News magazines: 'I see a whale'

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.

Monocle - monthly current affairs with a dash of style from Tyler Brûlé

Tyler's eye Back to top

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

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.

The BBC's 'Newsbrief' Back to top

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.

Murdoch's shadow Back to top

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

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

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