Should IPC Media fear Time's return to small-town values?
The UK's biggest magazine publisher is up for sale – and may find its new US owner is at odds with its metropolitan attitudes david_hepworth_140x140
David Hepworth
The Guardian, Sunday 24 February 2013
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People power: the US magazine is profitable, but how would its new owners deal with IPC Media?
In the 80s I worked for Emap, which arose from a flat, unfashionable part of the country to take its place at the top table of the British magazine industry. Hence I'm interested in the current plans to take some of New York's most profitable and prestigious magazines from the Time Inc stable in New York and place them with Meredith, a company based in Des Moines, Iowa, a state even flatter and less fashionable than East Anglia.
Thirty years ago Emap introduced a provincial approach to housekeeping that the big metropolitan publishers couldn't bring themselves to match. Industry watchers are now looking at the prospect of Time Inc's most profitable magazines, titles such as People, InStyle and Real Simple, being taken over by the publisher of Ladies' Home Journal and American Baby and run from some Dunder Mifflin-style offices in a flyover state rather than a glittering skyscraper in Manhattan. At a stroke the magazines will be less prestigious and more profitable.
It's a huge shift. Time's culture involved writing and rewriting (often at the expense of personality), lavish photo budgets, dogged fact-checking, heavily populated mastheads and a Chinese wall between editorial and advertising that it liked to describe as "church and state". Time Inc spelled New York. Even though its titles were bought and read in the midwest, the company's people wore their metropolitan, liberal sophistication like a badge of honour. How many of those people relish the idea of new masters in Des Moines?
People, which is what this deal is all about, is the most successful magazine of the past 50 years. I spent a little time there in the mid-90s when it was edited by the shrewd, affable Lanny Jones Jr, who described his job as "reflecting what America is talking about around the dinner table on Saturday night". He said the most successful cover was always "a famous, beautiful woman with a problem".
The Princess of Wales was huge for People, which sold massively at supermarket checkouts and proudly claimed that it was the only mass circulation title in America that never discounted its subscriptions. Most US magazine publishing is smoke and mirrors. People makes proper money.
People still sells 3,600,000 copies a week, but it's in decline. Meredith, which calls itself a "media and marketing company", can be expected to farm the numbers rather than polish up the editorial. It clearly has no interest in Time, Fortune or Sports Illustrated, which will remain with the original owner. Titles such as Entertainment Weekly, which have hung on for decades because they contributed towards the company's eye-watering overhead, may come under uncomfortable scrutiny.
Then there's the small matter of IPC Media in the UK, which became part of the Time empire in 2001. It's difficult to see a heartland publisher such as Meredith concerning itself very much with a faraway country of which it probably knows nothing, even if it happens to include the UK's biggest magazine publisher. If it does, I suppose its interest may extend as far as the big women's titles. It's difficult to imagine it losing much sleep over NME, Country Life or any of the other specialist magazines. Then again, if IPC continues its cost-cutting (it recently announced 150 redundancies) and delivers respectable numbers from its established titles, it may leave the British publisher alone.
If the deal goes through there are two things the IPC management have to worry about in the short term. The first is when Des Moines finds out that there's cheaper office space available in Peterborough. The second is when they get their first copy of Nuts.
• This article was amended on 25 February 2012 to reflect the fact that New Scientist is no longer owned by IPC
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