Two of the UK’s oldest B2B magazines, spanning 300 years of publishing history, are being brought together in a deal announced today (Friday, 7 August).
The Stage – the 140-year-old newspaper for actors, producers, and theatre owners – is acquiring the 162-year-old The Bookseller for an undisclosed price.
The privately-owned weeklies are among the oldest of 21 business and professional magazines which have been continuously published in the UK since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (The oldest, incidentally, is Morning Advertiser, for pubs, clubs and bars, which dates back to 1794. Next came The Lancet, New Law Journal, Railway Gazette, the British Medical Journal, and Building.)
The Stage has been published by the Comerford family since 1880. Its illustrious history includes advertising which, in 1956, persuaded wannabe playwright John Osborne to submit his script for Look Back in Anger to London’s Royal Court Theatre. Ads in The Stage also brought together many pop groups including the Spice Girls, Take That, and Steps. Actors Harold Pinter, Idris Elba, Michael Caine, Kenneth Branagh, and Charles Dance all reportedly found their first jobs in the pages of the world’s longest-surviving weekly for the theatrical profession.
For the past few months, it has been campaigning loudly for the UK government to permit the reopening of the country’s theatres which have been closed since the virus struck in March. But, in last week’s issue, columnist Lyn Gardner said the closures had broken the theatre-going ‘spell’, especially for the older population which had comprised most of its audience. When it reopened, UK theatre would find itself in a new world which would demand more experimentation in content and business models in order to attract previously excluded audiences – and to survive.
The Stage seems a natural partner for The Bookseller which has been the business magazine of the UK book industry since 1858. It incorporates Bent’s Literary Advertiser which had launched 56 years earlier. It is read by publishers, authors and retailers, and has chronicled the major events of British book publishing including: publication of George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss in 1860; Penguin founder Allen Lane’s 1935 launch of the world’s first paperback; the 1995 demise of the Net Book Agreement (retail price fixing); and today’s Amazon-led competitive struggles. It profiled the unknown J.K. Rowling in 1997, before publication of her first Harry Potter book.
The Bookseller was founded by Joseph Whitaker (he of the 152-year-old Whitaker’s Almanack) and is the UK’s ninth oldest “trade” magazine. It had been published by the Publishers Association and the Booksellers Association, before being acquired successively by VNU and Nielsen. In 2010, it was bought by magazine publisher Nigel Roby.
Although they continue in print, the survival of these two weeklies in the 21st century has been largely due to the growth of online audiences and also live events.
The Stage has 10-12k print and digital subscribers but a monthly online audience of some 400,000, presumably comprising “pro-sumers” as well as theatre professionals. In addition to a star-studded annual awards party, it operates the Debut Awards, and publishes The Stage 100 of the profession’s movers and shakers.
The Bookseller, whose web site claims an audience of some 300,000 monthly uniques, has diversified beyond the magazine with its FutureBook conference, and the British Book Awards (the Nibbies). It also publishes the official Top 50 chart of bestsellers, and awards the prize for the Oddest Title of The Year. It was won in 2019 by “The Dirt Hole and its Variations”.
The enlarged Stage Media Company will continue to be managed by Hugh Comerford, the former EMAP and Reed executive, who was appointed managing director in 2012.
For Nigel Roby (who is retiring), the sale of The Bookseller is the culmination of a 40-year B2B publishing career in the UK, variously at Haymarket, Centaur, and Nielsen. He might regard his decade-long stewardship of The Bookseller as the highlight. But he also did a great job launching New Media Age in 1995, when few had even heard of the internet.
The ‘merger’ of these legendary B2B brands will create greater economic stability for both, and some cost savings. But you would expect the benefits to include enhanced resources in databases, events – and also campaigns for two areas of the arts which (more than ever) need the support of public and private interests.
There may even be some authors, publishers, actors and producers who will subscribe both to The Stage and The Bookseller. Nice news.
