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Wallpaper* guest editors

Wallpaper* has just published their annual guest editor edition, this time featuring contributions and front covers from Karl Lagerfeld and Philippe Starck. The cover above is Lagerfeld’s, who self-indulgently strips his male model using a sticker, below:

(Read more)

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More on Arena, Maxim closures

Tony at Magforum succinctly makes the point that despite the closure of two of the UK market’s most prominent names, many men’s magazines continue to survive and others launch; while James Brown adds his angle on the market in the Observer.

His argument – that the UK market is a victim of it’s own success – is a valid one. The first men’s title, Arena, launched against the prevailing wisdom that men’s magazines couldn’t work in the UK. From a starting point of zero, Arena, and later Brown’s Loaded, established a space for men’s content that has grown to encompass more monthlies, a pair of weeklies (Nuts, Zoo), plus free titles (Shortlist, Sport), TV channels (SkySports, Dave) and online titles (Monkey).

It’s not the market as a whole that’s failing, it’s the individual magazines.

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Maxim to close

Dennis have announced that the next issue of men’s title Maxim wil be the last one. In 2000 it was selling 328,463 copies a month, a figure that had decreased to 45,951 at the end of last year. The familiar phrase ‘continue as an online brand’ has also been uttered, although in this case Dennis’s experience with digital-only brand Monkey suggests some truth in that statement.

UPDATE: The Guardian on why Maxim and Arena closed.

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Digital edition of The Week

Dennis Publishing, publishers of online magazine Monkey, will be producing a one-off online edition of The Week later this month (April 20). Full story here.

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Monkey ‘hates the Zoo and eats Nuts’

I learned some great facts and figures at a presentation by Kerin O’Conor and Ben Raworth, the people behind Monkey magazine yesterday morning. Perhaps the most surprising was that user response has led them to halve the number of pages featuring girls from 16pp to 8pp. So much for my earlier assumption that it was just one level above a porn website.
(Read more)

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The Last Magazine, reviewed

Here’s my review of David Renard’s recent book ‘The Last Magazine’, published in Creative Review this week. (Read more)

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Happy birthday, magCulture

This day a year ago I sat down to write my first post on magCulture. At the time the project was an experiment to see if blogs were as easy (and useful) as the many articles claimed. After a few technical hitches it has proved to be very simple to operate the software (WordPress since you ask) and slightly harder to keep up the momentum on posting. (Read more)

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Monkey

Acording to Media Week, Dennis Publishing are launching their first stand-alone ‘e-magazine’. Monkey, a weekly email, will launch in the UK on November 1, aiming at the 16-30 mens’s market and their average ‘30 hours spent online monthly’. Apparently it will appear in magazine format with 50 turnable pages and will be viewable online or saved as a PDF.

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