Above: Coverage in Business Desk, with me pictured with Lucire fashion and beauty editor Sopheak Seng.
Big thanks to Daniel Dunkley, who wrote this piece about me and my publishing work in Business Desk, well worth subscribing to (coincidentally, I spotted an article about my friend and classmate Hamish Edwards today, too).
I had a lengthy chat with Daniel because he asked great questionsâthe fact he got a lot out of me shows how good a journalist he is. And he reveals some of our more recent developments, as well as my thoughts on the industry in generalâthings I hadnât really got on to record often to a journalist, certainly not in the last few years.
I had my Business Desk alerts switched off so I didnât know he had already written his story (on the day of our interview) till another friend and classmate told me earlier this week. It also shows that Googleâs News Alerts are totally useless, something that I realized recently when it took them three weeks to send the alert (the time between its original spidering of the article and the email being sent out). Those had been worsening over the years and I had seen them be one or two days behind, but now they rarely arrive. Three weeks is plain unacceptable for one of the last services on Google I still used.
Back to Danielâs story. Itâs a great read, and Iâm glad someone here in Aotearoa looked me up. I realize most of our readers are abroad and we earn most from exports, but a lot of what weâve done is to promote just how good our country is. Iâm proud of what weâre able to achieve from our part of the world.
Above: Google News Alerts take an awfully long time to arrive, if at all. I hadn’t seen one for weeks, then this one arrives, three weeks after Google News spidered and indexed the article. Google feels like another site that now fails to get the basics right.
Posts tagged ‘Bauer’
On publishing in 2021, as told to Business Desk
03.09.2021Tags: 2021, Aotearoa, Auckland, Bauer, business, fashion magazine, Google, journalism, JY&A Media, licensing, Lucire, Lucire KSA, magazine, magazines, media, New Zealand, publishing, Saudi Arabia, Scots College, Sopheak Seng, St Markâs Church School, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara
Posted in business, internet, media, New Zealand, publishing, Wellington | 1 Comment »
Saddened to see colleagues lose their jobs as we bid, ‘Auf wiedersehen, Heinrich Bauer Verlag’
03.04.2020I am privy to some of the inner workings at Bauer Media through friends and colleagues, but I didnât expect them to shut up shop in New Zealand, effective April 2.
Depending on your politics, youâre in one of two camps.
TV3, itself part of a foreign company who has made serious cutbacks during the lockdown, said Bauer had approached the government and offered to sell the business to them at a rock-bottom price in the hope of saving the 200-plus jobs there. The government declined. I believe that’s the angle foreign-owned media are adopting here.
Both the PM and the minister responsible for media, Kris Faafoi, have said that Bauer never applied for the wage subsidy, and never approached the government to see if it could be classified as an essential service to keep operating. Indeed, in the words of the PM, âBauer contacted the minister and told him they werenât interested in subsidies.â
Itâs murkier today as there is evidence that Bauer had, through the Magazine Publishersâ Association, lobbied for reclassification for it to be turned down, though the minister continues to say that it had never been raised with him and that Bauer had already committed to shutting up shop.
Outside of âwe said, they saidâ, my takes are, first, it was never likely that the government would want to be a magazine publisher. Various New Zealand governments have been pondering how to deal with state-owned media here, and there was little chance the latest inhabitants of the Beehive would add to this.
We also know that Bauer had shut titles over the years due to poor performance, and Faafoiâs original statement expressly states that the Hamburg-based multinational had been âfacing challenges around viability of their operations here in New Zealand.â
With these two facts in mind, the government would not have taken on the business to turn it around, especially while knowing the owner of Bauer Media (well, 85 per cent of it) has a personal worth of US$3,000 million and the company generated milliards in revenue per annum.
I also have to point to its own harsh decisions over the years in shutting titles. In 2018, Bauerâs own Australian CEO told Ad News: âThereâs a really interesting view that somehow we are here to provide a social service. The reality is weâre here to make money and if we canât make money out of our magazines, weâll sell them or weâll close them.
âWe have an obligation, whether thatâs a public company or private company, to make money for shareholders. If it doesnât make money, why would we do it?â
That, to me, sounds like the corporate position here as well, and no doubt Bauerâs bean counters will have crunched the numbers before yesterdayâs announcement.
Iâve had my own ideas how the stable could have evolved but itâs easy to talk about this with hindsight, so I wonât. Enough people are hurting.
But Iâd have applied for whatever the government offered to see if I could keep things going for a little while longer. Even if the writing was on the wall, it would have been nice to see my colleagues have a lifeline. Get one more issue of each title out after June. Maybe Iâm just not as brutal. I mean, Iâve never defamed Rebel Wilson as Bauer’s Australian publications have. Maybe itâs different for a small independent.
If I may use a sporting analogy, Bauer hasnât let their players on to the field and kept them in the changing room, and more’s the pity.
One comment I received yesterday was that Bauer wouldnât have been in a position to pay its staff even with the government subsidy, with no advertising sales being generated. Iâm not so sure, with annual global revenues of over âŹ2,000 million. New Zealand was probably too unimportant to be saved by Bauer’s bosses in Hamburg. I guess weâll never know.
Tags: 2020, Aotearoa, Auckland, Australia, Bauer, business, COVID-19, Fairfax Press, Germany, government, Hamburg, Jacinda Ardern, Kris Faafoi, libel, magazines, media, Mediaworks, New Zealand, pandemic, politics, publishing, The Spinoff
Posted in business, media, New Zealand, politics, publishing | No Comments »
The return of borders?
22.12.2019Nadia has done it for ages, but I noticed Glamour did it for a while in 2018, and Wheels has stuck with it for its “new look”. What’s the deal with bordered covers?
I still prefer them bled, especially as I remember the difficulties of doing them back in the old days, and print agencies discouraged me from bleeds on cheaper jobs.
Unless there’s a clever reason, I can’t really see these covers as having a greater impact. Having bought Wheelsâ design issue recently, I was pretty disappointed in the overall look. Nothing really beats the feeling of the UVed, upmarket Phil Scott issues back in the late â80s, even if the price hike put it slightly outside my teenage budget, and I stopped getting the mag monthly.
Based on a cursory examination, CondĂ© Nast’s Glamour went back to bled covers by the end of 2018, the gamble probably having done nothing for circulation.
Tags: 2010s, 2017, 2018, Bauer, Condé Nast, design, editorial design, Glamour, magazine, magazine design, Nadia, publishing, redesign, trend, Wheels
Posted in cars, design, publishing, USA | No Comments »