Marketing trade press set for shake-up
February 12th, 2009 by Wendy McAuliffe
Stories of journalist and newspaper cut-backs are rife, and over the past few days the UK marketing trade press has been the latest casualty.
Centaur has made the decision to close its magazines Precision Marketing and Brand Strategy, while Marketing Week is undergoing a major staff reshuffle. New journalists to be joining the Marketing Week team are rumoured to be Ruth Mortimer, formerly editor of Brand Strategy and Branwell Johnson, former editor of Mad.co.uk, while some existing staff will be leaving.
According to the Precision Marketing website, Centaur is avoiding placing any blame on the current economic situation. The announcement reads:
“Centaur Media is to shift the coverage of direct marketing from Precision Marketing to Marketing Week, reflecting the transformation of direct marketing from a niche function to a mainstream operation…Precision Marketing, which had a circulation of 12,000, is therefore to cease publishing from the February editon onwards.”
Arguably Centaur is paying the price for not evolving its marketing titles quickly enough. A re-design for Marketing Week is on the cards, but this is long overdue. Interesting that little mention has been made of it increasing its digital marketing coverage, or delivery of news through social media. While NMA and Marketing Week are both placing increasing editorial focus on features, I question whether this is really what readers want or need. Subscription-only content is going to have to work harder to keep its reader-base in my opinion…
Tags: brand strategy, centaur, marketing week, nma, precision marketing, redundancies, trade press
February 12th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Totally agree with you Wendy, and I’ve blogged in similar vain a number of times recently.
Publishing houses like Centaur need to take a step back and reassess exactly where they can add value.
Danny Whatmoughs last blog post..Non, non et non, Monsieur le Président