Duncan Greive: magazines are a tough business to be in

The Listener, Woman’s Weekly and Woman’s Day are up for sale as owners Are Media go on the market.

The sale raises the inevitable question of the future direction of the magazines under any new ownership – and whether they will remain under one umbrella.

Founder and Managing Editor for The Spinoff Duncan Greive says magazines are just a tough market to be in, everywhere in the world.

He says despite loyal readership, the numbers aren't as high as they once were.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Right now. Some of the country's most iconic magazines are
going up for sale again, five years after they were
rescued from cancelation during the pandemic. The Listener, Women's Day,
New Zealand Women's Weekly and some other titles were bought
by Our Media in twenty twenty after Boo Media abruptly
closed them. But now Our Media is on the market,

(00:20):
reportedly because it hasn't been making enough of a profit.
Duncan Grieve is the host of the Fold the spin
Offs media podcast and joins me.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Now, Hi, Duncan, Hey, Royn, how are you good?

Speaker 1 (00:31):
So they're just not making enough money?

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Yeah, I mean I think that that's the sort of
thesis coming out of Australia. I actually recently interviewed Stuart Dick,
our Media's boss here, and he was very upbeat about
how the New Zealand assets are performing. And you know
that might well be true. It's a much leaner operation here,
so you know there might be a difference there. But overall,

(00:58):
magazines are a tough business to be in anywhere in
the world.

Speaker 1 (01:01):
Does it matter, well, presumably quite important who buys them
and that will determine what happens with the next.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
Yeah, I mean they're being sold by a private equity owner.
Typically they want to buy it cheap, strip out costs,
get the profit margins up, and sell them for more.
They've held it for a relatively long time five years
for that kind of a program, and they're not selling
it what you would call the optimum time for any
media asset. So it makes you think that maybe something

(01:31):
has gone a bit awry there. So you know, this
talk of maybe they could go to another private actuality buy.
But I think, especially if they cut off the New
zeal assets, I can see someone like enz me, which
does already do the digital subscriptions for the listener, potentially
taking a look at them.

Speaker 1 (01:53):
What is it worth? I mean, is it the fact
that they're hard copy magazines that makes it hard to
make money out.

Speaker 2 (01:59):
Of I think that some of it is kind of
perception narrative stuff. You know that magazines used to be
amazing moneymaking machines, and a lot of premium brands would
only advertise in them or put a lot of their
spend through them. That kind of stuff has gone to

(02:20):
other places now, even though there is still a robust,
if aging audience for magazines, but they still have like
good sort of subscription revenues and you can make a
good business out of them, but they're just not as
sexy as they once were.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
Yeah, And like I was thinking today about your women's
days and stuff. Nowadays you've got social media and celebrities
and you know, actors, and they've all got their own
They basically do their own Women's day through their Instagram accounts,
don't they.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yeah, Well, the sort of so called lifestyle and women's
titles that they have the most impacted in terms of
the kind of you know, exactly what you said, that
the fact that what they the function that they performed
has been somewhat duplicated. There is an older audience's people

(03:16):
live a lot longer now, so you know, they still
have quite good sales, but they don't have that same
sense of being really central to the culture anymore. Whereas
a title like The Listener, which is actually a real
outlier amongst the rest of the portfolio. You know, I
think under Kirsty's editorship, it really has done a very
good job of getting back to being a quite psychostic publication.

Speaker 1 (03:38):
Again, Yeah, Dunk, And I hope that someone picks them
up because there's some really talented journalists working at these magazines,
and they I just hope that they keep going. Thank
and Grief, host of The Fold, the spin OFFFS Media podcast.
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