Content still king on quality street

As the new weeklies sap the monthly market and the internet eats away at younger readerships, many quality titles are prospering by going back to their roots, finds Will Hodgkinson

In this post-internet climate of magazine insecurity, one truth remains: having faith in your product will reap rewards. Take the panic among the monthlies brought about the rise of the weeklies. Men's magazines such Maxim, FHM and Loaded have tried to compete with titles such as Zoo and Nuts by aping their downmarket style, increasing the birds and lager content and reducing copy into easily digestible bite-sized chunks. The result has been falling circulations and dropping advertising revenues. But the magazines that have stuck to their guns - and the editors that have maintained a sense of integrity - are weathering the storm.

Men's Health is a case in point. When Rodale brought the title to the UK in 1995 it was met with scepticism, the argument against it being that men simply didn't care about their health enough to support a magazine about it. Rodale gave an entry point through getting to the average man's Achilles heel: their protruding belly. By the time editor Morgan Rees came on board in 2003 the commercial power of having a man with a washboard stomach on the cover was established and Rees was ready to broaden the magazine's remit onto self-improvement as a whole. He went against the prevailing trends - Nuts-style semi-pornography or GQ-style aspirationalism - to find an everyman's middle ground, commissioning respected writers such as William Leith and Will Self in order to realise it.

"We had to make it bigger than sex and six-packs," says Rees, who won editor of the year for Men's Magazines in the 2006 BSME Awards. "So we decided to cover every aspect of men's lives: financial, exercise, work-life balance and so on. As a result our demographic covers young men who want muscles to older men living in fear of having a heart attack. If you ask any man if they want more from their life, the answer will be yes. This is a useful shortcut."

Elsewhere in the men's market, Emap and IPC have created competition for their own monthly titles with the launch of downmarket weeklies Zoo and Nuts respectively. Ostensibly at least, it appears to have been a perverse tactic. The latest ABC figures show that Emap's market leader FHM has had a year-on-year 24.9% drop to 420,668 while IPC's Loaded has had a 21.9% drop.

Leah Annette, press group head of the media agency Starcom, believes that the shift was inevitable. "The change came when Heat was relaunched in 2000," she says of Emap's magazine, which started out in 1999 as a general entertainment title. "Before Heat, celebrity magazines like Hello! and OK! treated celebrities as people you paid to be allowed into their home. All that changed with Heat. It was inevitable that men's weeklies would be the next step."

Emap has embraced the weeklies market. Closer is the latest celebrity magazine to crush all underfoot with its barrage of snack-sized articles and compromising celebrity shots - it enjoys a bulk circulation of 590,211 according to the latest ABC figures, with 583,524 of that actively purchased. Meanwhile Grazia has benefited from prizewinning editor Jane Bruton's no-brow, news-and-shoes approach to a weekly glossy: the latest bulk sales are 175,218.

"We realised that there were, say, opera lovers out there who were consumed by the bushtucker trials on I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here," says Paul Keenan, chief executive of Emap consumer media. "People are much more interesting than their old socio-economic brackets suggested, and Grazia needed to reflect that."

Keenan does not accept that the weeklies have fostered attention deficiency in magazines. "The frequency of the product is not informative," he states. "All that has really changed is the existing weeklies market. Before Heat, weekly magazines were in terminal decline and something only associated with your grandmother."

"Monthlies don't fulfil the same role that they once did," says Grazia's Jane Bruton. "When Top Shop is changing its stock every week, the monthlies can't help but end up looking out of date. Vogue does what it does brilliantly, and Vanity Fair will always be a luxury read, but the middle-market monthlies are suffering. The weeklies are responding to a change in the culture."

One cannot help but wonder, however, if the ever-expanding bubble of celebrity ink is about to burst. The only men's lifestyle monthly to show growth in the latest ABC figures is GQ, which has gone in a markedly opposite direction to its competitors and held onto its highbrow, aspirational signpost, celebrating good writing and in-depth articles as much as overpriced luxury goods. A year-on-year 1.4% rise to 126,797 has been the result.

"The red-top men's monthlies - FHM, Maxim and Loaded, the ones that are read in the mail room - shot themselves in the foot by launching the men's weeklies," says Conde Nast's MD Nicholas Coleridge. "They provide the same kind of stuff at a third of the cover price and it cannibalised [the monthlies'] circulations. GQ has prospered because it serves a defined market of aspirational, fashion-conscious, brighter and better-heeled guys. And we have a great editor in Dylan Jones."

Conde Nast are alone in the big four UK magazine companies in bucking the trend for quick-fix journalism. "All 11 of Conde Nast's uber-glossies were up in circulation in the last round of ABCs, so the impact of the weeklies has not been noticeable to us," says Coleridge. "Obviously there is more competition for shelf space, but you are not likely to find Vogue, Tatler or World Of Interiors readers switching to Love It or Closer. In fact, I doubt they have heard of those titles."

