those producing content that can be had quicker, cheaper, in digestible bite-size chunks online.

Nicholas Coleridge
managing director, Condé Nast

Next year will be a challenging time for magazines, though I'd rather be working in the glossy industry than any other branch of the media this year. Circulations will hold steady for blue-chip titles, but deteriorate for peripheral ones. I expect some of our competitors to shutter loss-making titles. On the advertising front, it will be particularly tough for mass-market and middle-market titles, and we certainly don't expect to be unscathed at the quality end.

 

[MissMagAddict]

source | fashionista

Bye, Bye Katie... her editor's letter from the final issue of POP

Dear You,

Twenty issues and eight years later, this is my last outing at the top of POP. Gosh.

First, a confession. There’s been too much fluoro, too many animals, too many pictures of the staff, too much pink and slightly too many Muppets. Charlotte Tilbury would probably add that there have been far too many plane journeys involved, too. I’d also add that there have been too many tears, but discounting one blubbing Christina Ricci episode at 1am on her cover shoot, we’ve had too many jolly times to start sobbing. Whether I’m still saying that at the other end of this letter is a different matter entirely.

POP has been put together on a budget of love. That is how and why it has worked. Because the most amazing photographers, stylists and writers who have become part of the POP family over the years have been fans first of the stuff that they’ve engaged with on our behalf - sometimes in the most fanatical sense - every single image we have created for POP and every word we have written for it have come from the right place. Question the decisions made, if you like. I do with every magazine I look at (there is still nothing better, really, than a good magazine argument between friends). But don’t question the intention. Behind the gloss and sparkle, POP has always come from the heart.

Because we’re fans, we have been able to celebrate the phenomenon of Lindsay Lohan and the genius of Miuccia Prada, page beside page. Abi Titmuss, Grace Jones, Beth Ditto, Billie Piper, Yoko Ono, Giles Deacon and Girls Aloud might not look like they make any sense together but the rule of thumb guiding POP from the start has always been that if someone or something is an office obsession, if we can’t stop talking about it, then it is probably the case that lots of other people can’t stop talking about it either. So I won’t say sorry for giving Big Brother nutcase Nikki Graeme the opening feature when she was enjoying her one nanosecond in the spotlight. These were the things that other fashion magazines didn’t do and we did. Because we wanted to. Nobody had to fit a mould to be venerated as an icon of their moment; they just had to be one.

The moment for me that POP started making its own unique sense was when I was sitting beside Stella McCartney in a cafe next to Luella’s studio on Talbot Road. Stella called Madonna and asked her if she wanted to do the magazine. She said yes. I still have to pinch myself that this phone call actually happened. Quite besides the fact that our official photographers-in-residence Mert and Marcus hid in the toilets for half an hour because they were so scared of meeting her, it set a new precedent for us. I can never thank Stella enough for it.

Some other highpoints. Shooting and re-shooting Liz Hurley two weeks after giving birth having lost an astonishing one-and-a-half stone and waving her hands dismissively as if it would ever be a problem getting into a bathing suit at that moment; seeing Victoria Beckham stumped for words when we put her in front of the camera in a sweatshirt and jeans, five minutes into arriving on set; the most beautifully insane 24 hours in Ibiza with Courtney Love; finding out that the miniature countercultural author JT LeRoy, who Steven Klein had shot over 20 pages for us, was actually a figment of somebody’s imagination; deciding not to do Kate Moss until the moment was exactly right, then watching and beaming as the issues arrived with her all sunnily iconic in angel wings and boxer’s helmet after a summer scandal in which the tabloids had decided they wanted to destroy her; then sitting back whilst she became the biggest-selling POP cover star ever (obviously).

The cast list of people who have helped make my time at POP the most breathlessly fabulous magazine ride a girl could enjoy is too numerous to thank. In an Academy Awards attempt to keep it brief, my right-hand art directing henchmen Lee Swillingham and Stuart Spalding can take a bow, for defining our aesthetic from day one to my last curtain call. Murray Healy has kept the copy desk on fire over the years with splendid ease, mostly in pristine, high-end sportswear. And nobody could ask for a better production editor than the brilliant Matt Fiveash. Our resident cover photographers Mert and Marcus have to get another nod. The incredible amount of talent, time, energy, money, enthusiasm and vision they’ve lent to the magazine makes them inseparable from it.

