Good riddance to the Bauers, the family that wrecked Australia’s magazine industry
Yesterday, Bauer Media closed eight of the most famous magazines in Australia. Mumbrella’s Tim Burrowes assesses where this leaves the industry.
It says a lot about how far – and how fast – the Australian magazine industry has fallen that when Bauer’s press release arrived on Tuesday morning, it didn’t come as a surprise.
Eight of the country’s most famous (and in some cases, most respected) magazines have closed.
From the top end of the market, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle and InStyle.
From the health sector, Men’s Health, Women’s Health and Good Health.
Thanks Tim
Good recap of the tumultuous journey that is Bauer Media in Australia.
Should run a comp about what the new name should/could be?
Winner gets a a year’s FREE subscription to the remaining publications – here are some to kick things off
– Mercury Magazines
– Love Magazines
– Australian Magazines Co
– My Magazines Co
– The Magazine Co
Over to your creative followers…
Maybe we should follow the baffling ‘Here, There and Everywhere” possibly “Seen but not Heard’ ?
“Seen but not Hearst” ?
Wouldn’t recommend the use of magazines in the title. They need to position themselves as brands rather than their legacy medium
Great read – more of this on Mumbrella pls.
While I might agree with the politics, blaming Bauer for the decline in sales of magazines across the board, across the globe – is more than a tad ridiculous.
The fact of the matter is, that consumers get their information from social media, usually for free – instead of purchasing a printed magazine that is already out of date when they buy it, and which is seen as killing trees to produce the paper.
Blame the internet for killing magazines.
Blame the inability of journalists and media owners to see the bleeding obvious for at least two decades.
Seriously, anyone who could NOT see this coming should not be in media or jounalism.
That’s not what Tim said. He said that the Bauer family applied a European model to a different context. The US magazine market, for example, is a wildly different beast from the Australian market. And thinking that most people get what they want from social media is simply erroneous.
The internet hasn’t killed magazines – a vast number of indie mags are flourishing. What HAS killed magazines is an inability to adapt and rethink the model.
Which is partly what the Bauer family failed to do.
Bauer has been a problem for quite some time.
I refused to buy anything much that was related to this silly company. They told BS from start to finish, and New Idea is one of the worst. I can’t believe its taken this long to go downhill. If I wanted to read BS, I’d want to buy a mag that specifies that, not some trashy mags at double their worth!!
I hope a better company can pick it up and improve the quality.
Great article, would also like to point out re; tarnished name, that Bauer Media pulled out of New Zealand April 2 with no explanation, blamed it on Covid, denied government support and put 250 people out of work in the middle of a pandemic.
The Australian office will be running select New Zealand titles, and closing the rest. Sad for NZ’s already small media industry.
Outstanding summation, Tim. The Bauer family’s withdrawal from publishing was far more a sign of incompetent ownership than actual difficulties.
Good summary of what transpired. I worked at ACP etc for close for 40 years and loved my time there until the Bauer family took over, a company that believed their formula was right and no interest in the local market and what made it tick, arrogant.
I did have the good fortune to work with Brendon Hill when he was in Finance department and he always took an interest to understand what drove the advertising business and he was alway happy to engage. I’m confident with his knowledge and people skills he can lead the business successfully for the future.
Story by Tim Elliott in Good Weekend in the SMH published 3 weeks ago has much of this analysis and more
https://www.smh.com.au/national/how-a-german-media-company-brought-australia-s-greatest-magazine-empire-to-its-knees-20200622-p5551c.html
Great read, Tim.
Another point to add to this – I was told by a senior Bauer executive back in 2016 that both NW and OK were to close, due to their very poor circulations and that profits from other titles were needed to keep them both afloat. Then there was a change of heart and both titles kept going.
The fact both NW and OK were allowed to continue this long, draining the finances from other successful titles in the stable, is yet another example of bad management by Bauer.
I am sorry for anyone who has lost their jobs, but the closure of NW and OK in particular was long overdue.
I always used to say that Print Media was like the person falling out of an aeroplane: they can keep saying “I’m not dead” quite correctly for a while.
But.
Right now, it’s dead.
It IS true to say the sheetmusic business is still alive, you can buy sheetmusic still.
But it isn’t the revenue powerhouse it once was when entertainment was playing the family piano at home.
Radio, which took over (publishers got singers to record their songs to boost sheetmusic sales) is also dead.
