Bauer to close Madison magazine

The message is loud and clear – no former ACP title is sacred to Bauer, nor can any be guaranteed to be spared the chop. Which is as it should be. Plenty of fat to be trimmed in today’s market. I predict cuts to motoring & tech magazines will follow shortly.

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Very sad news and my best wishes to any staff who may find themselves out of a job. I’m sure they put their all in; market conditions just weren’t what they were meant to be. I’m guessing too that Madison produced a lot of its own content – meaning a lot of writers and photographers and stylists will lose work – and these days it appears only licensed magazines that take vast amount of content from overseas editions (see Elle) have a chance of surviving.

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Motor, Picture, People, Zoo and OK must all be feeling pretty nervous…

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They couldn’t get Grazia or Madison to sell but they think Elle’s a winner? Am I missing something?

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Time for OK and Zoo to go. OK is almost the same as NW these days. Elle Australia better have a lot of Australian content, shoot all their own covers or it’s just a waste of time in era.

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Totally gut wrenching news…Madison has been my longtime favourite magazine and I will dearly miss my monthly subscription. I am surprised to hear it was “not commercially viable”, I have always found the content to be interesting, informative, inspiring and relevant to today’s woman. The journalism was excellent, the stories current and appealing with a great mix of fashion, beauty and lifestyle to provide a good balance. I shall miss Madison dearly, it was a good friend. I wish all the staff the best of luck for the future.

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Good advertising reps (sellers, not order-takers) are worth their weight in gold. Anyone on Madison who can sell ads and wants to live in Freo should give the Fremantle Herald (weekly independent newspaper in WA) a call – always looking for quality ad reps.

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How can a magazine that is basically 100% ads not be profitable?

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I actually think this is great news. I love it when companies trim the fat and start being accountable with market forces. Exciting times ahead to see what unfolds.

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LB I hear you! Another one of may favourite mags gone.
There is now a huge gap between Cleo and AWW….. I have my doubts that Elle will fill it.

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Not surprised at all. A print publication cull is coming – it’s a medium that’s changing.

And yes, I can’t see why they think Elle will be any different, in terms of sales.

However, Elle should be much cheaper to produce, as they can simply pull in content from the UK and US editions.

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I’m with you LB – on a personal note I will really miss madison. Was a great product and I still remember the days Paula Joye was doing the sell job to advertisers at launch. Wishing all the staff the best. They did a great job, shame ACP had not future proofed the business earlier. The signs were there years and years ago it was going to get tougher in the digital world. Who buys the weekly celeb/goss mags these days when there is The Daily Mail every day for free!

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Another incredibly dull Australian magazine closes. Bauer were absolutely right to close this underperforming magazine. It was DULL.

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I predict Elle will be gone in 18 months.

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I agree with LB that Madison was a great magazine and its staff did a terrific job under difficult circumstances but the writing was on the wall about a year ago even before the Bauer takeover. I don’t agree that Ok! is the same as NW. It isn’t. Never has been.

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Sorry Liz, but filling a magazine with stories from overseas editions of magazine is not away to sell copies in Australia. Original local content is what sells.

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Lindsay, I disagree. Local content is NOT what sells here. See the closure of Madison and Grazia as proof. The biggest selling women’s mags (aside from AWW) are Women’s Health, Marie Claire and Cosmo – all of who pick up a significant amount of overseas content. The teams on women’s mags here are too stretched and small to produce anything like the quality and originality of US and UK women’s mag journalism. Some of the best stories are written by American writers, and of course there are some standouts but there are also some very dull writers in Australia in women’s mags. I don’t know why, if the standard of training is low or it’s just a lazy market to write for.

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Such a great magazine that sat perfectly well in the market. I’m gutted.

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@Lindsay: You only have to look at the way News Ltd started putting foreign articles into the old Australasian Post after they bought Herald and Weekly Times. Within a few years the publication closed and that was years before the Internet.

