• Murdoch's Love It weekly to launch as sample with Sun. Media Week
• Burda Living & Gardens due out 2 February
• Sunday Times Inside Out homes title 16 March
• 'The nationals can't compete.' Closer editor interview. Independent
• Editorial Intelligence for journalists and PRs (24 November)
• Fashion weeekly at NatMags - Project Z
• ACP-Natmag to launch Real People weekly (Project Star) in January
• NatMags-Rodale planning to bring Prevention to UK from US
• FHM compact for summer 2006 at Emap following success of trial
• News International to launch True Lives and Inside Out in spring. Media Week. Follows Guardian report
• Robin Derrick, creative director of Vogue, was inspired in his career by a Vogue cover in 1976. The Independent
• Muffin the Mule and Zap comics at Future
• Women's rights magazine editor arrested in Afghanistan. BBC News
• Vogue's Wintour hit with pie in fur protest. Reuters
• Trinity Mirror real-life magazine, Reality
• Independent on Sunday goes tabloid (Oct 16). Press Gazette
• Greenslade fears for press in distribution changes. Guardian
• Burda sees dirty tricks in Tesco delisting Full House. Media Week
• Uncertainty over TES after sale by News International. Press Gazette
• Higher frequency for the Economist's lifestyle annual Intelligent Life
• Undisclosed £9m weekly from Future France
• GQ Style for September
• Weekly fashion title at IPC
• Film weeklies from IPC and Emap; KO! for men at Northern & Shell

Magazine mogul Packer dies
Dec 26. Australia’s richest man, Kerry Packer, who controlled most of the country’s magazines through Publishing & Broadcasting Ltd, has died, aged 68. A family statement released through his Nine Network television station said: ‘He died peacefully at home with his family at his bedside.’
He inherited the family company, which has now been run by his son James for several years. Kerry was the son of newspaper and magazine mogul Sir Frank Packer and began his career working in the printing room of one of his father’s newspapers. When his father died in 1974, Packer became chairman of Australian Consolidated Press, now the magazine arm of PBL. He inherited television and radio stations, newspapers and the biggest magazine publisher in the country. In 1977, he bought limited-overs cricket to television with players in multi-coloured kit – ‘pyjamas’. The 190cm - 6ft 2in - Packer was a flamboyant character and known as a gambling ‘whale’, playing baccarat tables around the world and buying Melbourne’s Crown Casino, Australia’s largest.

Australia & New Zealand
Dec 05/Jan06. Merricks. £3.75; 124pp. Ed: Anna Scrivenger
The latest in a range of titles from Merricks covering lifestyle, buying property and travel to various countries. The range focuses on advice for people who want to migrate. Australia (six a year); limited distribution: only WH Smith; sponsored by Currencies Direct. Florida quarterly.
Australia magazine and Florida magazine
Travel sector profile

MacKenzie drops Highbury
Dec 22. Kelvin MacKenzie resigned as chairman of Highbury House. He told the Guardian: 'I gave it my best shot but was defeated by a mountain of debt which had been accumulated over the past three years.' The publisher of Front suspended its shares on December 12 over £25m in debts.
MacKenzie moves in
Highbury profile

Beano publisher buys Soduko company
Dec 15. DC Thomson, the family-owned company that publishes The Beano, Shout and Scottish newspapers such as The Courier and Sunday Post, spent £85m on Puzzler Media, publisher of 50 titles, including Puzzler Sudoku. Puzzler Media claims the title of 'the world's largest puzzle content provider'. The company traces its roots back to Home and Freezer in 1983 and is based in Redhill, Surrey. Puzzler Sudoku - which shifts 280,000 copies a month - is the bestseller of the group's titles.
DC Thomson profile
Puzzler Media

Guardian picks top 20
Dec 12. The Guardian's media section named Private Eye, The Economist and The Week as its top three titles out of 20. It's a very news-based list with just seven monthlies. Take a look at the BSME awards list for some similarities and contrasts
'Covered in glory'
BSME awards

Inked
Undated (c) 2005. Inked Productions (US). $3.99/£4; 146pp. Ed: Mike Salman
'Mindset, style, culture, art', in this case the art being tattooing. Glossy US quarterly distributed by Comag.
Inked

Zoo and FHM block Nuts
7 December. Zoo and FHM publisher Emap has won a ruling against IPC's Nuts to prevent it claiming the title 'best-selling men's magazine in Europe'. IPC made the claim in an email based on selling 301,671 copies a week of the title. However, Emap complained to the Advertising Standards Authority that monthly FHM sold 560,167 copies each issue. The ASA backed Emap.
ASA ruling
ABC sales figures

No more Spin at Future
November 30. Future has closed Spin, the cricket title it bought as part of a £30m deal with Highbury House in April. The magazine was launched in March (April cover date) and was seen as benefitting from the buzz surrounding the game after the England team's success.
Future profile

Publicis Blueprint wins top agency award
Publicis Blueprint has been voted customer magazine agency of the year by the Association of Publishing Agencies. John Brown Citrus picked up five awards and Haymarket three. River won editor of the year for the Sunday Times Travel Magazine.
Customer magazine publishers profiles
Publicis Blueprint profile
Winners' list at Media Week