Sure, there are still radio stations, but not like the glory days of Jack Davey and Bob Dyer.
Cinemas are pretty dead too. No longer do we go to the flicks every Saturday.
And Television is determined to shoot itself in the foot with repeats of shows made decades ago and hours devoted to Home Shopping.
On demand is the new powerhouse for eyeballs. But even Foxtel is slipping, with its higher cost, black box installation and wires on every street. At least they offer Foxtel Go.
Look at it this way: my Dad subscribed to newspapers every day of his life. SMH and “The Three on Sunday”.
I’ve subscribed occasionally.
My kids never have.
Who’s spending hours on Home Shopping via television? As opposed to online shopping?
I can’t imagine.
I have the feeling that if “Home Shopping” on TV actually sold products, we would be seeing more companies get aboard.
The Stations make money from the businesses offering the products.
Mirrors my sentiment entirely.
The Hamburg-based company, led by Yvonne Bauer, seemed to assume it could replicate the business models that worked so well in making it a powerhouse in Europe.
This included strong reader revenues and cheap, repurposable content
.BauerAustralia
MD Yvonne Bauer
The devil wears Witchery
Not Prada!
CH – Former GM Jalou Media Group France in A+NZ
I was made redundant last year Bauer only give the bare redundancy according to Australia law and I was there for nearly 20 years it would have been nice to be given a bit extra,the best years were the ACP Magazines and when Kerry Packer was alive and when Bauer took over they didn’t know a thing about the Australian market and how many CEO did they have? Even Nik Chan tried to fix the place but they wouldn’t listen to him and he had so much experience in the magazine business
Hear, hear!
Well put Tim.
As an ex Bauer and ex PacMags staff member, my heart breaks for the staff.
Mostly correct, but the reason Bauer wanted to get into Australia was to combine magazines with FM radio here (similar shitty celeb gossip content). They failed to find anyone willing to sell FM radio at the time. Prior to all this though was the fundamental mistake that Herr Bauer made in gifting the business to his daughter in the first place. The devalue that’s occured in Australia is mirrored worldwide for them.
Nice summary.
Now let’s talk about how Pacific/Seven contributed to the demise of magazines in this country by selling to Bauer.
The Pac staff were horribly, horribly betrayed by management, and so were the readers.
Unlike Bauer, Pacific had a relatively strong digital strategy – New Idea alone used to double and often triple the audience of Bauer’s entire Now To Love platform.
When Seven sold Pacific to Bauer, almost all of the Pacific digital staff were immediately sacked for short term savings, effectively ending any hope that major Australian magazines could have a digital future.
Yes, Bauer killed the Australian magazine industry, but Seven handed them the knife – and no one directly involved is going to forget it.
Very interesting and informative piece.
Every survey of online readers I have done since closing the print edition of Australian Videocamera yells “We prefer print”. Maybe it’s because my content is niche? I don’t know.
Oh and by the way, subscribers will never make a publication profitable. Barely pay for the ink in real terms.
What I *do* know is that I didn’t close the print edition due to lack of readership; I closed it due to the costs of printing and lack of advertising as advertisers were convinced (and to a degree duped) that online was the only way to go.
Which everyone who has been in the mag biz knows is utter and absolute crap.
This is true for me too. I edit a niche magazine. Whenever we do a reader survey, about 70 per cent of respondents say they would prefer a print version of the publication over digital.
Print has so much power. You cannot leave a digital publication on a politician’s desk, or encounter it in the reception of one of your stakeholders. It’s difficult to incidentally encounter a digital version of a magazine, which is one reason why the internet is littered with the detritus of so many of them.
I’m surprised none of the comments on here have mentioned Monocle magazine, the masthead at the centre of one of the world’s most successful publishing empires, which was actually launched just before the GFC hit.
Founder Tyler Brule’s philosophy is “print done well”, which is something Bauer failed to understand. You cannot compromise on the quality of your journalism, photography, design – even paper stock.
And of course print must integrate well with your complementary digital offering.
Savvy marketers understand there is still a place for advertising in print, and that place is in print done well.
What we all forget in this saga is that German culture and nature is so far removed from entertainment, style, and editorial depth (without the density of the Frankfurter Allgemeine). They have never been able to make a comedy movie that traveled internationally, and never succeeded in fashion like the French, Italians, and Americans / English. The Bauer group came out of a lower grade magazine DNA and was always doomed in the western world media of high cover prices for quality product.
