'James Brown on lads' mags slump', Sky News

Thursday, August 21, 2008

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The end of the road for lads' mags? By James Silver

Wilting circulation figures, tired content and recycled bikini-clad "celebrities" - is the writing on the (toilet cubicle) wall for the once mighty beer-and-birds lads' magazine sector?

A glance at the latest set of ABC industry sales statistics would suggest so. The worst performer of the bunch was Dennis Publishing's Maxim, whose average monthly sale plunged by 44.5% to just 43,542 in the first half of 2008 and by an eye-popping 59.6% year-on-year.

But Maxim was not alone. IPC's Loaded slumped by 20.8% year-on-year and Bauer Consumer Media's FHM by 10% over the same period.

Bauer's weekly lads' title Zoo has lost 13.6% of its circulation since last year, while IPC's rival Nuts lost 9.8%, albeit from a higher base.

Pundits have been quick to write off this once unassailable sector altogether. But are lads' magazines really in terminal decline or just sorely in need of fresh inspiration?

Sky News Online tracked down James Brown, founding editor of Loaded and the man credited with spawning the entire genre back in the heady days of 1994.

"The problem is that [lads' mags] are not offering anything different to what you can get online," says Brown, who quit magazines five years ago after selling his group IFG to Dennis Publishing and now runs media consultancy Black Ops.

"Why would you pay for a magazine when you can access exactly the same sort of information, constantly refreshed, for free?" he went on.

"When magazines like Loaded and FHM were at their peak there weren't any online offerings at all," he says.

"They were also far more diverse in their content. Right now they're all cut from the same cloth, they're run-of-the-mill - plastic, big-breasted and fake."

Of weekly titles Nuts and Zoo, he says: "I really think it's the same old stuff again and again, every week. They're totally, utterly predictable and stale."

He believes a similar problem afflicts the celebrity sector in which titles like Bauer's Heat shed 15.8% of its buyers year-on-year, while sister title More magazine lost 37.6%.

"There was a real momentum around the readership of Heat, as there was with the men's mags in my era, but I think things just moved on.

"Readers grow out of magazines. You buy a magazine at a certain time of your life, you'll have a particular favourite for four or five years and then you move on. And those readers aren't necessarily replaced as other media might have emerged that they want to read instead.

"When Heat started there weren't any [gossip websites and mail-outs] like Popbitch and Holy Moly and you couldn't read American gossip as readily as you can now."

He says that he is a bit out of touch as his magazines career was "all a long time ago now", but recommends a conversation with Joe Barnes, editor of Front magazine, instead.

"Joe's doing something really different with Front," says Brown, "and he's got really strong opinions about the men's market."

When Barnes is reached on a somewhat scratchy mobile phone, his analysis is remarkably similar, though rather more forensic.

"The audience for lads' mags has changed a lot," he says. "For example, when they're on a train journey, they've got an iPod, they might have a PSP, they might watch a film on a laptop or on their iPhone - they've got so much more to do than just read a magazine. That's why the market is in trouble."

The real problem, he says, is that the publishing groups have been sluggish when it comes to reacting to the changing tastes of their readers.

"The novelty has worn off, people have seen it all before. [Titles] like Maxim are quite an old genre of magazine now. I think they need to reassess and look at what young British blokes are into today.

"What we're doing with Front is to try to offer something new and we've gone for an alternative, rockier, sort of Emo audience... you can't see Nuts and Zoo appealing to them. The big publishing companies have been a bit slow to react to the changing interests of 20-year-olds."

But does he think lads' magazines are on the way out?

"Journalists are always so negative about lads' magazines, reporting their demise with glee. But they still sell a lot of copies and the brands themselves are quite strong.

"A lot of newspapers have been saying that lads have gone off lager, looking at girls and football, but that's not true. They still want that content, there are just a lot more places they can get it from now."

Posted by James Silver - On Thursday, August 21, 2008

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