France holds back Emap
A raft of problems has held back Emap profits - at a time when it has spent a total of £16m on the launches of Grazia in the UK and Closer in France. Interim pre-tax profits were flat at £75m, even though revenue rose 6 per cent to £554m. In France, its TV listings magazines TéléStar and TéléPoche have struggled to sell advertising in the face of new competitors, sales on the news-stands have been difficult - and the rioting of the past weeks will not have helped. French profits were halved. In the UK, recruitment advertising fell 14 per cent, but the company blamed NHS budget constraints rather than a shift in spending to recruitment websites. FHM, Heat and Zoo and Grazia were plus points.
Emap presentation on French market
Emap profile

Bazaar decision at NatMags to drop Queen
National Magazines is planning to change the name of Harpers & Queen back to Harper’s Bazaar (it adopted the Queen when it took over the latter in 1970). Harper’s Bazaar dates back to 1867 and was bought by Hearst in 1912. It launched in the UK in 1929.
NatMags profile
Janice Turner on Harper's strategy

Magazines thrive in China
Magazines are thriving in China, as advertising income growth starts to eat into that of television, says the Wall Street Journal. A report in the paper on November 15, ‘Subscribing to China's Masses’, cites Nielsen Media Research showing that spending by mass-market and luxury consumer brands in consumer magazines was up 28% last year over 2003, outpacing the growth rate for newspapers and eating into the 80% share of television. While it gives the fragmented market, advertisers' preference for established titles, political land mines and ambiguous circulation numbers as obstacles, the barriers for magazines, especially lifestyle titles, remain considerably lower than for TV.

Development Hell buys Mixmag
Word publisher Development Hell has bought clubbing magazine Mixmag from Emap, paying 'a seven-figure sum' for the 46,470-selling title. Rivals Ministry and IPC's 1995 launch Muzik closed since in 2002 and 2003. The Ministry of Sound tried to launch another title, Trash, as a contract magazine with Condé Nast in 2003, but this was an embarrassing failure. Word sells 33,376 a month for £4.20. Emap bought Mixmag from independent music company DMC in 1997 for an undisclosed sum. It then had an 80,000-circulation, having been launched 14 years earlier as a newsletter for DJs. The £3.85 Mixmag may have been too small a niche for Emap, which has developed radio stations around Kerrang!, Q and Mojo.
Development Hell profile
Emap profile

Zoo ridicules ASA
Zoo publisher Dan Cotton has ridiculed the Advertising Standards Authority's criticism over the magazine running a 'boob job competition'. Retail Newsagent quoted him saying: 'This kind of thing is entertaining for out readers'; 'Our readers could not give two hoots about the ASA'; and 'Hopefully this will drive readers to the news-stand.' The ASA listed a dozen complaints to the Emap magazine's competition from around the country.
ASA ruling
Emap profile

Vogue put covers on website
Condé Nast has put a selection of British Vogue covers since its launch in 1916 on its website as part of a celebration of 10 years of Vogue.com. Unortunately, it is a limited selection and some have been heavily cropped. The Esquire equivalent is much better with all covers available.
Vogue archive
How to find cover images
The secrets of cover design
Condé Nast profile

O: Observer Fashion Supplement byTank
Winter. Tank/Observer (GMG). Free with Observer newspaper. 100pp. Ed-in-chief: Masoud Golsorkhi. Art dir: Nina Lawson
The Sunday Observer presses ahead with its free supplement strategy. This fashion quarterly - produced by photography-led Tank - follows sport and music monthlies, in addition to the weekly magazine. Large format (266mm by 320mm) enables O: to show off the photography and it is thick enough with perfect binding to feel like a real magazine (26 pages of ads, including a four-page advertorial for Getty Images/Cointreau).
Tank
Observer profile

Uncut DVD
Nov/Dec. IPC Media, London. £3.99. 148pp. Ed: Allan Jones. Pub dir: Andrew Sumner
IPC Ignite has launched a quarterly spin-off from Uncut, its film and music title, which will cover films on DVD. The first issue features Clint Eastwood and has a history of The Sweeney. With an editor's letter that starts 'The last time I essayed this sort of introduction...', it could do with better subbing.
Uncut DVD
IPC profile

Crime Confidential
Oct 25-Nov 7. Hachette Filipacchi, London. 70p (£1.40). 68pp. Ed: Nick Chalmers
Hachette Filipacchi has launched real-life crime title Crime Confidential with a 70,000-90,000 sales target. The fortnightly will be sold alongside women's weeklies. Cabal tied to launch Crime Weekly in 1999 but this never appeared after IPC put out a 'spoiler', Chat Crime and Passion, in February that year.
Hachette Filipacchi profile

Best US covers of 40 years
Oct 17. The 1980s was a low point for magazine covers in the US, according to The American Society of Magazine Editors. The decade threw up just three covers from the past 40 years, whereas the years 1965-1969 alone produced 11 (including four from Life, three from Esquire and two from Time).Overall, Rolling Stone’s January 22 1981 cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono was named the top cover, with Vanity Fair’s cover featuring a naked, pregnant Demi Moore (August 1991), ranked second. In third place was Esquire’s April 1968 issue depicting Muhammad Ali as St Sebastian with six arrows in his body. The Economist made the list with its September 10 1994 cover showing two camels copulating and the words: 'The Trouble with Mergers'. The ASME tried to pick the top 40 US covers of the past 40 years - but ended up choosing 41! The total included four winners from Esquire, Life and Time; three from The New Yorker; and two each from Harper's Bazaar, Newsweek, National Geographic and People. The most recent cover was Vogue's May 2004 cover of Nicole Kidman.
The top 41 covers
ASME press release

