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News
magazines: 'I see a whale'
‘When I see a whale hanging about in a lagoon getting fatter
and fatter my immediate reaction is to reach for my harpoon.’
So said Felix Dennis. He was talking about What Car?, but it
seems the Economist is the whale of choice in recent years.
Lining up to have a pop at the venerable title by taking
away the attention of its affluent readers are whalers in the form of:
- the BBC with a mooted news weekly under the working title Newsbrief;
- Rupert Murdoch's News Magazines division in the UK with a possible
news weekly, Spectrum, in development;
- Monocle monthly from Wallpaper founder Tyler Brûlé;
- Condé Nast in the US with monthly Portfolio;
- Condé Nast in Germany with a weekly Vanity Fair; and
- Andrew Neil with weekly-broadsheet-turned-magazine The Business.
Sections in this case study:

The Business calls itself ‘London’s
first global business magazine’ |
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Andrew Neil's Business
Top
First out of harbour was Andrew Neil with The Business magazine
- as ‘Britain's first weekly international business magazine’ in
late 2006 .
This was a relaunch of the Sunday broadsheet paper in a standard
magazine format and is published on Wednesdays.
Neil spent 10 years
on the Economist where he became UK editor, so should
understand its market. He also turned the European newspaper
into a magazine-style tabloid but plans to become a magazine foundered.
Neil told the
Telegraph (which is also owned by the Barclay brothers): ‘New
York has Business Week, Forbes, Fortune, Barron's. London
doesn't have a business magazine.’ The Economist ‘is
not a business magazine. It's a geo-political magazine and it's
great at that. Business is a few pages at the back.’
The
Independent (16 October 2006) saw Neil as a Captain Ahab: ‘The
seminal episode in Andrew's life was being Britain Editor of the Economist.
He has since dreamt of creating a rival. His attempt to change
The European newspaper into a magazine was not
a runaway success. Now he has persuaded his employers, the Barclay
brothers, to let him do the same with The Business. As
a (to my mind) quite creditable Sunday newspaper, it struggled
at just over 20,000 copies. As a magazine it is supposed to sell
45,000. Captain Neil sees something we don't.’
Eighteen months later, the Indie was proved right. Press
Holdings announced the closure of The Business in
February 2008.
However, it also announced another chance for Neil with the launch
of Spectator Business, scheduled for the spring. |
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Monocle - monthly current affairs with a dash of style from Tyler Brûlé
|
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Tyler Brûlé's monthly, Monocle, is aimed
at affluent opinion formers with a mix of business, reportage,
cultural criticism and luxury goods coverage. The core readers
will be frequent travellers like Brûlé himself.
Its ‘hub’ is in London but with bureaux in Tokyo, New
York and Zurich. It is being sold worldwide. Brûlé has
raised £5m from
private investors to pay for the launch. The first issue of 10-times-a-year
Monocle was March 2007 at £5 a copy. It hopes
to sell 150,000 copies.
Brûlé told the Observer: 'We have
been influenced by the success of the Economist and the
BBC in North America … but we will be bringing stories to
life with our writing and reportage and looking ahead a bit, which
is very different from what the Economist does.' In the
first issue, he admits to being a fan of Germany's news weeklies
and picks out National
Geographic, der Spiegel
and Stern (for 'its bold photography, fondness for
skin and racy subject matter') as inspiration.
Brûlé feels
magazines have a great future in the online era. He explained to
Adage.com: ‘It
struck me that there was room to give people all over the world
something which was more visual than what's on offer and more of
a look ahead,’ he said. ‘Could there be an opportunity
to do something which was much more luxurious in terms of production
values, not necessarily just what was inside, and married the best
of geopolitics and business?’ ‘If you look at Asia
and markets like South Korea and Japan, which are four or five
years ahead of us in this digital revolution, their publishers'
reaction has been "Let's invest more in print".'
Brûlé is editor-in-chief, with Robyn Holt from Condé Nast's
Russian office as managing director.
Wallpaper was one of the great publishing success stories
of the 1990s, but Brûlé’s two later attempts,
sports fashion title Line and
fashion title Spruce,
both failed.
