Byline: Lorraine Candy
Launching a magazine in the present climate is a brave decision. There may be a recession around the corner and women are not buying as many magazines as they did last year. However, I assume Real publisher H Bauer have research that proves it will work.
LED Flexible Strip Ribbon Series Ribbon 5050Bauer is a very successful company and Real chief Janice Turner is a very good editor so they must have sat down together and come up with an idea they felt would sell. No-one launches into this market without an enormous amount of research that looks into the potential readership.
I think Glamour, which was launched last month, will be a success - it's a good magazine and I'm really impressed with it. I think something with the novelty value of that fits-your-handbag size is a great idea. I don't how long that will be maintained, we just don't have that crystal ball. The media has grown and we're a much more sophisticated nation. Newspaper Saturday supplements are a million times better than they were five years ago, they're like miniature magazines.
This is not new. In Italy, Saturday supplements have been fantastic glossy magazines for years. They've always looked beautiful and always been separate glossies that come with the newspaper.
I don't think the women's magazine market is becoming too tired - women love reading magazines. We don't appeal to a Marie Claire reader, she's not going to buy Cosmopolitan. Most magazines are aimed at specific audiences - our readers probably won't buy Marie Claire and vice versa.
Cosmo appeals to a majority of women readers because of the issues we cover. There are lots of areas that need to be covered and looked at. A magazine like Vogue, which sells under half of what we sell, is still phenomenally brilliant and successful because it has a specific market it aims for and it does that really well. It never wanted to be a mass-market magazine.
Women will always love reading magazines. First issues and launch issues of magazines are special, but people tire of that and often go back to the things they've been buying for years. It takes a long time to establish a magazine.
There are a selection of ideas around the world and they reach each country at different times. Real is a good idea. It's based on Brigitta, which sells very well in German - but who knows how it will do here?
I've seen the cover and I think it looks very good. It may well be hugely successful, it's just impossible to predict. I expect it to have some really good "real women" first-person pieces, I expect a very glossy-looking weekly magazine and I do expect it to work.
There will probably be less soap star content in Real than the other weeklies. I think it will be pitched to a lot older audience than the Cosmopolitan market - we're 18 to 32 or 33.
I don't think its going to change the market or the way we think about magazines. Everyone will wait and see how this does and I would have thought it will be a year or two before someone else launches into the same kind of market to rival it.
I think the market will stabilise a bit for now. People will wait and see what's going on. We're launching Cosmo Girl at the end of this year because we think the teen market is ripe for glossy stylish, fashion and beauty-orientated magazines.
Catalog Printing It's too early to say if any magazines will fall by the wayside. I don't know the older market that w
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