Another Man
Autumn/Winter. Another Man Publishing. £4.50 322pp. Ed: Jefferson Hack
Jefferson Hack and Rankin Waddell - the people behind Dazed and Another Magazine - have produced a picture-fest tomb of men's fashion. It includes a 10-page shoot of Kate Moss modelling Dior Homme's autumn clothes. It begins: 'She sells beer, she sells cigarettes and clothes...' She is also Hack's former girlfriend and mother of their daughter. The issue probably went to press before the 'Cocaine Kate' scandal broke in the Daily Mirror because it carries Burberry advertising with Moss (the company has since dropped her).
Dazed profile

She relaunches
November. National Magazine Co, London. £3; 84pp. Ed: Matthew Line
This is more than a relaunch: NatMags got rid of all the old staff, so this is a new magazine under the same - 50-year-old - name. Line has been developing the title for 18 months, before which he was editor of Homes & Gardens. Before that he worked on contract titles at Redwood. Cover lines:

Help!
50 secrets and solutions to everyday dilemmas

Beautifully simple meals with no washing up
One colour scheme to transform any room
Are you using the wrong painkiller?
Fashion classics that really flatter

Discover how to
- Download music
- Use the real da vinci code
- Create a firework display
- Read palms...& teach your dog tricks!

Free pull out & keep
Health chart *cookery cards *decorating guide

She
National Magazine Co profile

Flush
November. Flush Magazine. Dennis, London. 99p (£1.50); 84pp. Ed: Steve Muncey
Another gambling title hits the streets a month after Poker Player. The website says 100,000 copies of this online gambling guide, covering sports as well as poker, will be distributed. The first three issues are to be sold in WH Smith with copies (presumably free distribution) also going to airport business lounges and private members clubs. The publishers must have had a hard time with advertising though, because the promise of 'minimum 100 pages' is not met. Ex-footballer, film actor and airline-rager Vinnie Jones is on the cover.
Flush

Mood for French teens
October. SNC Selma (Hachette), Paris. €2.50; 148pp. Directrice de la rédaction: Cécile Lestienne.
Publicité: Fabien Livet
Fun feel for a teen magazine marketed as coming from the same team that launched Psychologies in 1988 - Jean Louis Servan-Schreiber and Perla Servan-Schreiber. Compact format (185mm by 224mm). Print run is 400,000 copies. Hit the streets 21 September. Used special advertising rate card for the first three issues. Backed by a €3 million (£2m) marketing budget through radio, poster, online, press, viral and 'street' marketing. The web site seen as an important part of the package, with a spread on pages 10 and 11 promoting the online element. The home page features a counter giving the number of days since the issue came out, which changes to the next issue countdown a week in advance.
Mood

Poker Player
October. Dennis, London. £1 (£1.50); 68pp. Ed: Dave Woods
Dennis has never been slow to spot a trend and on the back of Total Gambler, distributed free with September's Maxim and other Dennis titles, comes monthly Poker Player. The launch is backed by a TV advertising campaign through agency BLM and creative services company Flint. It is shown alongside poker programmes and aims to give viewers interested in poker the chance to sample three issues of the magazine through interactive TV. At 68 pages, the magazine feels thin, but the launch price is held at £1.
Future has Online Gambler, a free monthly launched in March with a print run of 500,000. It is distributed with Future's titles that have an audience of men aged 21-45, such as PC Format, PC Gamer and T3.
Seymour is the distributor for Total Gambler, with the second issue due on sale 20 October priced £1.50.
Dennis profile

360 from new publisher Imagine
Not dated (on sale 18 August). Imagine, Bournmouth. £4; 132pp. Ed: Mark Denton
360 is dedicated to the Microsoft Xbox 360 videogames console and aims to piggyback on the games hype that starts in the run-up to Christmas. The magazine comes in a sealed cardboard case with a quality feel that is reminiscent of a Future launch. It aims at gamers aged 25-34 who see the console as a 'digital hub' for music, film, etc. But it is not without competition: XBox 360 Official from Future and existing XBox titles from Highbury are on the shelves also. Beware confusion with Threesixty, a bodyboarding magazine. Publisher Imagine is based in Bournemouth and was formed in 2005 by the former directors of Paragon, which was sold to Highbury in 2003 for £32m. The company is backed by venture capitalists and corporate financiers. It has also launched Mac Creative for advanced users and plans more launches. Seymour is the distributor, with the second issue due on sale 29 September.
Imagine Publishing (a tedious Flash website)

Gongs issue of Styling Lard
Summer (biannual). Mark Denton Design, London. £10; 80pp. Ed: Mark Denton
For the self-glorification of awards-obsessed advertising creatives. 'The first magazine to give mediocre advertising a wide berth.' Lists both the top 50 copywriters and top 50 art directors. Two covers: one for Gongs, the other (upside down) for Styling Lard.
Styling Lard
lad@lard.tv

