Quick read. The London-based Mark Allen Group (MAG) is buying Rhinegold, the long-time publisher of Music Teacher, Classical Music and Opera Now magazines, and the Music & Drama Education Expo. The price is believed to be less than £500k. The privately-owned Rhinegold is believed to employ some 20 people and has revenues of under £2m…
Can Daily Mail beat family curse?
The UK’s Daily Mail & General Trust (DMGT) and Hearst Corporation, of the US, can each claim to be the world’s oldest media company. Both were founded as newspaper publishers in the last years of the nineteenth century by head-strong entrepreneurs with a lust for money and power. Exactly 100 years ago, at the end…
Why Reed Exhibitions may be sold
Everybody loves exhibitions. They are the traditional media which have been growing revenue at an average of 6% for the past 10 years, thriving as an antidote to the virtual world for business people everywhere. It’s a highly-competitive £30bn global industry and the signs of success are easy to find: 44% of B2B exhibition companies…
Is FT really the model news brand?
The daily newspaper best known for its ‘salmon pink’ newsprint wants the world to know it is unique in other ways too. The Financial Times (FT) is feeling pleased with itself. It is celebrating its 130th anniversary with 910k paying readers across print and digital in what is now “a majority digital content business”. Even the…
How Meredith upstaged Time Inc
While the British were founding the BBC and jailing Mahatma Gandhi, 1922 became a landmark year in magazines. Reader’s Digest was launched. Henry Luce and Briton Hadden left their jobs at the Baltimore Daily News to launch Time magazine. More than a 1,000 miles away in Des Moines, Iowa, farming publisher Edwin Meredith launched Fruit,…
What now for ‘world’s biggest’ magazine?
Twenty-one years ago, the world’s most successful magazine editor stepped down. In a dazzling 32-year reign, Helen Gurley Brown had transformed the pre-internet fortunes of Cosmopolitan and its publisher, the Hearst Corporation. It was a stunning second career for the former advertising copywriter who had written the 1962 bestseller “Sex and the Single Girl”. She…
Forget Oscars, here are ‘The Dinkies’
Welcome to the first ‘digital-from-ink’ awards (“The Dinkies”), to recognise the successful transformation of primarily consumer print-centric companies. The first winners are three long-established companies from Europe and the US which started life as newspaper publishers. They have all succeeded in stabilising their traditional media brands while creating expansive digital operations beyond their home markets….
Is this how streaming will kill TV networks?
‘Media disruption’ is a gentle description of the way that technology expands the choice for consumers and marketers so dramatically that it shatters long-established business models. Tech has given consumers the ability to decide what, when and how they want to read or view, and has given advertisers a huge range of new promotional options….
Who will buy Time Inc UK?
Facebook and all those bloggers and vloggers have shredded the magazine market. “Me time” used to describe readers’ relationships with their favourite magazines; now it belongs to social media. For enduring brands, print is becoming ancillary to digital services. Many will still prosper, but magazines are becoming a much smaller business.
What now for UK’s Telegraph Media Group?
Daily newspapers remain the most vulnerable of traditional media. The business model has been broken not so much by print as by the cost and irrelevance of the daily frequency. Newspapers can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the commoditisation of general news. In print as well as digital, freely-available news continues to dominate their output (and…