Yet as a media analyst for decades and intimate with the Private Equity culture, nothing could be worse than a private equity player to follow Bauer. Always from passion comes success no matter which direction an industry may be heading. PE is never a passion player.
The question is: why would Mercury buy such a basket case of a business?
Can it even be saved without closing even more titles? Is it even worth saving? Commercial mags have had their day. Let’s put them to bed …. along with the arrogant and toxic weekly category management team, forever.
Amen.
It’s a perfectly reasonable price to pay solely for the AWW brand. Anything else is gravy. They got a bargain.
Great article and some great comments. Regardless of Bauer ownership, magazines are in freefall at about 14% year on year. But that stat is also fraught in that it is circulation and does not take into account newsagents return their unsold mags for refund, so it is way beyond that. Newsagents no longer position magazines in their real estate in prime spots, sadly like newspapers (but that is a story for another day). To respond to that freefall by making their magazines central to fake news, has only accelerated their demise. The only good news is that a well articled magazine will always sells. We are just getting rid of the riff-raff at last. Now, to start on News Corp ……
A forgotten point in the article is that the titles cut are all joint ventures and/ or licenses….. most of the deals were cut in good times, some with what now look like generous terms to the brand owners. The internet has meant you can get foreign content that these magazines provide on the owners’ websites…. and some deals struck in the 80’s and 90’s didn’t properly cover digital let alone social ….
I worked at ACP back in the 90s – what wonderful days they were. Without doubt the fondest memories I have of working life.
The Bauer ‘SAGA’ reminds me of the Miley Cyrus song which goes something like ‘…they came in like a Wrecking Ball’. Bauer, from the moment they arrived did nothing other than destroy a great magazine industry, the great people who worked in it (like me in the early 2,000’s) and leave a string of carnage and distaste for everyone, everything and every business they touched or did business with – even attempting to damage one of Australia’s greatest exports – Rebel Wilson – on the way through… all I can say is: Good Riddance – dont come back…
Bauer have proven to be completely inept at the business, lacking vision and making inexplicable decisions. Horrible for all the individuals impacted now and in the past.
But lets not let forget that the decline predated them, previous leaders and managers were slow to adapt, easy to blame others than look in the mirror.
The old joke of how to start a small business has been adapted to the publishing world. Buy a large business and reduce the number of mastheads.
Many of the commenters have said what I would like to say. The only time I have ever read a magazine ‘in depth’ was at the doctor’s surgery.
Other than that, I would stroll around the supermarket, go past the “news stands” and survey the titles of the magazines. Then I would look at the front page of the publication.
Generally the front cover has an apparent sensational headline about a celebrity, sporting couple or a member of the royal family. For example a few years ago there would be a story of a sporting couple’s rocky marriage. That would be repeated over the years. Go inside and the story would go for nor more than two pages, with the bulk of the pages devoted to photographs.
After a few stories about the same “rocky marriage”, you instinctively ‘feel’ that these kinds of stories are a pack of lies. The couple in reality are nevertheless in a happy marriage. Goodness, what does it do to the family in question and all the relatives and friends of the sporting couple. This is totally calumnus. Discussion of the topic not only lowers the publisher but also lowers the reader gossiping about the story. What happens to society’s values when many violate the commandment “Thou shalt not bear false witness against others” ?
In addition how do we know whether the photos are recycled not depicting the supposed current story or altered with software? This is same as telling lies in picture form.
The Media Watch program has been covering stories about fake stories and photos in magazines.
https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/nw—the-art-of-fabrication—episode-22/9971096
https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/mags/11647506
Even if there is “fake news” does not justify lying about people whether in print or on social media or blogs or electronic publications.
Thank you,
Anthony of exciting Belfield
A really interesting insight into a once-glamorous industry. I hope we can see an invigoration and repurposing of some of Australias best brands. They’re sitting on a lot of branding goodwill, which recently has been mismanaged.
It’s time to focus on what customers want, the revenue will come with strong content and engaged readers.
The huge criticism – right from the start – on NW’s Instagram account by its readers was actually encouraging. The same annoyance was seen on New Idea’s site. Totally underestimated their market. There’s just not enough junk audience here. Middle market’ll get you every time!