Men's Vogue (US)
Fall (20 September UK on-sale date). Condé Nast, New York. £4.30/$4.95); 300pp. Ed-in-chief: Jay Fielden
Rare Italian wine, Geneva, Sotheby's, Julian Opie, Berkel meat slicers, Fiat's Gianni Agnelli, Panerai watches, tailor-made suits, Barker Black shoes, pilot bags, Bentleys, picture framers, Swiss watches, English furniture, a Hamptons golf club, GPS phones, $1,400 desk lamps, Paul Smith suits, English shooting parties, Roger Federer. The contents of this launch issue scream that the New Yorkers who produce this magazine (the editor came from The New Yorker) want to be anywhere but the US at the moment. Old World Europe is the place to be. They aspire to James Bond glitz (that of the books with their supercharged Bentleys, not the films) and they are aiming their magazine at people they believe can afford such trappings - men aged 34 and up who earn $100,000 a year or more. Half of the 400,000 printed in the US were sent to men fitting the target profile, with the remainder going to newsagents. However, the paper feels surprisingly thin and the launch unambitious. Of three Soho newsagents where I tried to get a copy, there was only one left and one owner bemoaned only being sent 10. Clearly, the magazine has to differentiate itself from stablemate GQ , though that has to some extent been dragged into Maxim territory. Some reviews have compared Men's Vogue with the Esquire of yesteryear, and it's certainly no Maxim, but stepping back in time is no option and a glance at the cover shows it is no Esquire . More like the FT's How To Spend It.
Condé Nast profile
Men's magazines case study

Future buys Italian and French titles
20 September. Future has spent €3.7m (£2.5m) on a clutch of computer games magazines in Italy and France. Italy's longest-running games title The Games Machine was bought from Milan-based Xenia Edizioni Srl for €3.5m. The deal also includes smaller titles PC Action, PC Action Games , Videogames and the website www.tgmonline.it. In France, Consoles Plus from Emap France cost €0.2m. It is one of the leading multi-platform titles in France and was founded in 1991. It is a strategy the company has used before. In August 2004, Future bought Computer & Video Games - regarded as the UK's oldest games title - with its website. It closed the magazine but kept the website
Future profile
The Games Machine

OK! set to sell a million
Richard Desmond's OK! has printed about 2 million copies of the first part of Jordan & Peter Andre's wedding. Only about 20,000 of them were returned early by retailers, suggesting it will sell in excess of a million copies, but probably not the 'nearly 2m' that Desmond's Express has suggested.
Northern & Shell profile

Newsquest buys Exchange & Mart
United Business Media is to sell Exchange & Mart and Auto Exchange to Exchange Enterprises, a subsidiary of local newspaper group Newsquest, for £50.25m. The titles turn over about £35.8 million a year, and trade sources had suggested a sales multiple of up to three (which would have fetched £100m). The Exchange & Mart website gets about 5 million page impressions a month. Exchange & Mart started in 1868 and sells almost 90,000 copies a week. Auto Exchange is free on Fridays from supermarkets and petrol stations
Exchange & Mart
UBM profile
Newsquest profile

Living, Etc expands into TV
IPC's home and interiors magazine Living Etc, is to front a cable TV series. Discovery Networks International has commissioned a 15-part series of 30 minute programmes on modern home design 'through the eyes of' the magazine. The series, which will use the magazine's name, is to be broadcast on the Discovery Travel & Living network in late 2005. Several members of the editorial team will contribute to the series.
IPC profile

Guardian switches to Continental size
Monday, 12 September. The Guardian newspaper switches to full-colour and a Berliner format, which is smaller than a broadsheet but larger than a tabloid. Ironically, the specialist sections (Media on Monday) get bigger, from tabloid to Berliner. However, the G2 section goes down to a half-Berliner, feeling very insubstantial. Paper's redesign in 1988 by Pentagram's David Hillman was a watershed in British newspaper design, bringing in the concept of white space to newspaper pages, though it met a mixed reception at the time. It marked the start of the domination of modular layouts, larger pictures and fewer words to a page in English papers. However, although these look clean in design terms, they lack dynamism in many readers' eyes. The often-intriguing 'briefs' that were used to fill in the bottom of columns on papers such as the Telegraph disappeared, losing an easy way in to reading papers, particularly for younger readers. The Berliner Guardian goes further down that route.
Guardian article on redesign and front page gallery
Guardian profile

Wonderland seeks luxury buyers
Sept/Oct. £4.95; 295pp. Visual Talent, London.
Ed/pub: Huw Gwyther
A thick first outing for the luxury magazine that came about as a result of a TV programme, BBC2's The Dragon's Den , to find young entrepreneurs - though positively skinny compared with the same month's Wallpaper at more than 400 pages. The bi-monthly's print run set at 140,000 copies with target sales of 100,000, about half of which are expected in the UK.
Glossy throughout but cover marred by marks - work will be needed in post-press handling. Huw Gwyther, who had been a studio manager for photographer Mario Testino, received 175,000 in backing from telecoms millionaire Peter Jones after appearing on TV, but the total launch budget was only £250,000. The launch PR was by Max Clifford Associates.
info@wonderlandmagazine.com

