Madison magazine to close?
Speculation is rife on the future of Bauer Media’s fashion magazine Madison.
The Australian Financial Review’s Rear Window today predicted the magazine will be the “next title to the slaughterhouse,” raising eyebrows after it accurately predicted the closure of Grazia in mid-February.
However, Rear Window speculates that the magazine will be “strung out” for several more months. The reason it gives is the expansion of Elle, which just appointed Justine Cullen as the new editor.
A spokesperson from Bauer said everything was “business as usual.”
Another dull magazine, may as well close it.
Bauer is clearly and sensibly going after overlap. When magazines were big business pulling in big bucks ACP was a master at stratifying the biggest markets with differentiated titles.
Other duplicated titles will follow a careful cull in the womens/fashion segment, such as motoring and technology.
In motoring they’ve got Wheels and Motor and Top Gear, I reckon Wheels or Motor will go and we’ll see the survivor carry through key content in a “bigger! better!” format.
Ditto for tech, where they have Australian Personal Computer and TechLife. APC’s been flatlining for years and while TechLife pushes into a broader mainstream category it’s been losing readers in droves, both before and after it changed from PC User into TechLife.
I disagree. It’s one of the few women’s magazines trying to do something intelligent, lively and outside the square, albeit within the constraints of having a tiny budget and trying to please advertisers.
I will be gutted if it goes – really lovely magazine and gorgeous in it’s new bigger size.
From someone who works in the magazine industry, why would anyone want to work in the magazine industry???
Madison has always been DULL. It’s sells 50% less than its main competitor Pacific’s Marie Claire. The only good thing Madison has going for it, is they do their own unique cover photo shoots with Australia’s top fashion / celeb photographers. Whereas Marie Claire mainly re-use intentional cover shoots, or even used crap red carpet twice last year.
Mark, December 2012 circ. was 90k Marie Claire, 65k Madison. The year before, the difference between the two was only 15k, so the gap has grown, but your maths is still way off. As for ‘dull’, I suspect you are possibly not the target market 🙂
Very little commercial leadership at the top