Publishers – ditch the supermarkets and go back to newsagents as the magazine specialists
Last week’s Publish conference featured a call for newsagents to get tough with publishers on what they stock. In this guest post, newsagent Mark Fletcher argues that the real problem is publishers’ love affair with supermarkets.
It is frustrating reading that magazine publishers bagged newsagents at an industry forum without newsagents having a reasonable right of reply. But maybe that is how publishers like it, maybe they don’t want to mix with newsagents. We do, after all, only sell 50 per cent of magazines sold in Australia.
Sheffield: Urged newsagents to set tougher standards
Nicole Sheffield, the CEO of NewsLifeMedia says we need to exert more control on the titles we receive. Ash Hunter, chairman of Publishers Australia and CEO of Hunterfive Group, says newsagents entering the channel are of a poor standard.
I’ve been a regular follower of Mark’s Newsagency Blog for some time – and get a lot of value from its coal-face insights. As an example newsagents are already talking about the heat coming off the colouring book craze.
A few months ago Mark and his fellow newsagents started talking more than usual about the magazine distribution process – which I must admit I didn’t really know much about.
So I did some research and the more I read the more I found out just what a very broken process it is…
I was amazed (& saddened) to realise that there are 360 million magazines printed & distributed each year and half are not sold ie pulped – but as distributors are paid on distribution (and printers to print) it is not in their interest to reduce this number – even though they get accurate daily sales figures from most newsagents.
I also discovered that newsagents cannot choose either how many or what magazine titles they stock – where as supermarkets can. This obviously puts enormous pressure on newsagents’ cash flow as Mark often points out – yet alone resources and time management.
If you’re interested in finding out more, (including details of a trial which is currently in place to take just 11 million magazines out of the 360 million already distributed) then I tracked my research – and also did a Q&A with the ex AMAA CEO – Paul Dovas here – http://www.mediascope.com.au/m.....newsagents
The relationship between publishers. distributors, newsagents and their various industry organisations is incredibly adversarial with an enormous amount of distrust and lack of understanding between all concerned…