Press interviews:
Wallpaper
man's singular vision Observer, 11 February
Just
don't mention the Wallpaper* Guardian, 12 February
Glossy
debut with a cool eye on the world Independent 12 February
Globetrotting
and affluent? PG Friday, 16 February
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Portfolio joins Vogue and Vanity Fair as
Condé Nast titles in newsagents |
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Condé Nast’s Portfolio Back
to top
Next to test the choppy waters was Condé Nast’s
Portfolio. This is a business monthly,
with a launch issue on 24 April 2007 (May cover date). A website,
with unique content and interactive tools, supported the launch.
Although it may not seem obvious, the Vogue and GQ publisher
does have a current affairs and business pedigree. It may be best
known for its film star covers, but Vanity Fair counts ‘politics
and power’ in its beat and regularly steps into the geopolitical
arena. Issues have profiled the Bush administration,
in a non-too-favourable light, and the June 1993 issue carried
an excellent article on the succession battle at the Economist.
The company also owns technology title Wired. Portfolio was
seen as entering a tough market in the
US for business advertising with page
volumes down at BusinessWeek, Forbes and Fortune at
between 3% and 13% over 2006. Also, their sales figures
have been flat in recent years.
As for its UK business pedigree, Condé Nast
had teamed up with the Financial
Times in
1986 to launch Business, a glossy monthly.
Although this lasted five years, it never made money and closed
with the onset of the recession in 1991. Kevin Kelly, who set up
the magazine, has described it as a spoiled child: 'It had
two excessively rich parents and they didn't have the discipline
of getting costs in line. They were paying rates to journalists
that I was unhappy about. It was a Rolls-Royce read, but never
an essential read.'
After the closure, the Independent quoted Stephen Fay,
the magazine’s
editor for the first three years:
'Fortune is read by chief
executives and aspiring managers. We could never persuade chief
executives to read Business. The Americans have a magazine
culture, but British businessmen feel they can keep up by reading
a daily and a Sunday paper.'
When it closed, Business was about
15,000 short of its target break-even circulation of 60,000 and
had lost £5m-6m.
When asked whether anyone would try again, Fay told the paper:
'Not for a generation. A lot of fingers have been burnt.'
Portfolio sounds like it might be in the Business mould.
In a Financial
Times feature in
October 2006, Stephen Adler, editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek,
shrugged off the threat from Portfolio: 'Portfolio is
doing something entirely different, it will be a high-quality feature
publication that feels more like Vanity Fair.' 'BusinessWeek defines
itself as timely, concise and useful – I don’t think that
is how Portfolio would describe itself.' However, like
all the titles covered here, they will be vying for the time of the
same reader pool and the revenue from the same advertisers.
And talking of Vanity Fair, its launch
in Germany in February 2007 was as a very fat weekly (330 pages for
just €1 with double
covers and gatefolds galore) though the second issue has settle down
at just (!!) 198 pages. The production values certainly set a standard
that the likes of Monocle can only yet aim for. |
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As for the BBC, little has been revealed about
its plans to launch an international news magazine. A report in
the Guardian said it would be a weekly with contents based
around its news programmes Newsnight and Panorama.
'Phoenix' is the codename given to the project, with a working
title of Newsbrief.
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Media Week reported that News International had registered
the title Spectrum with the Patent Office in October
2006. It said Times insiders had indicated that
a news analysis magazine genre would be an area of interest,
drawing on the editorial resources of paper.
However, the group's magazine division closed its interiors
title Inside Out in January and postponed the proposed
launch of a women’s weekly when it won the contract (from
another NI division, BSkyB) to publish Sky customer
magazine, which had been run by John Brown Citrus.
|
Time
& Tide -
'the British news magazine' for 2-8 September 1965. 24 separately
numbered pages were devoted to the cover feature

Topic -
'the British news weekly' in October 1961 (second issue)

Topic -
as relaunched by Cornmarket with a redesign by Tom Wolsey
The European as
a weekly tabloid magazine

Now! news magazine launch issue, 14 September 1979; and,
below, in December 1980
Now! in December
1980

The Editor,
a 24-page A4 supplement with the Guardian on Saturday:
'The best of the world's media edited for you.'' This issue is
from 19 December 2000
|
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What does history
have to say? Top
There have been several notable attempts to create a news weekly
in Britain in the past 40 years:
- Statist;
- Time and Tide;
- Topic;
- Now!;
- The European; and
- The Week.
