Author: Mark Fletcher

Michael McHugh, the creator of Notebook, is behind Mindfood, a new magazine which lobbed into newsagencies yesterday morning, unannounced. While it is good to have a new magazine I would have liked to receive some marketing collateral with which to promote the new arrival.

Mindfood will be a tough sell given its broad and innovative focus – News, Society, Health & Wellness, Environment, Culture, Food & Travel and Brain Teasers – it is more of a movement than a magazine. I like the magazine, it’s a quality title in terms of production and content – I still think it will be a tough sell.

As happens with all new titles, McHugh is relying on the charity, yes, charity, of newsagents to get his new baby off the ground. I received 20 copies and am supposed to leave these on the shelves for two months. My investment is $148.50 for stock and $35.00 for real-estate and labour over these eight weeks. Unless I achieve a sell through of 60% or above, I’ll lose money on this title for the next year.

Given the 28% discount offered for people who subscribe through the website, I would have thought that a higher commission, and not one-off, for newsagents would be good. It would certainly focus the minds of newsagents more on the title – 35% or above for the first two years. Let me make some money back.

It’s a catch-22 situation with new magazine titles. I want to be a magazine specialist. To earn that mantle I need to support new titles. However, the magazine distribution model leaves newsagents carrying more cost than the benefit warrants. We have no share in ad revenue nor do we charge for access to our real-estate and labour assets. The magazine distributors, journalists and just about everyone else except the investors get paid for their services. Newsagents carry more risk than all of them, except the investors. Ours is not a traditional risk/reward model. And publishers wonder why newsagents don;t always act like business people.

But this is the magazine distribution model and no one seems prepared to change it so we go on. We have co-located Mindfood next to our women’s weeklies section, in our front of the shop magazine feature display and also in the general women’s interests section. Hopefully it will find customers and we’ll get something close to the 60% sell-through we need.

UPDATE:  I missed the announcement sent by the distributor on this.   Marketing collateral is on the way.  A couple of newsasgents contacted me with good stories about the title – I am looking forward to driving sales.

ACP magazines does not want newsagents to return magazines early – earlier than they (ACP) want. Their reasoning is that they know from research and data the optimum shelf life of a title.

For weeklies and monthlies this is fine, in with the new and out with the old. It is the one-shots and less frequent titles where newsagents face challenges.

Take the Ultimate Trivia Book under the TV Week banner. It was released on January 7, 2008 and is supposed to stay on sale for fourteen weeks. We have sold three copies between January 7 and today. This title is a dud in my newsagency. I have no choice but to return it early yet I have to jump through time consuming hoops to have the right to do this – even though every day it is on my shelves the title is losing my money sinc I have paid for all stock supplied.

This is where the ACP policy of no early returns is unfair on newsagents. I’d prefer to see one shots paid for based on scanned sales and not up front for all supplied stock as happens today. Right now I am a partner with ACP in the trivia title and I wasn’t even asked. If they won’t let me pay based on scanned sales then they must let me early return.

I should note that I am happy for there to be some rules around early returns, business rules. The current approach is not business-like and this is why it does not attract business-like attention from newsagents.

While ACP is not alone with their view, they enforce it more than others and this enforcement increases costs for newsagents often without revenue to balance the cost.

Ziff Davis, once the darling of technology magazine publishers, last week filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US, citing a decline in print advertising revenue as one of the reasons. MediaPost has the story. PaidContent rightly points to debt as the issue. On top of the considerable challenge of disruption, today’s media companies have to deal with the cost of debt. This was less of a problem with older media company structure, before the era of private equity.