Media Unmade – Chapter 14: Magazines are different

Welcome to the latest edition of the Unmade podcast. Today’s edition features another extract from the audio edition of my book, Media Unmade, which is published by Hardie Grant and available online and in book stores.

In today’s episode we examine a story of mismanagement, structural change and bad luck. In the space of a decade, Australia went from having the greatest number of magazine readers per capita to one of the most challenged markets in the English speaking world. But it didn’t need to be that way.

The Packer family’s once great ACP fell in to the hands of the Europe-based Bauer Media. What followed was a conveyor belt of CEOs, magazine closures and advertising exodus.

Not that things were much better in the rest of the market where Seven West Media’s Pacific Magazines and News Corp’s News Life Media had their own challenges, leaving the medium unable to collectively market itself to the media agency world.