Statist dated back to 1878. By
1967, under
editor-in-chief Paul Bareau and editor Colin Jones, it was a news weekly along
the lines of The Economist - complete with a similar look. However,
it failed to reach its 200th anniversary.
Time & Tide was founded
in 1920 by Viscountess Rhondda (a suffragette
who survived the sinking of the RMS
Lusitania by a German U-Boat in 1915 - see Wikipedia)
using the wealth from her coalmine-owning father Lord Rhondda.
Her aim was to put ‘the
woman’s
point of view in what was then a man-ruled world’. She
died in 1958 and the magazine's funds were exausted. It was
a literary review in this period, but under the control of
Rev Timothy Beaumont and editor John Thompson it became a political
news-magazine in the 1960s. However, according to Topic (7
July 1962, p35), it was unable to raise its sales above 14,000
and it was sold. The new owners were led by W.J. Brittain who
took over in July 1962. A regular editorial from 1965 described
Viscountess Rhondda as ‘leaving
a magazine which, as the theatrical people say, was a great
artistic but not a commercial success'.
The Magazine
Data File has Time & Tide becoming
a monthly in 1970 and closing in 1979.
The launch issue of Topic -
'the British news weekly' bore the cover date 21 October 1961.
It ran to
64 pages with colour cover and centre spread, printed in photogravure by Martlet
Press in London's Old Kent Road.
The editor was Morley Richards, a Daily Express veteran, and the backing
came from a clutch of millionaire industrialists. An article in Time magazine
said the first issue sold 150,000 copies at 2/-; that
it could break even with sales of 65,000 and show a profit at 90,000.
However, as Time also pointed out:
'It must do so
against competition of the sternest sort. The newcomer must
buck England's big national Sunday press - eight papers, combined
circulation 24 million some of which, unlike Sunday papers
in the US, serve many of the functions of a weekly news magazine.'
An article in Topic's first
issue called the venture 'Britain's biggest publishing gamble' since
the second world war.
'Topic,' Time said, 'may discover that to make a go of
it in Britain, even six millionaires are not enough.'
The words of the doomsayer were prophetic. Despite a redesign
and halving the cover price, Dome Press pulled out with issue
33 and the title was bought by Town publisher
Cornmarket (run by Michael Heseltine and Clive Labovitch). Most
of the Dome staff did not transfer. In came Nicholas Tomalin
as editor; Richards became 'consulting editor' and carried on
writing a column about events in Fleet Street and television;
Michael Parkinson was deputy editor. Tom Wolsey redesigned the
magazine and used photographs by people such as Don McCullin.
However, Cornmarket couldn't make a go of it either and the
title collapsed by Christmas 1962.
Seventeen years later, Sir James Goldsmith
had a go with Now!
as Cavenham Communications with
Anthony Shrimsley
as editor. Goldsmith controlled Generale Occidentale, a Paris-based holding
company with interests in supermarkets (Liptons and Presto in
the UK), oil drilling and forest products. He also owned the
French news weekly
L'Express (sales 585,000). He had tried to gain control
of several Fleet Street newspapers to
advance his right-leaning, pro-European political ideas. Goldsmith
poured money into the title with expensive colour printing,
which at first paid off with the Sunday Times Magazine off
the streets at the time because of a strike. Like Topic,
Now! started well, selling out of the print
run of
416,000 copies. However,
the sales target of 250,000 copies was not met and the first year figure
of 182,000 slid
to 119,000 in 1981. It folded in May 1981 after 84 issues. Goldsmith
lost something like £7m in the venture.
According to Time:
'Goldsmith badly misjudged his market and competition. Because
Britain is small and has excellent rail service, the leading
London newspapers are distributed nationally. The Sunday editions
(combined circ. 17.8 million) provide extensive national and
international news, in-depth background reports and a wide
range of reviews and entertainment stories. Also well entrenched
are the Economist (UK circulation 69,000), Time (British
Isles and Ireland 78,000) and Newsweek (40,000).
