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No More. Are print magazines in crisis?

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On Tuesday, More! magazine's latest edition hit the shops. With Beyonce as its cover star, it was a notable issue because it was the very last one. Visit the More! website and you'll be met with a downbeat message:

more! is a well-loved brand which, throughout its impressive 25 year history, has touched, entertained and informed generations of young women in the UK. The magazine has constantly evolved in order to remain relevant to its audience but continuing challenging economic conditions mean that the product is no longer viable. The decision to suspend publication has regrettably been made with effect from this week’s issue.

Technically the owners, Bauer Media, have only 'suspended' the publication but in truth, nobody expects it to return.

More!  launched in 1988, with a female, older teen target audience. 14 years later, it reinvented itself as a general lifestyle read for young women.  A subtle difference maybe, but it worked. By August 2009 the magazine posted 17% annual circulation growth, making it the UK's fastest growing weekly glossy. There's little doubt the title had hit the rising tide of celebrity culture early, continuing to expertly surf it until recently. The surge in sexually frank features such as the graphically illustrated 'Position of the Week' , also helped to tease its public into loyalty

Unfortunately, these were the glory years and decline set in rapidly and fiercely. From a respectable readership of 300,000 in 2007, More! plummeted  to fewer than 100,000 in 2013 -  as Bauer say, that just isn't a sustainable model.

In many ways, we are living in the post-magazine era. Quite obviously there are still hundreds of titles in print, as a visit to WH Smith will confirm - but it's hard to believe any of them are basking on the sunny uplands of a circulation boom. In fact, many are in the process of managing their decline. Is the internet to blame? In a way, yes. But in a complicated way.

True, the web provides ready access to many, if not all, the features found in traditional magazines - often for free - and this has hit print media hard. But if magazine buyers really have abandoned the glossies for digital media, the shifting market is difficult to analyse let alone exploit. If there had merely been an exodus from ink to pixel, Rupert Murdoch's iPad publication, 'The Daily', would have been an unqualified success, but it failed to make its second birthday. And 'The Daily' was only the highest profile online publication to suffer this fate - there have been others and there will be more.

If the solution to the crisis in periodical publishing was to simply shift from a physical edition to a web version, every player from The Guardian to Heat would have made the move. But it isn't.

First there's the problem of pricing. Even though fewer of us actually purchase magazines and newspapers, we are quite prepared to part with the best part of a quid for a paper and considerably more for a glossy when we do. Accessing a website, however, we are shocked if we are asked us for a fee (in the manner of all Murdoch sites). This isn't because we don't appreciate the time and effort which goes into a really good website, but because of precedence. We've always had to pay for physical magazines, therefore we expect nothing else. But websites have generally given away their content as part of a 'free' internet - so a demand for payment is outside our experience, making us very reluctant to cough up.
The next problem is the price point. The last time I took a magazine from the rack with the intention of buying it, I didn't even get to the till. One glance revealed the cover price to be £6.40. Now I'm not sure what I was willing to pay, but it was a sum much lower than that - possibly half as much. If the profitable production of a magazine generates such a sizeable price tag, the market is in real trouble.

Finally, there's content. I imagine the last magazines standing will be niche titles - perhaps those tattooing titles, or custom motorcycle monthlies or that odd blend of 'Fortean Times' and 'Nuts' - 'Bizarre'. They'll never make big bucks, but they were never designed for that purpose. They have a small but dedicated readership which they'll probably retain as long as they continue to serve its needs. But the more general the magazine's reach, the harder it is to compete with the mass of general information available elsewhere (social media, the web, multi-channel TV etc.) And that's exactly where More! positions itself - as a friendly, cheeky, populist read for a general audience of young women.

Or at least it did.

Magnus Shaw is a blogger, copywriter and consultant

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