The first thing you’ll notice when you read the annual report of the Press Board of Finance is that it looks like a restaurant menu, from somewhere like the Savoy Grill in pre-Gordon Ramsay days. The second notable thing is the anachronistic language, which reads like a cross between a press statement from Buckingham Palace [...]
How unpleasant can Apple make the experience of publishing apps for the iPad? In Europe, the disincentives are piled high. The cost structure behind every £1 of revenue earned by a UK paid-app publisher has looks distinctly nasty: In the UK, publishers will continue to pay Apple 30%. Thanks to Apple’s decision to ban in-app [...]
Twenty minutes into my interview with Rupert Heseltine, executive chairman of Haymarket Media Group, I ask my 15th question about the company’s finances. Did Royal Bank of Scotland, the magazine publisher’s bank, require his father, the Tory grandee Michael Heseltine, to step down as chairman as part of a debt-restructuring deal in June 2010? At this point I [...]
Web-linked touchscreen tablet that repurposes print content unveiled by SkiffIt is thinner than a CD case and is made of a flexible sheet of stainless steel foil that won’t shatter if you drop it. Yet the Skiff Reader, a touchscreen device unveiled las…
It might not be up there with W.H. Auden singing the praises of the General Post Office in his 1936 documentary Night Mail. But The Association of Newspaper and Magazine Wholesalers does inject a healthy dose of lyricism into its description of the “nightly miracle” that results in millions of newspapers arriving at 54,000 retail [...]
190 staff, 4.8m readers and 80 years-worth of back issues. I give you Business Week, for sale by McGraw-Hill with a reserve price (according to some reports) of as little as $1. The volume of ad pages carried by Business Week during Q1 fell by a remarkable 39.8%. During Q2, the decline was 30%. (NB: These [...]
Roy Greenslade highlights this from Adam Smith, futures director at WPP-owned media agency Group M, as a potential quote of the year: “No previous ad recession has put household media names at risk like this one has, from local newspapers to high-street magazines to national TV channels”. Separately, Mark Sweney at the Guardian paraphrases Smith [...]
When news of Bauer’s decision to close Arena broke last week, I read a couple of news stories that failed to mention the magazine’s founder, Nick Logan. Because Logan has lived in self-imposed exile from the magazine industry for the past decade, this isn’t so surprising. After selling The Face and Arena to EMAP in [...]
In a forthcoming column, I argue that things will start to cut up rough for consumer magazine publishers in the New Year. On the other side of the Atlantic, it’s starting to happen already. The New York Times reckons that Conde Nast has ordered 5% cuts in budgets across the company. There’s no mention of [...]
In B2B publishing, local newspapers and on the nationals, the web skeptics were pinned back a while ago. For the most part, they’ve gone quiet, having seen what has happened to others who poked their heads above the parapet too enthusiastically. For some reason, consumer magazines are different. Here, the web skeptics are still alive [...]