Now! could not decide whether it was a feature or
a news magazine. Its reporting never matched the newspapers',
and its writing and analysis fell far short of the weeklies.'
It was a European agenda that sparked the
next attempt, Robert Maxwell's The European (see
case study).
He wanted the 'voice of Europe' to have its
own platform. It appeared in May 1990 and the first audited
sales figure was 226,000 - 74,000 short of the break-even target
(about 150,000 were expected to be sold in Britain). The paper
had a turbulent time after the corrupt owner's death in
1991 and ended up in the hands of the Barclays brothers being
run by Andrew Neil. Sales in 1993 were estimated at about 200,000.
In July 1997 Neil announced plans to transform The European into
an upmarket magazine. The paper was to go tabloid and then become
a colour magazine competing with the Economist, Wall Street
Journal, International Herald Tribune and Financial Times. The first of the tabloid magazines
appeared on 16 March 1998. However, six months later, the Barclay
brothers announced its closure and the last issue was dated
14-20 December.
In May 1995, The Week was
launched by Jon Connell, a former deputy editor of the Sunday
Telegraph, as a digest of the world's press.
Its motto is: 'All you need to know about everything that
matters.' A year later, Maxim publisher Felix
Dennis took a 51% stake in the title. It was selling about 4,000
copies at the time. By 2000, it was selling 52,367. In
2001, Dennis took on former Times and Sunday Times editor
Harold Evans as a consulting editor and launched the Week in
the US with a $17m budget, as a rival to Newsweek and Time.
By the end of 2006, the Week was selling 134,803 copies in the UK and
358,336 in the US.
Of course, it was not a new idea and can be traced back at
least to 1881. Tit-bits from George Newnes
rewrote material from many sources,
using cheap newsprint and selling in volume. This editorial
model spawned many imitators. In the late 1980s, a contract
publishing title (possibly for Rank Xerox) culled
the best business articles from around the world.
The success of the Week led to at least two imitators.
The first was The Editor, a 24-page
A4 supplement with the Guardian on Saturday: 'The best
of the world's media edited for you'. Another
imitator, though with a different slant, was Cut.
This was a weekly lad's magazines from Take A Break publisher
H Bauer. The first issue, dated
12 August 2004, culled from 54 papers and 185
magazines. However, sales were poor and Cut closed in
December.
There are several other titles, either weekly
or monthly, that fall into the current affairs category. These
are listed in the table below with sales
figures for the end of 2006. Also,
the Financial Times published a supplement called The Business for
several years with the Saturday paper, but this closed in July 2002. In 2003,
the FT launched a new Saturday supplement, FT Magazine,
which has a focus on international politics, as part of
a relaunch of the paper.
One other rumoured
development deserves
a mention. This was the report in 2003 that the left-leaning Guardian was
to launch a weekly political magazine in the US in time for
the start of the 2004 presidential campaign. Guardian
in America never
appeared but the paper's website, and a weekly summary of the
paper, have proved popular in the US and it certainly stirred
up a lost of interest, though the costs would be horrendous. |

Economist -
a November
2006 cover of the business news magazine
|
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Is the Economist vulnerable? Top
With a circulation of 1.1 million copies, about 80% of them in
subscriptions, the Economist - which is half-owned by
the FT - is certainly a whale of a magazine (or rather newspaper,
as it calls itself). But just how much blubber is there? It certainly
looks more bloated with its pages of contents introduced in a big
redesign – which
also saw the introduction of more images and editorial colour – in
2001. That was under then-editor Bill Emmott, but this hardly looks
extravagant when the circulation has risen 80% in a decade. John
Micklethwait was appointed as editor on 1 April 2006.
It is difficult to see any of the announced launches chipping
away at its crown. The likes of the Business may have
some effect at the edges, but the Economist's reputation,
bolstered by very clever advertising over decades, is firmly established
in the psyche of the business world.
The Economist itself has identified
competition from
the expanding coverage of daily papers as a barrier to selling
more copies in the UK: 'That became especially true in the 1960s
and 1970s, when British daily papers started to carry more of the
interpretive, argumentative and analytical articles that had traditionally
been the preserve of the weeklies.' So efforts were focused on
expanding sales overseas.