Psychologies looks for 'third wave' women
October. Hachette Filipacchi UK, London. £2.50 (£3); 180pp. Ed: Maureen Rice; ad manager: Caroline Lawley
Psychologies claims to have identified a new market of 'third wave' women* - 4.7m 30- to 55-year-olds who do not read a women's monthly. Furthermore, HFUK's research (by the Future Foundation) suggests a third of women in this age group have no interest in reading about fashion (HFUK publishes Elle and Red). Psychologies aims to open up this market, by offering 'positive living' and 'strategies for a richer life and better relationships' (dubbed 'self-help' in the trade press). Psychologies defines itself 'your personal coach'; 'accessible and useful'; 'an emotional and psychological toolkit for modern life'; 'mind-shifting and inspiring'; and 'about what we're [women] really like, not just what we look like'. The media pack shows editor Maureen Rice, beauty editor Delphine Lamandé-Frearson and features editor Rebecca Alexander all dressed in white shirts against a white background - very clinical, the sort of look adopted by Vision Express and Boot's for its opticians. A 28-page sample of Psychologies was distributed with the previous Sunday's Observer newspaper. The news stand sales target is 100,000 copies after a year. About 300,000 distributed for the first issue.
The research-based approach echoes the niche Emap and Hachette (who were then in partnership) proposed for the launch of Red in 1989: 'middle youth'. That term had been around at Emap for for several years, known as 'Project Miriam'. It described women who had grown out of Elle and Marie Claire but were not ready for 'middle-aged' Good Housekeeping. Red aimed for women aged 28 to 44, with a core audience of 30 to 39-year-olds. Kevin Hand was then Emap chief executive but lost his job over the disastrous purchase of Petersen in the US; now he leads HFUK.
Psychologies is a top 3 women's magazine in France (launched 1970, sells 350,000 copies a month) and there are Italian (October 2004, 200,000) and Spanish (March 2005, 340,000 sold of first issue) editions. Hachette plans to launch the title in China, Russia and the US. Maureen Rice is a former editor of Options and 19.
It is the first launch by HFUK since it was formed by splitting off from a joint partnership with Emap and taking over Attic Futura in 2002, when it said it aimed to become one of the top three UK consumer publishers within five years.
*Third wave is a term relating to the development of feminism. The first wave was campaigning for women's suffrage. This was followed by 1960s demands for positive action. The third wave of the 1990s involves recognising gender diversity and involving men in social change (gender mainstreaming).
Hachette Filipacchi UK profile
Psychologies
Future Foundation

How to be Better Off
Autumn. BBC/FT Business, London. £3; 100pp.
Ed: Matthew Vincent
While Seven Publishing, below, goes straight for the Millionaire throat, the BBC and FT Business take a more laid-back approach: 'We deliberately didn't call this magazine How to be Rich '. The first issue has 'payback' boxes with each article listing the potential saving - a total of £115,303.
How to be Better Off

MacKenzie takes over at Highbury House
Kelvin MacKenzie, former editor of the Sun tabloid newspaper and head of The Wireless Group, took over as executive chairman of Front to Popular Patchwork publisher Highbury House Communications this week. He had built up a 20% stake in the embattled publisher in the past month.
Highbury profile

Who Wants to be a Millionaire
Oct (but no stated cover date, only off-sale 6 Oct). £1.50 (£1.95); 100pp. Seven Publishing/Celador, London. Ed: Sarah Giles
Chris Tarrant is on the cover and inside hugging the editor of this puzzle monthly spin-off from the TV show. The print run was 200,000. The programme's logo is carried on most pages, cementing the relationship with production company Celador. The first launch since Seven bought puzzle specialist Cottage Publishing a year ago. Puzzles supplied by Dilemma (UK).
info@7publishing.co.uk
Seven profile

Car magazines open up new fronts in sales war UK motoring monthlies Top Gear, What Car? and Evo this month find themselves competing for readers and advertising in a new marketplace - Russia.
Dennis has launched its fourth overseas edition of Evo magazine in a licensing deal with Mediasign Publishing House, a Russian publisher with a portfolio of titles from several UK publishers. The first edition featured a 3D image on the cover. Haymarket unveiled What Car? in August with Russian partner Open Systems, which publishes Haymarket's Stuff, Champions and Management Today under licence. Both will come up against BBC Magazines' Top Gear (which has 10 international versions, the latest being with Media Pulse in Thailand). However, Russia is the only country in which the three go head-to-head, though Top Gear and What Car? both appear in China, while Top Gear and Evo fight it out in the Philippines.

Murdoch ends newspaper price war
3 September. The price of the Times has risen to 60p, the same as the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian , ending a price war that started in September 1993 when proprietor Rupert Murdoch cut the price of his paper from 45p to 30p (and 10p on Mondays). Within a month of that cut, sales rose 30%. In a front-page editorial, the Independent appealed for readers' support because 'The intention, as Times insiders are prepared to admit, is to drive this newspaper, the Independent, and the Independent on Sunday, out of business.' The move led to a crisis at the Independent that saw the company change hands several times. The Express, which like the Daily Mail cost 37p, was also hit. The Daily Telegraph was forced to cut its price, but even so saw the sales gap over its rival contract dramatically. The resulting financial decline played a part in the takeover of the paper by the Barclay brothers last year. Even so, complaints of predatory pricing were rejected four times by the Office of Fair Trading.
By June 2001, the Times's circulation had almost doubled and Murdoch increased the price to 40p. However, the Independent switched to its 'compact' format in September 2003, which resulted in a boost to its sales. The Times has since followed suit (and the Guardian in September).
In the year to June 2004, Times Newspapers (which also publishes the Sunday Times) lost £40m, up by a third from the previous year (£29m) and more than double the £16.3m loss of the year before that.
News International profile

Heseltine heads up distribution campaign
Lord Heseltine - former Conservative deputy prime minister and founder of Haymarket - is leading a campaign against changes to the magazine distribution system. The changes, proposed by the Office of Fair Trading, would see wholesalers such as WH Smith, John Menzies and Dawson News, and regional distributors lose their exclusive right to distribute magazines. However, the change would also end the guarantee of universal distribution of magazines and hence the livelihood of small newsagents. Magazine publishers have warned that 1,000 titles and 12,000 retailers are endangered. The industry also believes the supermarkets - whose share of magazine sales has risen from 4% to 27% in 15 years - would gain a stranglehold.