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Oh please, it was not a great magazine.
It was deadly boring and very worthy. How many, “Is it too late to have a baby” stories can you read in one mag?
It had no sense of humour, the fashion was appalling and its tone was so sanctimonious. It was written for the one per cent of Sydney-siders who live in Paddington and shop in designer stores along Oxford Street, If it was good it would sell.

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For over a decade the Australian Women’s Mirror was the biggest selling magazine in Australia and it was almost all local content. It was replaced as the biggest selling magazine in Australia by The Australian Women’s Weekly, again with almost total Australian content. For a time it was probably the biggest selling magazine per head of population in the world. Cleo out sold Cosmo when it started because of its local content. Australian journalists can and have produced quality magazines which have made big profits. The biggest problem here is trying to produce quality without paying for it. Accountants do not make good editors. The only reason we have dull writers in Australia in women’s magazines is because of the dull money being offered.

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@ Lola… interesting post. Don’t know about the “sanctimonious” part but I believe you are right on the “if it was good it would sell”. Too many mags blame “external” factors for plummeting sales these days when, yes, the editorial/covers etc are often weak at best. How many memorable locally produced covers can you think of in the past 12 months? None?

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The print industry is dead and this is proof! Make money or fall behind.

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OK, lots of chatter but let’s talk facts. Whilst ACP was part of Nine Ent, no mag was going to close. Nine Ent management had too many mates working in there to rationalise, so ACP was basically a benevolent crèche or in the worst performing mags, a sheltered workshop. Bauer have simply acted commercially and that’s what magazine are about.

As for the 2 titles ‘Grazia’ and ‘Madison’ they were weak names in this market and weak efforts in production. ‘Grazia’ is a soft title in international markets and the introduction of the globally stronger ‘Elle’ makes commercial sense. Frankly the ‘Grazia’ effort seemed to be a real life version of an AbFab episode “and don’t forget to say how lovely champagne is” for the Sydney Eastern Suburbs crowd, who never bought it BUT did go to the parties. As for ‘Madison’, frankly I doubt even the staff knew exactly who the hell it was targeting, perhaps the Mamamia fringe who secrety wanted to knit but dare not take it up?

As for staff doing “a terrific job”, sorry but they weren’t. If they had been, people would be buying their magazine in droves and thought of closure wouldn’t even be contemplated. Yakking on in print about Z list celebs, and approaching mid-life crisises to a readers so few you could probably name them without a list is not “a terrific job”.

As to “difficult circumstances”, it’s not Syria, those are difficult circumstances. If your work is such that people buy it in commercially viable volumes then the magazine continues, if not then you’ve created your own “difficult circumstances”.

Yes, you can expect a few more magazines to be put down in the ex ACP stable. ‘OK’ must be in the range finder, not just on sales but also as it’s a N&S title and Bauer’s not fond of their big UK competition.

Across the media industry in Australia, the ‘Fairfax mentality’ seems to have set in, well guess what? Magazines and newspapers and television stations for that matter are not socialist charitable institutions, they are commercial enterprises. The profitable survive and proprietors, the people who put the money up, have the full right to set editorial policy, hire and fire and close those operations that don’t perform. Oh, and champagne is lovely (freebie champers swag contra duly deal satisfied).

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I agree with Bauer’s decision and stopped buying Madison years ago. Cleo needs to be the next title on the chopping block.

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@SD… The fact they’re willing to re-launch Elle into the same market with very similar advertisers means they believe that there are legs in this market. Just not through Madison… which must be a difficult fact to acknowledge if you’re the editor.

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I think these comments are very uncalled for when the publication has survived without an international masthead for eight years in a competitive market. I always enjoyed reading the content (especially as it was local) and I think it speaks to 30-something Australian women – maybe the people making the mean comments are outside that demographic? We need to remember here that people have lost their jobs and I’m sure worked very hard and long hours to create the magazine. As a journo I personally thought the quality of writing was the best in the mags in this country and I am really going to miss getting it every month.

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@Alice McGuire haha! the content and mags are ALL based on international subjects, period. (Yes some local content) but that never sells, its sales that are needed for these companies/ mags to survive. unfortunately Australia is not a fashionable country on the scale of its overseas competitors and the online market…NEXT.