Internationally, Monocle, Portfolio and Vanity Fair are
likely to have to fight it out for high-end fashion advertising,
which is not the Economists's patch. However, the Economist saw them all coming and in September 2007 expanded its annual lifestyle
publication Intelligent Life into a quarterly magazine with
the slogan 'Lifestyle.
Now with substance.' It was edited by Edward Carr (a former news
editor at the FT). The large format title is sold in the
UK, continental Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
The BBC seems the only real potential rival, though it may have
political problems launching a commercial magazine with taxpayers'
money - its magazine publishing division cannot possibly be throwing
off enough cash to fund a news weekly - into a market that many
would argue is already well served. |
Sales of news and current affairs Back
to top |
Title
|
Publisher |
Launch date |
Sector |
UK/world
sales 2006
Jul-Dec* |
| Business |
Condé Nast
/ Financial Times |
|
Business & finance
monthly |
closed |
| The Business |
The
Business Publishing Ltd (Press Holdings) |
1996
as broadsheet newspaper; 14 October 2006 as magazine |
Business & finance
weekly |
n/a |
| BusinessWeek
(US) |
McGraw Hill |
1929 |
Business & finance
weekly |
930,722 |
| Der Spiegel |
Gruner + Jahr
|
1946 as Diese
Woche (This Week) by British Control Commission for Germany;
1947 as Der Spiegel (The Mirror) |
News weekly |
2,650
(worldwide: 1.06m) |
|
The Economist
Newspaper Ltd |
1843 (UK) |
Business & finance
weekly |
1,088,790 |
| |
|
|
UK |
170,038 |
| |
|
|
The
Americas |
544,395 |
| |
|
|
Continental
Europe |
226,894 |
| |
|
|
Middle
East / Africa |
25,862 |
|
Encounter
Publishing (funded by the CIA until 1967) |
1953-1991 |
Anti-communist
Anglo-US monthly journal |
closed
(20,000
in
90 countries) |
| The
European |
Maxwell Communication
Corporation |
May 1990 |
Weekly broadsheet
newspaper / tabloid magazine |
closed
(226,000
max?) |
| Focus |
Burda |
1993 (Germany) |
News weekly |
714,168 |
| Monocle |
Winkontent |
March 2007 |
Celebrity |
n/a |
| New Statesman |
New Statesman Ltd |
1913 |
Domestic political
weekly |
30,036 |
| Newsbrief (working title) |
BBC |
In
development - for April 2007? |
News
weekly |
n/a |
| Newsweek |
Washington
Post |
1933 |
News weekly |
158,142
(worldwide: 3.6m) |
| The Oldie |
Oldie Publications Ltd |
February 1992 |
Domestic monthly |
24,769 |
| Portfolio (US) |
Condé Nast |
24 April 2007
(May cover date) |
Monthly |
n/a |
| Private Eye |
Pressdram Ltd |
1961 |
Domestic fortnightly |
208,979 |
| Prospect |
Prospect Publishing Ltd |
October 1995 |
Domestic
monthly |
22,269 |
| Spectator |
Spectator (1828)
Ltd (Press Holdings) |
1928 |
Domestic weekly |
72,034 |
| Spectrum (registered
title) |
News International
|
In development |
Domestic weekly |
n/a |
| Statist |
The Statist
Co Ltd |
1878
|
News weekly |
n/a |
| Stern |
Gruner + Jahr
(Bertelsmann) |
1948 (Germany) |
News weekly |
1m
(worldwide) |
| Time |
Time Warner |
1923 (US) |
News weekly |
143,519
(worldwide: 5.2m) |
| Time & Tide |
Time & Tide
Ltd |
1921 - 1970 |
Literary review
/ News weekly |
less
than 14,000 |
| The Week |
Dennis Publishing
|
1995 |
Domestic weekly |
134,803 |
| Vanity
Fair (Germany) |
Condé Nast |
7
February 2007 |
Culture
weekly |
n/a |
|
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| *Source: Audit
Bureau of Circulations (ABC) / publishers |
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