ABC figures: launches do well
Women's weekly launches Grazia, Reveal and Pick Me Up, listings title TV Easy and monthly Easy Living all met targets with their first audited sales figures:

• Emap's fashion weekly Grazia - 155,000
• NatMag's Reveal - 273,159
• IPC's "real life" title Pick Me Up - 503,950
• IPC's TV listings mag TV Easy - 340,000
• Condé Nast's Easy Living - 171,000.
  

One disappointment was Dennis's Test Drive at 67,190. This has been relaunched and the price halved to £1.45 for September's issue. October's will be £2.99. No figures were released for Northern & Shell's monthly shopping title Happy (which is set to raise its price by 10p to £1.90 for September's issue) or its TV listings title Take 5, or Burda's women's weekly Full House.
ABC website

ABC figures: Slowing economy hits sales
Falls in house prices and lower consumer confidence dented magazine sales in the motoring and home and interiors sectors. Most titles in both sectors saw falls. It was a different story in current affairs, with The Week up 14%, the Spectator and Economist up 5% and Private Eye up 2%.
ABC website

ABC figures: sales grow in men's market
Fears of the men's weeklies hitting sales of the monthly lads' mags have been confounded by the latest sales figures. Ten of 14 titles in the sector saw sales rise - weekly Nuts up 5% to hit 304,751 and rival Zoo leaping 30% to 260,317. Loaded jumped back ahead of Maxim - thanks to a relaunch and price cut - to regain second place among the monthlies. But there were casualties: FHM down 4% and Front and Bizarre both losing 12% (the former is owned by troubled Highbury House and the latter was recently redesigned).
ABC website

Felix Dennis rules out men's weekly in the US
15 August. Felix Dennis, founder of the eponymous company that publishes Maxim and The Week, has ruled out launching a men's weekly in the US. "It is interesting that no one has rushed to launch one in America and anyone who does will be utterly crucified because there isn't anywhere to sell it. There's not a supermarket in America that would touch [Emap's and IPC's weeklies] Zoo or Nuts ," he told the Guardian . He also foresaw brand extension for Maxim in the US, and said Maxim steak houses and nightclubs were on the horizon. On Test Drive, launched last year, he said: "This was a brilliant launch with a cocked-up editorial product which is now a brilliant editorial product ...We ripped up the gameplan which was obviously flawed. We did the necessary, put in new people and refused to walk away. [Rival] What Car has been around a long time ... When I see a whale hanging about in a lagoon getting fatter and fatter my immediate reaction is to reach for my harpoon."
Dennis profile

MacKenzie takes stake in Highbury
Kelvin MacKenzie, former editor of the Sun and, until recently, chief executive of Wireless Group, has built up stake of almost 15 per cent stake in troubled publisher Highbury House.
Highbury profile

Highbury retrenches
8 August. Highbury House has cut back its lifestyle division, selling Real Homes to Hachette Filipacchi UK for £500,000 and closing the loss-making Home and Inspirations , all of which had been relaunched in April. Male lifestyle title Front and Gardens Monthly are being retained, but the company is focusing on titles it gained in 2003 when it bought Paragon, which are mainly in the computer and games sector.
Highbury expanded in 2003 but got into problems in 2004. A £96 takeover by Future fell through this year but Highbury sold 38 UK titles and its US division to Future for £30.5m. Highbury is in the process of selling its South African division.
Highbury profile
Paragon profile

Sodoku puzzle publisher 'could fetch £100m'
August 8. Press reports have speculated that Puzzler Media, which publishes puzzle magazines and sells sudoku puzzles to newspapers such as the Times and the Sun, cold fetch up to £100m in a trade sale. The buzz around the number puzzles has prompted private equity fund ABN Amro Capital - which bought the company for £36.7m in April 2002 - to look at strategic options including a sale.
Puzzler Media

OK! takes on People in US
August. Northern & Shell. $3.29; 100pp. Ed: Sarah Ivens; Publisher: Gaby Fireman
Richard Desmond's Northern & Shell plans to spend $100m (£57m) over six years to establish OK! in the US with $10m spent on the launch. Its Hola!/Hello!-like strategy of 'working with' celebrities by paying for exclusive access and offering copy and picture approval, puts it up against the more invasive People from Time Warner (which sells the 3.7m copies a week and is often seen at the country's most profitable magazine); Star and Celebrity Living . In the UK, OK! has been in a running battle of words and court cases with Hello!
The print run was 1.3m copies and 110,000 shelf positions had been bought at retailers. The first issue carried interviews with actresses Tara Reid and Mariska Hargitay, others from Desperate Housewives and the OC , Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. Advertising of 20 pages included copy from Estée Lauder and Hérmes at a page rate of $28,000. In comparison, People runs to 50-odd pages at this time of year.
OK! magazine
UK women's weeklies
Northern & Shell profile

Zoo launches in Spain
1 August. The first international edition of Emap's men's weekly Zoo has been launched in Spain. It is published in partnership with Focus Ediciones (part of Swiss publisher Edipresse), which publishes FHM in Spain under licence. Recently launched weekly Sie7e (Seven), has been re-branded as Zoo Sie7e. Emap and IPC are in a race to launch their men's titles internationally after they lost out when Dennis took Maxim, then a distant third in the UK to FHM and Loaded, in the US. FHM has 30 editions worldwide. FHM came in with its first audited circulation figure of around 250,000. The target circulation for Zoo Sie7e is 100,000 within 18 months. FHM sells 250,000 copies in Spain. The move follows the June launch of Closer in France.
Edipresse website
Emap profile

Test Drive halves price for a month
September. Dennis. £1.45 special price (usually £2.99)
Dennis is to halve the cover price of Test Drive for the September issue, which appears in August - a critical time for buying new cars. Test Drive was launched last year and had a first ABC sales figure of 109,880
www.testdrive.co.uk
Dennis profile

Grazia at £1 for a week - ahead of 20p rise
11 July. Emap. £1 special price (usually £1.50); 116pp inc 16pp beauty section
Emap is to increase the cover price of fashion weekly Grazia by 20p to £1.70 after this week's special trial of £1. The cover story was of Kate Moss's plans to marry Babyshambles singer Pete Doherty, having split up with Dazed & Confused publisher Jefferson Hack.

