TIME OUT FOR THE BRITISH EMPIRE?

By Lawrence Gibbons
 
Following the collapse of the banks this black October, not many people would be willing to launch a magazine on Halloween. And yet at the very peek of the sub crime crisis, the British publisher Felix Dennis has committed $15 million to launching ‘The Week’ in Australia on October 31st. Worth £750 million ($AU 1.8 billion) according to this year’s Sunday Times of London Rich List, Dennis knows that free speech comes at a cost. In 1971 he was imprisoned along with co-editors Richard Neville and Jim Anderson during the Oz Trials, the longest running witch-hunt in the lead up to the beat up of Bill Henson here in Oz. Dennis and the two Sydney co-accused spent several weeks in prison for allegedly publishing obscene images of young people until their prosecution was overturned. British born Dennis was given a shorter sentence then his Australian co defendants since the Old Bailey magistrate considered Dennis “very much less intelligent” ‘ reportedly driving him to create a business empire to prove the judge wrong. And just to make the point, Dennis is coming to Oz. Based on British and American versions of the magazine he owns, The Week is an intellectual version of the Readers Digest, only targetted at university educated, chardonay sipping Baby Boomers. The Australian executive editor will be David Salter, who produced Media Watch for five years during the Howard purges of the ABC and the editor will be Hall Greenland ‘ who won a Walkley Award for subediting the Bulletin after serving as the first of many news editors here at the City Hub. According to Hall, who I ran into at Jamie Parker’s inauguration as the first Green Mayor of Leichhardt. Dennis believes there is a market opportunity here in Australia following the collapse of the Bulletin. Dennis certainly knows a thing or two about surviving collapses. According to the October 6th edition of the Scottsman, ‘He started writing [poetry] in a hospital bed nine years ago and it now consumes him for three to four hours a day, filling the gap once occupied by a life-threatening crack cocaine habit’ Now 61, the once famously hedonistic publisher, who is supposed to have evaporated £50 million in a decade, much of it on drugs, women and generally excessive living, has written to date some 1,000 poems, publishing many in widely selling collections. ‘It’s completely obsessive and I accept that.’
Having sold three American magazine titles last year to a private equity group (back when such entities had money) for a reported $240 million, Dennis can afford to take a risk or two here in one of the world’s most competitive magazine markets. While Australians consume more magazines per capita than most English speaking countries, magazines receive a smaller piece of the overall advertising pie than in either Britain or America. Which may partly explain why one of England’s glossy institutions: Time Out was forced to make a partial retreat from the local Sydney market last month going from weekly to fortnightly. Just one year after launching the Sydney edition of Time Out, Print and Digital Publishing Pty Ltd, the company that leases the right to produce Time Out here in Sydney announced it would start publishing every other week. The down sizing coincides with an announcement that the British mother company might start giving Time Out London away for free. Time Out was launched in London in 1968 by Tony Elliott, one of Felix Dennis’ old underground publishing mates both of whom were born in 1947. For 40 years Time Out had been sold to Londoners as a listings bible. Following a flood of free print and online content, the Brits ‘ like all of us — are now drowning in a sea of information. At its peak Time Out London sold 107,000 copies each and every week. In the last two years alone, the magazine’s circulation has fallen by 12%. Today Time Out is only able to sell 21,950 newstand copies with twice as many copies sold by subscription and only 4,000 copies given away in all of London.
In order to compete against an onslaught of free what’s on information, Elliott is looking for new investors so he can distribute the London edition free of charge. His hopes for a deal with the BBC were quashed when the state owned media corporation spent £75m acquiring a controlling stake in the Melbourne based rival travel guide publisher Lonely Planet. At the peak of Time Out’s success, Tony Elliott entered into joint financial agreements with Wall Street financiers to roll out his London listings formula first in New York (1995) and then in Chicago (2004). In 2004, Elliott told the Evening Standard, ‘it will be easyish to raise the $20 million we need to do LA’San Francisco is clearly also a city we’d like to do. And there’s a provisional plan to launch Time Out Toronto in 2006.” None of the markets eventuated and he cancelled his Paris edition that same year. While he is now looking for new investors to provide his antsy US investors with an exit strategy, Elliott continues to make millions a la McDonalds leasing the franchise rights to produce his glossy magazine formula across the old colonial empire: from Dubai to Beijing to Mumbai. As he told the Evening Standard: “What’s so exciting is that these guys go off and you think, ‘FUCK, it’s just like Time Out!'” In September 2007, the first Sydney edition appeared under a licensing agreement as it does in 17 cities worldwide. One year later, Print & Digital Publishing marked the publication’s first anniversary by announcing Time Out Sydney was reducing its frequency. CEO Justin Etheridge did his best to put a positive spin on the move, stating: ‘We are exploring new ways to interact with our readers, expand our total brand offering and investigate new publishing opportunities. We continue to look to expand our footprint in Australia and anticipate a launch into the Melbourne market in early 2009. To this end we are expanding our online functionality as we are seeing that online has become the hub for social planning and interaction. Our events listings will move online and be fully searchable.’
Whether or not Time Out can secure the capital to expand into Melbourne, the company’s statement that it will shift its content to a free online strategy does not bode well for the future of its paid print distribution model. Time Out Sydney’s statement that it would scale back print costs starting on September 24th by producing less copies of the publication while expanding on line content echoes a strategy that was announced by Creative Loafing, the second largest chain of alternative newsweeklies in America. On September 29th the company filed for bankruptcy protection. As part of its restructure plans, Creative Loafing also announced it would cut back on print costs by pursuing an online strategy. Last year Ben Eason, the publisher of free weekly papers in Atlanta and Tampa, acquired newspapers in Chicago and DC by taking out an $85 million dollar loan from the very financial institutions that are now in chaos. Following a year of financial turmoil in America, Eason was unable to maintain his company’s hefty loan repayments. In filing for bankruptcy protection, Eason stated his company’s recovery scheme ‘involves a transition move to the Internet.’ He told a magazine in Atlanta he wants to ‘get us quickly to a daily publishing web company that happens to have a weekly print publication that is a reference point for the web.’ The shift from publishing weekly newspapers to aggregating online content will come at the expense of lost newspaper advertising revenues and staff. While the US newspaper chain generates more than $100 million in annual advertising revenues, Creative Loafing ‘s company-wide internet revenues are $1.2 million, up from $200,000 a year ago. Writing in one of America’s largest alternative papers, the LA Weekly — Matthew Fleischer stated Creative Loafing’s new web-first strategy “sounds ominous.”