Mat Kenyon


Spotlight 10 Informed


Magazine make-over


Ian Burrell leafs through the glossies and hobby titles and finds that, while celebrities are no longer hot, gardening and golf trollies are on trend.


When the chief executive of the world’s most famous magazine company stated recently that it was “no longer a magazine company” the declaration stoked an identity dilemma that permeated the whole sector. Roger Lynch, CEO of Condé Nast, home


to such bywords in luxury publishing as Vogue, GQ, Tatler and Te New Yorker, appeared to be suggesting that the 70m readers who still engage with its titles in print format are of litle consequence. “Our audience is already telling us that’s not the way they interact with us,” he told Te New York Times. Instead, his focus was on the 300m who read Condé Nast content online and the 450m who engage with its brands on social media. Lynch’s blunt comments caused shock but will not have surprised the staff on British editions of Vogue, GQ, Wired and Condé Nast Traveller who were


made redundant last year in a painful restructuring process at the 113-year- old publisher. Veteran British GQ editor, Dylan Jones, stood down as part of the cost-cuting merger of editorial teams in the US and the rest of the world. Fat and glossy magazines have been hit hard by the pandemic’s impact on newsstand sales and a shrinkage in luxury advertising. Tese nice-to-have purchases are threatened by the cost of living crisis. From women’s lifestyle monthlies to celebrity weeklies, glossy prints are “geting thinner and thinner” observes Pamela Morton, NUJ senior organiser for books and magazines. Hearst UK, publisher of Cosmopolitan, which in February reported a 26 per cent year-on-year fall in circulation, carried out its own restructuring last year, puting a reported 200 jobs under threat. Its then CEO, James Wildman, also fought shy of the word “magazine”, telling Te Daily Telegraph last year that Hearst UK was a “marketing services business”. Te shiſt to digital is undeniable and magazine businesses have had to respond. Lynch, whose background was not in publishing but in streaming companies, has brought loss-making Condé Nast back into the black. Other publishers have shown great


invention in creating new revenue streams from the digital revolution. Future plc, which includes Homes & Gardens, Country Life and PC Gamer in its fast-growing portfolio, has developed e-commerce technology which helped to make almost £1 billion in sales for its retail partners last year, generating £216m in commission for the publisher. It employs 180 people in its tech development department. Te publisher has its own price comparison platform, Hawk, and on a typical day its readers purchase more than 40,000 items, from headphones to gym equipment and golf trolleys. In the six months to March this


year, the publisher increased adjusted operating profits to £134.5m, up 51 per cent year-on-year. Pre-tax profits for this


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