Nat Mags' Reveal is also using price this week - 50p rather than the usual £1.

Other price changes this week include Cosmo Girl! up 10p to £2.10; August's Future Music up a whopping 74p to £4.99; Heat up 5p to £1.55; Private Eye up 10p to £1.40; Rolling Stone up 30p to £3.50; and Top of the Pops up 10p to £2.10. Going the opposite way is Bauer's weekly Full House, from 70p down to 60p.
Emap profile

Lion and Valiant heroes reappear in Albion
Characters such as The Steel Claw, Robot Archie, Captain Hurricane and The Spider that appeared in Lion and Valiant comics in the 1960s are to re-appear in Albion, a six-part monthly series, published by DC Comic's WildStorm imprint. Albion is plotted by Alan Moore and features covers by Dave Gibbons, who together created Watchmen. The characters have been licensed by IPC to the US company, both of which are divisions of Time Warner.
IPC profile
Albion
Profile of The Steel Claw at International Hero
Lion history at Comics UK
Profile of Robot Archie at International Hero

FHM gets bigger - and smaller
August. Emap, London.£3.40; 244 pages. Ed: Ross Brown; art director: Dan Knight; managing director: David Pullan
FHM is being published in three sizes this month:

• a 'compact' edition measuring 230 x 170mm;
• the usual, slightly wider than A4; and
• a 'big as a house' version (350 x 257mm).

The company claims the move as a world first and hopes to increase copy sales by 30%. It has tried the giant size in Russia in June 2004 and Spain in April 2005. Pamela Anderson is on the cover, in a heavily touched-up image. The same image, not so touched up but reversed, was on the front of FHM US in July. The content was the same, apart from a section of images of very large things (in the big and usual sizes) or very small. The compact version was unable to carry some loose inserts; a bound-in insert for Sony Ericsson (neither was the big version); and two tip-on sachets. All carried a 16-page advertorial 'Better Bible' section for Heineken on heavier paper.
NB: FHM no longer carries a month in its dateline. Given that the August/8 issue is on sale at the end of June, does Emap plan to increase the number of issues a year?
Emap profile

Times Educational Supplement for sale
3 July. News International, publisher of the Times and Sunday Times, is to sell the Times Educational Supplement and two other specialist titles in an auction for an expected £250m. It would be the first newspaper disposal by the group since Rupert Murdoch bought the Times group of titles in 1981 (for £12m!). The weekly TES , its higher education sister, THES, Nursery World and Times Literary Supplement (not included in he auction) form one of the UK's most profitable specialist newspaper publishers.
TES
THES
News International profile

Radio Times backs Live8
Radio Times has published eight different covers to celebrate the Live 8 concert in London's Hyde Park on July 2. Coldplay, Bob Geldof, Annie Lennox, Paul McCartney, REM, Joss Stone, Sting and U2 are on the different covers.
BBC Magazines

Cooler
Summer. Action Sports Media, London. £2. 132pp (plus gatefold). Ed: Cathy Struthers
The 'first boardsports lifestyle magazine' for women aims to pick up on a trend for the 'macho, guys-only line-ups' of the surfing world to be shaken up. Features cover spas, zen, beauty and 'The sexiest men in surf' as well as fashion and beauty. Has a very US feel, possibly down to the advertising and small A4 format. Front cover has a a reverse gatefold, which is rarely used because it does not stand up well to the treatment it gets in shops. Published in English, French and German. Company also runs Surf Europe and Kingpin (skateboarding).
Cooler
Action Sports Media

Fleet Street in 2004 looking west. The Express building is on the right with the Telegraph beyond. On the left is the sign of the Old Bell pub, which is in front of St Bride's church (picture from David Flint's History in Focus )

Murdoch reads last rites on Fleet Street
15 June. News Corp chief executive Rupert Murdoch returned to Fleet Street for a church service to remember the area's association with the national press. It was sparked by the move by Reuters - the last major news organisation with headquarters on Fleet Street - to new headquarters in Canary Wharf.

The irony was that Murdoch broke the back of Fleet Street - and the powerful print unions - in 1986 when he moved News International, which included the Sun and News of the World tabloids and Times and Sunday Times broadsheets, to Wapping to the east of Tower bridge. Within four years, the other dailies had fled Fleet Street, though their names still grace the buildings.

The street runs between St Paul's cathedral and the Strand, so it was close to the law courts, the City and a hop away from Westminster. But the name covered the whole area (some papers, such as the Times, were never on the street).

Banker Goldman Sachs moved into the Telegraph's old headquarters and another bank took over the iconic Art Deco Daily Express building (known as the 'Black Lubjanka'). The move from hot metal typesetting to computer-based technologies meant newspaper owners were able to make fortunes selling the properties, which included huge print plants, and move into smaller offices in cheaper areas. Reuters has sold its building, designed by Edwin Lutyens, to developers.