So the 20th issue. It’s all about animals as you will see. Drew Barrymore gets her second cover because she deserves it. She’s the perfect POP girl to bow out on, one of my favourite celebrities I’ve ever met. Her first pet was a pressie from Steven Spielberg called Gertie, too, which surely counts for something. As ever with my POP covers I checked in on photographer Alasdair McLellan and writer Paul Flynn on their super day in Connecticut with her, knowing how charmed they would be by her. Suffice to say the word, “AMAZING!” was swapped back and forth several times in those conversations.

If you study the credits in POP with expert detail - and if you don’t, why not? - you will note that the marvellous photographer Alice Hawkins has taken a good deal of the animal-related snaps in my final issue. Now I’ll start blubbing. We gave Alice her first commission when she was fresh out of college, so let me have a little maternal flutter as I recommend her first major exhibition at The Northern Gallery For Contemporary Art in Sunderland.
Yes, there is more flouro, more pink, more animals, more plane rides, more Muppets and more pictures of the staff. Because, you see, that confession wasn’t really a confession at all.

This is the suff I love. At heart, I’m a fan, too.
Bang, done.

Love,
Katie

 

[mikel]

from wwd:

LOOKING AWAY: As fashion brands continue to pull back their ad spending, it leaves fewer dollars on the table to divvy up across a plethora of magazines. And the result is another victim of the downturn: New York Look, the biannual spin-off from New York magazine dedicated to covering show seasons in New York, Paris and Milan. There definitely won’t be a spring issue this year — and a fall one is questionable. A spokeswoman for New York magazine said coverage of the fall 2009 shows, which begin Feb. 13 in Manhattan, will appear in New York’s Fall Fashion issue and include some elements of Look. She added the company “will revisit the publishing of the stand-alone Look in the fall of 2009.” Look was produced by New York’s fashion team and a handful of freelancers and was distributed on newsstands and to a select group of New York subscribers after the Europe shows ended each season.

— Stephanie D. Smith

 

[nyc_art_style]

I love New York Look. It will be a shame not to see it this upcoming season.

 

[tigerrouge]

Source / mediaguardian.co.uk blog section / Tuesday 13 January / by Vicki Frost

Will magazines be taking their own advice and slimming down?

Are we about to see thinner and thinner glossy magazines as the economic downturn bites?

There are a few things you can rely on in January. You will have marvellous intentions for the new year. Your resolution will falter somewhere around the 15th day of freezing, grey weather. You will be skint. And February's glossies – on newsstands now – will have more tips on how to lose weight than it would be possible to read, let alone implement.

Not that the titles will be following their own advice, of course. The least fashionable look for any magazine in the current climate is a bit on the slim side – much, much better to be plumped up with many pages of expensive advertising. But are they? While there's a school of thought that says luxe won't be hurt by the recession, in the States, there have already been comments on just how thin some of the glossies are getting.

So how are their British counterparts faring? January is traditionally a tough month following the splurge of Christmas advertising - so it's little wonder all the monthlies feel a little less substantial than they did at the end of 2008. Take Easy Living for instance, which is down to 176 pages in its February issue, from 252 pages in December; or In Style, which has dropped to 170 from 234. But over the year that should recover. The question is, in the current gloomy economic climate: will it?

Well, we're going to be keeping tabs to find out. Every month we'll be putting the glossies on the scales, and seeing how they weigh in – and how well the industry really is coping in tough economic times. It's the skinny on the glossies, if you like. We've picked a fairly wide, if slightly random selection of titles to give us a decent overview of the sector — including some magazines that are slightly more targeted than general lifestyle to see if, as predicted, this is the year of the niche publication.

Give us your own predictions below - how big or small will titles be by the end of the year? Like guess the weight … only without delicious baked goods as a prize. Well, unless you ask very nicely ...

Women's lifestyle

Handbag size:
Glamour (Condé Nast 344g; 232 pages

Full size:
Vogue (Condé Nast 571g; 220 pages
Marie-Claire (IPC 467g; 210 pages
Easy Living (Condé Nast 457g; 176 pages
Psychologies (Hachette Filipacchi 384g; 162 pages
InStyle (IPC 469g; 170pages
Elle (Hachette Filipacchi 488g; 194 pages
Tatler (Condé Nast 482g; 180 pages

Men's lifestyle
GQ (Condé Nast 602g; 208 pages
FHM (Bauer 371g; 154 pages
Arena (Bauer 401g; 146 pages

Non-general
Olive (BBC 356g; 130pages
Q (Bauer 364g; 170 pages
Conde Nast Traveller (Condé Nast 476g; 180 pages
House and Garden (Condé Nast 514g; 196 pages

 

[tigerrouge]

Source / theguardian.co.uk / Saturday 10 January / by Peter Walker

Young, white and super skinny? We don't buy it, women tell advertisers

Real women prefer brands whose ads mirror their own identities, survey shows.

