Byline: Roy Greenslade
RICHARD DESMOND to sell off his magazines . Even in an industry where the extraordinary is accepted as the ordinary, that was some headline. Surely, I said to myself and to anyone who would listen, that can't be true.
It does not, on the face of it, make sense. And, to be honest, I still can't fathom why he would be prepared to flog his stable of magazines.
But the less-than-unequivocal denial issued by his company, Northern & Shell, has fuelled further speculation about both his intentions and the wider state of the magazine market.
Whatever reservations I have about Desmond as a newspaper owner, I have nothing but admiration for the way in which he launched OK! in 1993 and muscled aside market-leading Hello!
Once he dominated the weekly celebrity magazine market in Britain, he exported the brand far afield -- to Australia, the US, China, India, Russia, Mexico, the Middle East and several countries across Europe, including such unlikely markets as Bulgaria and Azerbaijan. There is even an OK! in Vietnam.
The magazine is a manifestation of the age of D-list celebrity, with its endless glossy pages devoted to the weddings of pop singers, footballers and reality TV "stars" with the occasional higherprofile Hollywood star thrown in for good sales-winning measure.
There has been a suggestion that the appetite for such froth is waning. I wish, but I see no sign of that myself, much as I would applaud the surreal scenario of ex-OK! readers turning away in favour of taking out a subscription to The Economist (the magazine that cannot seem to stop adding new readers by the week).
Desmond also publishes another weekly celebrity magazine, New! In the final six months of last year, it outsold OK! by a distance, with 557,000 weekly sales compared to the latter's 434,000. To put that in context, OK! is the real sales phenomenon. It has a reputed world-wide circulation of six million and lays claim to 30 million readers.
So it is a staggering success story, in copy sales at least. As for profits, it is difficult to divine its exact contribution to Desmond's coffers, but the man who likes to boast that he is so rich it's ridiculous is probably not taking a big hit. Desmond's PR team has done nothing to stifle the sell-off rumours -- by suggesting that Barclays Capital made the approach in something of a "fishing expedition" to see whether or not there would be a buyer.
That's a long way short of saying there is no truth whatsoever in the gossip and, despite my scepticism, I really cannot imagine an investment bank stooping to such a tactic.
I remain surprised that Desmond is contemplating a sell-off, because he has spent the past decade creating a diverse media empire. He has Express Newspapers.
He has Channel 5, bought only last year. And the magazines are the third part of a sensible tripod.
His pride in ownership of all three is clear from the banner that flutters from the mast outside his Northern & Shell headquarters beside the Thames in the City.
Then again, is he prepared to give away two legs? One rumour begets another, so there have also been claims that he might dispense with the Daily Express and Daily Star. Papers provide their owners with unbeatable access to power. Would he really give that away? There are two reasons why Desmond, who became a father again recently, just might. First, unlike other owners he does not appear to have exerted the least political influence with either the last or the current government.
Nor, viewed in reverse, has either government seen fit to recommend a knighthood, let alone a peerage, for his papers' political support.
Second, I am reminded of a comment I heard several times from the lips of the former News International supremo, Les Hinton. "Richard isn't like Rupert Murdoch," he said. "He doesn't have printers' ink running through his veins." Hinton said it so often to so many people that I have heard it repeated, sometimes by Express staff who have quibbled at the cost-cutting at their paper.
Anyway, leaving the newspapers' fate to further speculation, let's get back to what Desmond's putative magazines disposal says about the state of the magazine industry as a whole. Several publishers have been showing signs of nervousness in recent months, as developments at IPC Media, Haymarket, Hachette Filipacchi and BBC Magazines have shown.
With so many different titles and so many different owners, it is unwise to generalise by suggesting that magazines are going out of fashion. Some remain profitable. Some are selling well. Others are losing circulation and cash.
There have been closures, but there have been -- as always in this most volatile of publishing sectors -- launches too. Fragmentation of the market has been in evidence, as well as consolidation.
Publishers have been feeling the pinch as print advertising remains unpredictable and the internet goes on growing in popularity. Younger eyeballs are spent scanning lap-tops and tabletreaders, such as the iPad.
And many thousands are choosing to read free morning and evening newspapers while commuting.
The result has been a measure of retreat. IPC Media spent months disposing of a string of titles -- some specialist, such as Cage & Aviary Birds, Superbike and The Railway Magazine, some more populist, such as Loaded -- to small publishing outfits.
It also sold off its bi-monthly sister titles, Wedding and Wedding Flowers, to Hubert Burda, an expansionist German company.
By contrast, IPC Media is planning to launch a monthly magazine, Style At Home, in May. It hasn't given up the ghost despite rumours -- always rumours -- that its parent company, the US conglomerate Time Warner, would not be unhappy to cast it adrift.
BBC Magazines, which includes the third largest selling weekly title, Radio Times, in its portfolio, is about to be sold, possibly to a smallish Bath-based company, Future Publishing.
More traditionally, as a sign of greater consolidation, the French publisher Hachette Filipacchi is being sold off along with its 102 magazines, including Elle and Red, to National Magazines, the UK arm of the US media giant Hearst, in a [pounds sterling]560 million deal.
None of this activity is quite as riveting as Desmond's possible sale, however. Who will say ok to OK! ? Roy Greenslade is Professor of Journalism at City University, London
CAPTION(S):
Publishing success: the PR team behind Richard Desmond has played down speculation he is looking to sell his magazines such as OK! or his newspapers the Daily Express and Daily Star
