A Question of Frequency

In the episode of the ’70s sitcom Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads called No Hiding Place, Bob and Terry must spend an entire day avoiding learning the score of an England game being played in the afternoon until the evening, when they can watch the highlights on TV. The central conceit is that such a thing would be difficult but not impossible.

When England went to their doom in Adelaide at the end of last year, there literally was no hiding place from the bad news. It came at us in agonising darts via the internet, 24-hour rolling news channels, free papers, text alerts and hundreds of radio stations. In the 21st century, Bob and Terry would have been no more able to avoid knowing the score than to avoid being aware of the weather. These days information is not just free, it's inescapable.

Many of the UK's top specialist weekly magazines were built in an era when this was not the case. Motor Cycle News could go to press on a Monday and still be first with the detailed results of that weekend's bike racing when it published on the Wednesday. The NME's news editor would be exclusively provided with the tour dates for, say, Genesis on a Monday morning and these would appear nationally on the Thursday. In the intervening three days, this information would not escape into the public domain. When Genesis announced their comeback tour in November 2006, the information was flying down innumerable pipes within seconds. It found its way to people who didn't seek to know it. Magazines are no longer in the revelation business.

Publishing used to be driven by an information need, and frequency used to be a function of the speed at which magazines had to keep pace with that need. This can still be a driver if advertising is the raison d'etre, as in Motor Cycle News's classifieds, the Lady's domestic servants' situations or Country Life's property pages, but it's unlikely to be coming from the editorial department. Anything that an editor needs to tell people within days they will have already found out within hours. He is no longer the holder of the keys to the magic kingdom of information.

What magazines provide now is largely entertainment, opinion and pictures. Even weeklies can never be the first with the news. However, the experience of the last ten years proves that news begets a foggier commodity called gossip. The new generation of weeklies have prospered by marketing the often spurious urgency of this to a willing and ever broader public.

Fifteen years ago, the conventional wisdom in women's magazines was that weekly meant downmarket. In research, women described glossy monthlies as "a treat", something along the lines of a long hot bath with scented candles; this contrasted with a weekly which they saw as "a break", something very bitty to be scanned with a Kit Kat as the kettle boiled.

The impact of the celebrity title

What's happened is that both formats have been eclipsed by the high frequency celebrity title which pays a lot for exclusive picture sets and consequently uses them THIS BIG, eschews the big read and calculates, like the teenage magazines of yore, that a disrespectful caption is worth a thousand words of fawning. The notion, for instance, that you might pay handsomely for an unflattering long lens shot of Britney in her bikini, crank it up until the pixels squeak and then scribble a caption all over it drawing attention to the subject's cellulite would have come as a shock to the editors of both weeklies and monthlies. The weeklies have capitalised on something that the monthlies, with their advertisers who promise transformation in a jar and their gushy editorial tone, could never quite bring themselves to concede, that you should never underestimate how uncharitable women are prepared to be about other women.

Somebody more qualified than me can no doubt point out how this is part of some tectonic shift in values, also reflected in the declining rate of marriage and the fact that pubs now serve Chardonnay in buckets, but celebrity has become the solvent of class and class in magazine terms used to be expressed in terms of frequency. Monthly meant middle, weekly meant working. Anybody looking for a media studies dissertation right now should be arguing that the rise of celebrity weeklies is an inevitable signifier of the fact that we're all lower middle now.

Before Grazia launched, the publishers of Marie Claire were eyeing its launch very nervously. Their worry was, would their allegedly sophisticated readers and advertisers buy into the weekly habit? Actually it was never really a question of whether they would like the content so much as would they allow themselves to like it? The experience of the last couple of years makes it pretty clear that they had no difficulty with this, which is why IPC have announced their Project Honey for the new year and now I hear rumours that somebody's going to try to do the same thing with men's.

Candid camera

There's no great mystery why publishers like the idea of weeklies. It's less easy to work out what an editorial team can convincingly provide at that frequency. Here, the women's magazines have the advantage over men's with candid photography, the one commodity which always replenishes itself. Famous women, either deliberately or not, telegraph the state of their life every single time they are photographed. There's no equivalent with men, which is why the editorial agenda of Zoo and Nuts has had very little to do with what's been going on in the outside world and more to do with how many young women they have been able to persuade out of their clothes. Even at the height of World Cup fever, when you would have thought that they would have surfed the national mood, they stuck to their template.

While all this activity is going on in the weekly market, the monthlies are undergoing a crisis of confidence. You can get away with a lot in a weekly that you can't in a monthly. A half-baked idea is gone in a week. Anything that doesn't go in this edition will go in the next. A weekly is a simple structure on which you can endlessly hang material. The readers are aware that the material's ephemeral. They don't mind that. In fact, that's what they like about it, the fact that if you don't buy it the first time you see it there's not much point buying it at all. Urgency is their lingua franca.

Weekly editors have strong reflexes but they don't need to be wildly original. They need to be fast on their feet and quick to detect the way things are spinning. Monthlies, on the other hand, have historically been more considered, more polished and in greater depth, but now they face the challenge of the endless depth and inventory of the internet on one hand and the sheer novelty value of the weeklies on the other.

Different editorial cultures

If you want to study the different cultures of the two frequencies, go and spend some time in a weekly office. Listen. It's a low, steady hum. It's like a shark or a man on a bicycle. It keeps going because it has to keep going. It's a mill into which material can be endlessly fed. It never has stand-out issues. That's not what it's there for.

A monthly office is different. In some cases there's nothing going on at all for two weeks, followed by two weeks' frantic production. That's because most of the time is spent making the recipe, getting the ingredients and then trying to make the best cake. Compared to a modern radio station or newspaper, a monthly magazine is a profligate misuse of resources, because only a tiny proportion of the material that it commissions is actually used and the key staff spend most of their time throwing stuff away.

Fortnightly is the least common frequency but some of the UK's most successful titles (Private Eye, Smash Hits, More) have benefited from the fact that it allows for some of the spin of a monthly without losing the urgency of the weekly. A good standard rule should be that the more of the magazine that is coming out of your imagination the more suited it is to monthly frequency. The more of it that flows in from the outside world the more likely it is that it should be weekly.

The difficulty of fortnightly is that the public doesn't know when to expect it and the printing deadlines are such that it's difficult to make it any more topical than a monthly. All the millions invested in digitising the magazine industry have not resulted in a situation where you can economically edit, print and distribute a magazine any quicker than you did in the days of hot metal. In fact, in many ways it's slower. Contrast this with other media who have made their processes quicker and cheaper, and have in many cases passed the benefits on to the end user.

Meanwhile, the drumbeat in the background is the declining patience of the public and the difficulty of getting people's attention in the first place. Emap’s senior citizen title Yours goes from monthly to fortnightly in the new year. It probably won't be the only title to look at upping its frequency. The appeal to the finance director is not hard to see. If only the appeal to the reader were quite that simple.