The advertising world's perennial reliance on young, white and extremely thin models has long faced criticism from feminists and health campaigners. Now, new research at a leading UK business school suggests it might be doing something else: harming companies' balance sheets.

In what is believed to be the first such global survey of female consumers' attitudes, the research says women respond more favourably to a brand if the models it uses somehow mirror their own identities.

Advertisers cannot, however, simply enlist a few fuller-figured models, says Ben Barry, who is carrying out the research at Cambridge University's Judge business school: "In general, people have a more favourable reaction to brands that show models who represent people's age, size and background.
"It's not necessarily enough to show one component which is similar - people really wanted to see someone who represents them in all three factors."

Such an approach has been used by a handful of brands in recent years, notably the Dove skincare range, which made a deliberate virtue of using older and larger models in its award-winning Campaign for Real Beauty.

But elsewhere, particularly in the fashion and luxury goods industries, the traditional reliance on so-called aspirational advertising has limited change, despite high-profile campaigns against perceived racism and the encouragement of unhealthy female physiques within modelling.

The study, which is still being completed, canvasses the opinions of 2,000 women in the UK, US, China, India, Canada, Brazil, Kenya and Jordan.

Barry commissioned advertising agencies to produce a number of realistic print campaigns for products, including consumer and luxury goods. Half were made using what the study termed "traditionally attractive models" - aged 16 to 24, white and around US size zero, the equivalent of a UK size four - while the remainder pictured "realistically attractive models" of a range of ages, races and shapes.

The findings were marked. Aside from women aged under 25, who were less likely to object to an abundance of young, white, ultra-slim models, and Chinese consumers, who actively preferred them, most of those surveyed felt positive towards the brands that used the more diverse models.

A small number of earlier studies, mainly carried out by psychologists, have suggested that the use of excessively slim models can create a bad impression with female consumers. But Barry's work goes further: as well as looking at the issue from a business and marketing viewpoint, it additionally considers race and age. The latter is a particular factor for companies to take note of given the relatively high spending power of older women.

The study quotes the reaction of one 50-plus participant to a mocked-up ad for a luxury product using a very youthful model: "It's a slap in the face to show this young woman because she'd never have the money to shop there whereas I do."

Another key finding was that while women preferred to see attainable images of beauty, this did not mean they were against glamour. "The women wanted models who looked like they were part of the fashion industry but also looked like them," Barry says. "It made them feel that they, too, were included in the industry and were considered beautiful. It's not just about taking a plain mugshot of a real woman."

Barry, who previously set up an agency for non-traditional models in his native Canada, says businesses needed to take note: "It's clear that in order to unleash new economic potential you need to represent your consumer physically. If you're a big fashion retailer and you're going to hire 10 models, you should make sure that each one of them represents a different aspect of your consumers."

While alluring for those who believe the promotion of unrealistic body images is inherently wrong, advertising experts warn that such studies are treated with extreme caution in the commercial world.

"This kind of research may have some interesting insights, but it's insights into the way consumers talk and think about the adverts when you prompt them," said Paddy Barwise, professor of marketing at the London Business School.

"There is a gap between what they say, particularly in the presence of other women, and what they would do actually at the point of sale, and that's a big gap, not a small gap." But he added: "I think that we will see a trend away from very, very skinny models, because there is a social trend against it."

Closed door

While "real" models have made their way into campaigns for a range of products in recent years, when it comes to the luxury sector the door remains shut. A flick through the advertisements in the latest UK issue of Vogue brings no sign of anyone who would have to even breathe in to fit into a size eight dress, while there is one non-white face, actor Halle Berry.

A recent craze has been the return of the supermodels prominent in the 1980s, such as Linda Evangelista and Claudia Schiffer, but even in their late 30s and 40s there is not a wrinkle or grey hair. Most of the fuss about excessive skinniness is now absorbed by the haute couture fashion shows; the last equivalent furore in advertising was over the Kate Moss "heroin chic" campaign for Calvin Klein 15 years ago.

More recently, the cosmetics giant L'Oréal was accused of lightening the skin tone of the singer Beyoncé Knowles for a press advert. Nonetheless, black faces - Naomi Campbell apart - remain extremely rare and size 14s unknown. Such luxury brands tend to be "very conventional in the way they communicate", said Neil Dawson, a leading advertising executive who heads the judging panel for the industry's IPA Effectiveness Awards. "This has meant that their campaigns have historically become a bit samey."