Bauer Media Group set to merge Cleo and Dolly teams
Markson
Dunk
Bauer Media Group has told staff it plans to merge the teams on magazines Cleo and Dolly in a move which signals that the titles’ editors Sharri Markson and Tiffany Dunk will be asked to fight for a single editor-in-chief position.
The company is currently reviewing the two products and is discussing with staff a proposal to bring the teams behind Cleo and Dolly together into a “young women’s lifestyles” division.
Markson joined Bauer team at the end of last year and relaunched Cleo with less sexual content in April.
Tiffany Dunk is one of the best in the business. If it does came down to both fighting for a single role, it surely has to be hers.
So the remaining staff will have to do double the work for the same pay…?
To Bauer’s credit, it’s doing everything it possibly can to tell the market, advertisers and its audiences that the business is absolutely up sh#t creek….
I used to enjoy reading Cleo i seen it as more an older teenage/ young adult hood magazine. Dolly is for young teenage girls.
The past few issues of cleo ive been dissapointed it, now this explains why. I tHink this decision is very poor judgement by Bauer.
If a restaurant is failing does it cheapen the ingredients and cut back on wait staff? If an airline has to reduce costs does it cut the pilots and engineers? If a magazine company is heading southwards does it cut all the people that make its content and basically hasten the decline? Seems an odd business model to me. Sure, cut costs – cut back paper stock, reduce print runs, cull third-party staff, use buy-in images etc. But to reduce the journalists – your very life blood – seems a disastrous business model to me.
Sadly, the shape of things to come. They’ve just done it with Cosmo and Cosmo Brides.
Reduce journalists? Looked at Fairfax, lately? It is shedding 9000, didn’t it? The thing that Bauer doesn’t get, and the Packers did, is that staff working on those magazines are very local to their mastheads and this is just a recipe for bland content which is the last thing they need The view is that magazines have been too slow to move to the internet but what resources are really being put into this area?