Media Week And Revolution Closing Down Print Editions, As Haymarket Restructures

Magazines

The troubled UK B2B publisher Haymarket is closing down two of its media-focused titles, Mediaweek and the digital media-focused Revolution Magazine.

It couldn’t hold back the tides of poor advertising revenue and structural change in the B2B magazine industry any longer: today’s edition of Media Week dated November 17 will be its last. Mediaweek.co.uk is being integrated into the company’s Brand Republic media content aggregation site as the publisher looks to cut back and avoid duplication in its portfolio. As part of the restructuring, 18 out of 58 editorial jobs will be cut.

Mediaweek.co.uk will retain an online editor who will get the benefits of an “enlarged” Brand Republic team, although any new additions to that must be redeployed from Revolution and Media Week: Haymarket is hardly in a position to go on a hiring spree. Mediaweek.co.uk gets around 80,000 monthly unique users, the company says, compared to Brand Republic’s 690,000. The Media Week awards and its annual conference both survive.

Revolution magazine will now be published as a give-away supplement four times a year with Haymarket’s Marketing magazine, plus the company says Revolution will be somehow “backed by a new blogging initiative” in 2010.

Haymarket Business Media’s MD Martin Durham says the move comes after the business has been hit by a “combination of a severe advertising downturn and unprecedented structural change”, but he paints the plan as something that will make the brands stronger — it certainly won’t feel like that for Haymarket staff today.

HBM’s editorial director Dominic Mills tell paidContent:UK that while the Mediaweek and Brand Republic sites would remain unchanged, advertising-reliant Mediaweek magazine has to go: “It’s sadly not viable in print any more because of the lack of display advertising and the movement of print to online.” The company felt it was unable to charge enough in subscriptions to make up the advertising shortfall, he says, so there was only one option.

But why do Haymarket’s other media titles, Marketing and Campaign, escape the cuts? “Campaign is a subscription title so it’s been protected and it has a lot of different brand extensions, Marketing is similar,” says Mills. He stresses that all the different brands will still serve their different markets: Mediaweek.co.uk the commercial on- and offline media audience, Revolution the client marketeer crowd, and so on.

When advertising is rising and business sectors are doing well, you can make your B2B publishing portfolio as niche and targeted as you want: Media Week can live alongside Revolution and Marketing magazine. But those times are over: Haymarket is narrowing its overheads and concentrating on its core titles. As a precursor to this, the company shut down Printing World and merged it with its Print Week title earlier this year.

The privately-held company saw its pre-tax profits drop from £8 million in 2007 to £4.5 million in 2008, despite a revenue rise of 8.9 percent to £269 million. Haymarket laid off 50 staff last November.

Here’s the release in full…

17 Nov 2009 11:39
Haymarket Business Media to restructure Brand Media

Haymarket Business Media is to restructure its Brand Media Group, which includes Campaign, Marketing, MediaWeek, Revolution and BrandRepublic.com.

Martin Durham, managing director and chairman of Haymarket Business Media, said:

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