Quite. And in Coleridge's well-heeled world, nowhere is the gloss more uber than in Vogue which, while always being an advertising dead cert with a steady audience throughout its 90-year history, is currently having something of what it would term "a moment". "It's always going to stand apart," says Starcom's Leah Annette. "If you are an upmarket fashion brand you want to be in there, and that seems to be stronger than ever right now."

"The big buzz is around Vogue, and I think we're going to see that in February's ABC figures," says Dan Pimm, head of press at media agency Universal McCann. "I think a lot of it is down to The Devil Wears Prada, which has got people talking about fashion and magazines again. There is a feeling among advertisers that above all others Vogue is the magazine to be seen in."

There seems to be a feeling across the consumer magazine board that the monthlies that are going back to their roots are winning out. Nicholas Coleridge claims it is a serious mistake to underestimate the intelligence of your readership. "We are seeing no lessening of appetite for long, well-written, well-researched articles," he says. "Although we live in an increasingly bite-sized society, there is still a strong educated middle class who value intelligence and depth."

This helps explain a trend that goes against the attention-deficit age: a growth in circulation for the news and current affairs titles, and those magazines that dig deep into their specialist subjects. Dennis Publishing's The Week seems to straddle both worlds: it digests the big news stories into chewable chunks, but it values intelligence and as such it provides a valuable service in our time-poor society. Both Matthew D'Ancona of The Spectator and New Statesman's John Kampfner were nominated for editors of the year awards in the current affairs category - as was The Week's Caroline Law - and those titles have steadfastly refused to change their long-established editorial policy of detailed reportage and opinion.

The latest ABC figures show other surprises. Mojo, the most specialist of all the mainstream entertainment monthlies, has reported a rising bulk of 121,746. Mojo will run 5,000 word articles on long-dead blues men alongside features on time-tested artists from Dylan to Radiohead, and it fills a niche for dedicated music fans that are not swayed by the latest trends.

"We make no apologies for the fact that Mojo is not for everyone," says the magazine's editor-in-chief Phil Alexander. "There is a door policy, which is why you won't find James Blunt on the cover. And the reason for Mojo's continued growth is simple: people who treat music as an extension of celebrity don't interest us."

In the past, Mojo has received a fair degree of mockery for being the preserve of middle-aged Dylanologists who bore everyone else with long-winded lectures on real music, and possibly real ale while they're at it. Alexander refutes the suggestion that the magazine's audience is confined to such a demographic. "We're bucking the trend of snackability journalism and I don't agree that younger readers can't appreciate that," he states. "Why are book sales booming if a new generation is only interested in disposable culture? We have kids who read the magazine because they have discovered music that they can believe in, and as the whole history of popular music becomes available online they want to see that music reflected in a wider social context."

Music is indeed going online, bringing into question the future of the CD and the vinyl record. Is print journalism going to suffer the same fate? Dennis Publishing has launched Monkey, the first online-only magazine, while almost every consumer magazine is building up its online presence and no doubt praying that they aren't shooting themselves in the back by doing so.

"It's a total threat," says Grazia's Jane Bruton of the internet, "especially at the younger end of the market. When I was a teenager I would buy Just 17 religiously. Which of these kids on MySpace and YouTube all day long are going to do that? Perhaps even within two years our jobs are going to be totally different. But that just means we're all going to have to evolve. Perhaps the next Face will be an online magazine."

There is, however, a new generation of print magazines that cater to the creative underground. The idea for Marmalade Magazine began in 2001 when The Face featured David Beckham on its cover. "We knew that the whole idea of 'cool' was over right there and then," says Marmalade's co-editor Sasha Teulon. "At that same time Dazed & Confused was busy rewriting press releases and nobody was going out there to discover the new creativity that has always been one of Britain's biggest exports."

For an independent style magazine Marmalade is going strong - circulation is around 50,000 - and Teulon discovers new talent by turning up to all the degree shows she can. "Our function is to assimilate information and not be beholden to third parties," she says. "And I think people trust our judgement. In our first issue we cited Giles Deacon and Gareth Pugh as the names to watch in British fashion. They are now the two most important names in the industry. We're proof that magazines can work on their own terms rather than those of the advertisers and PRs, and that the internet is simply a chance to take magazines further."

Magazines still offer a mirror of the culture that no other format can. From Playboy in the 60s to Loaded in the 90s, the best magazines have created a total picture of their time.

"Magazine covers," writes Steve Taylor in the just-published 100 Years Of Magazine Covers (Black Dog), "are in a pivotal position to offer us compelling clues as to who we might be or become." The future is, if not dazzlingly bright, at least tentatively hopeful.