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Dear Alice,

Some of those making the comments are actually engaged in the financing and operation of media. You know, the nasty, practical types that write the cheques, approve the budgets and transfer the salaries and commissions.

For some reason ‘journalists’ think they run the operations these days and when a title closes it’s a personal attack on all journalists everywhere, and a call to arms goes out.

Enough readers don’t support your view, they didnot want the publications that have closed. If the publications and efforts in them were indeed good enough, then they would have been bought by readers.

As for doing their best, someone can slave in a kitchen for hours and still turn out a dish that is burnt and you send back to the kitchen. Hours and effort mean nothing without a result that is wanted.

Magazines are not charitable institutions, if you want to write nice things that ‘speak to’ a particular dempgraphic, then by all means start a blog. That doesn’t have the overheads i.e., support staff costs, utilities charges, works comp insurance, maternity leave, parental leave, superannuation payments, cost overuns, print and paper costs etc and you can be as fairy headed about commercial reality as you wish.

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Lindsay, I have no idea about magazines that existed years ago, I was talking about what sells today, in 2013. It doesn’t matter what used to sell, as we all know the media landscape is like an ocean, turn your back and it changes again. The fact is that at the moment, aside from the AWW, the top three biggest selling women’s magazines in Australia use integrated content.

As for whether accountants make good editors – well a good editor needs to be extremely financially astute as well as have a good eye for a story. It’s a must. I think it’s a cop out to say we have dull writers in Australian mags because of the pay – sorry but a great writer is a great writer. Whether its for a free trade publication or Vanity Fair. It’s a matter of talent, not economics. Again, I am not saying there are no good writers in Australian women’s magazines, but they are few and far between, there are a lot of very average ones and sometimes one has to commission overseas writers to get something truly outstanding.

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I worked for ACP Alice and though the quality of the stories in the magazines may be high, as Ivan has said, they don’t cover the overheads.
In my opinion, Madison never matched its key competitor Marie Claire. It’s true Madison had more local content, but as it is a monthly often the topic had become less significant by the time the magazine came out.

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There is nothing new in producing magazines. The basics of what worked 50 years ago are the same basics that work now. One of the basics was to pay freelances well. Until the mid 1980s ACP paid good money to freelancers. Something changed and budgets got cut and other publishers followed with smaller budgets. Freelancers along with staff were forced to get along on less. Magazines in Australia have been struggling ever since. As you say writerdownunder, “a great writer is a great writer” but they do write for money. There is no shortage of quality freelance journalists in Australia, but cannot be expected to donate their work to publishers.

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As Lindsay has said: “There is no shortage of quality freelance journalists in Australia, but cannot be expected to donate their work to publishers”, magazines such as Madison/Cleo/Cosmo, pay for the work published. Unlike certain online efforts.

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“There is no shortage of quality freelance journalists in Australia, but cannot be expected to donate their work to publishers” – however, when you have to jump through hoops to lodge an invoice, the payment terms are 45 days from end of month, and then you have to chase a finance team who are instructed not to pick up their phones, just to get paid, writing for those magazines is just not worth it. Any freelancer (like myself) who has had to deal with this beast will simply no longer write for one of their titles.

Madison closing was about 3 years overdue. There should be some very worried ‘mag girls’ as I hear there are 2 more titles on their way out.

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The sooner magazines stop spending massive amounts on “fake awards nights to their advertisers” and VIP evenings which feed boring blond sydney siders who are not relevant to the paying public, how 1980’s, I’m asleep already.

To ensure the survival of fabulous titles you need to know and engage with the readers, and have strong return on investment which are measurable for the advertisers as well as local content relevant to ALL of Australia not just the 25 km radius of Bondi.

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Just because Maddison had “local content” doesn’t mean that the content was any good!

There was barely anything of real interest to read in Maddison and the majority of Australia’s womens magazines. They’re pathetic. Probably Marie Claire is the better because it does have fairly good content but it’s not really that great.

Look at the US mags, they’re full of interesting, informative content. The complete opposite to what exists here. Bauer is doing the right thing.

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