However, St Bride's, the journalists' church where the service was held, remains. Alongside is St Bride's Printing Library , which traces the roots of printing and publishing back 500 years. It began when William Caxton's apprentice Wynkyn de Worde, who was later buried in St Bride's Church, brought the printing press to the area. The newspaper tradition began in 1702 with the Daily Courant.

Agence France-Presse and Scottish group DC Thomson remain on Fleet Street. As do the pubs, such as the King and Keys, haunt of Telegraph hacks and renowned for its fights, the Tipperary, favoured by the News of the World, and El Vino's. Aficionados of such pubs should read Alan Watkins' chapter on Fleet Street watering holes in Secrets of the Press: Journalists on Journalism, edited by Stephen Glover (1999).
Reuters website
Fleet Street at Multimap

'Convenience size' for Essentials
July. IPC, London. £2.40; 180pp. Ed: Julie Barton-Beck; publisher: Ilka Schmitt
The price is about the only thing that's the same on this one: smaller, 'convenience size' format; new logo, typefaces and cover style; and colour-coded sections. The target reader is a 32-year-old suburban women - the realm of Hachette Filipacchi's Red and Haymarket's Eve - and 'life support' is the theme of the revamped title. A 16-page, perforated section of ideas, 'Essentials to go', is designed to be torn out and kept. The title saw a 14 per cent drop in circulation in February's figures. Julie Barton-Breck was editor of IPC's Family Circle, but swapped jobs with Karen Livermore last October.
IPC profile

Covermount madness
July issues. It's that time of year again when the women's magazines lard their cover with free gifts to jack up the sales figures towards the end of the first-half accounting period. Kit yourself out with:

• sunglasses - Tatler
• cotton vest - In Style
• sarong - Company
• designer bag - Eve
• beach bag - Marie Claire
• beach mat - New Woman

Once you are suitably settled on the beach, take out

• Red for a free copy of weekly OK! and anti-ageing cream
• She for a copy of weekly Reveal
• Harper's & Queen for its supplement on the 100 most beautiful women, and skin cream
• Cosmopolitan for its male centrefolds
  

IPC's Woman & Home took a different strategy: it is selling special issues of Ideal Home and 25 Beautiful Homes in a bundle for £4.90 at WH Smith

Performance Bikes relaunch
July. Emap, Peterborough, London. £1.99; 140pp. Ed: Tim Thompson
'Free of tawdry gifts. Buy it for the mag' - that's the coverline in contrast to the women's glossies on this relaunch. What's immediately different is the special price, almost halved (was £3.70). It does have a four-page, fold-out trackday planner as part of a poster, though. The title's sales fell 19 per cent sales drop in the latest audited figures. Press Gazette reported new editor Tim Thompson as saying the focus was on information "for people who actually own sportsbikes and who want to improve or modify them." Also, the title had decided to cut the number of naked girls in its pages. The other bike mags do have covermounts, including Emap's other titles Bike (a DVD) and Ride (a kit guide), IPC's Super Bike (book and poster) and Haymarket's TWO (tyre pressure gauge).
Emap profile

Morgan to buyPress Gazette
June 6. Former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan is to buy the 40-year-old newspaper industry trade magazine Press Gazette this week from Quantum Business Media. Quantum's owners, ABN Amro Capital, have already sold off the company's other titles, including Media Week , which was bought by Haymarket. Morgan is backed by celebrity PR Matthew Freud.
Future profile

Essential buys TV Hits
June 1. Hachette Filipacchi has sold teen entertainment title TV Hits to Essential for an undisclosed sum. The title has seen a slide in sales. Hachette also announced a cover-mounted book for All About Soap, which also has sales problems. Essential bought fortnightly Real last year from Bauer.
Essential profile
Hachette profile

VNU tests 'compact' Personal Computer World
July. VNU, London. £2.75; 230pp (includes gatefold cover). Ed: Rob Jones; publisher: Richard Wilson
It was once king of the computer monthlies with a pedigree going back to 1978, but PCW's editorial confidence was knocked in late 1989 by a damaging strike, which lasted six months and saw many top journalists leave. This opened the way for upstarts Future, Dennis and Ziff. Furthermore, changes to the market and increasing specialisation of titles led to PCW's sales falling from 142,000 in 1999 to 93,000 last year. The new 239mm by 169mm version, which is being tested for four issues in selected retailers, has all the content of the A4 version but no cover DVD (at £4.99) or CD (£3.25). Publisher Richard Power hopes the lighter, cheaper version will attract younger readers.
VNU profile
PCW

Scrapbook Inspirations
June. Future, Bath. £3.35; 100pp. Ed: Jenny Dixon; group publisher: Katherine Raderecht
Computers, knitting, fast cars, scrapbooks - is there no keeping the people in Bath down? 'Anorak' publishing is alive and well at Future. The company does well when it sticks to its knitting and only becomes unstuck when it tries to go mainstream, such as the music title Bang . This launch is full of practical ideas for making scrapbooks for weddings, father's day and so on. It comes with transparent stickers to use with pictures and a scrapbook kit with a dozen sheets of special papers and graphics. Subscribers get a mini paper trimmer. It was a popular craft with the Victorians - take a trip to the Fishermans' Reading Rooms in Southwold to see some examples - but has taken off in the past decade with the growth of craft retail warehouses around the country. Scrapbook Answers is being developed at Future USA
Future profile
Scrapbook Answers (US)

J-Tuner
June. Future, Bath. £3.99; 164pp. Editor: Steve Chalmers; publisher: Mike Lamond
The free cover