East is born

If I was the ignorant type I would start this article with a joke. Something along the lines of "what is the toughest job in publishing ……. launching a youth title in Eastbourne." However this crass and unworthy gag would ignore the fact that the Eastbourne demographic is changing and that a youth title "East" has become a vibrant part of the local scene in the last eighteen months.

The town

According to Eastbourne Town Council "there are now more under 26s living in Eastbourne than over 66s," and the council has gone to great lengths to promote this fact to the wider world. One strand of this was a poster campaign on London Underground focusing on the more positive connotations of a blue rinse. Over the last decade major housing developments in the harbour area and at Stone Cross have resulted in a large influx of young families.

It was in light of this shifting demographic that two young Eastbourne Herald journalists, Adam McNaught-Davis and Daniel Neilson launched East – a free monthly A5 listings mag in January 2003. The magazine has since grown into a highly visible fixture on the Eastbourne scene and is now a business turning over £100,000 a year. It has a print run of 20,000 and has managed to achieve virtual saturation coverage of retail and leisure outlets in the town.

The beginnings

The concept took shape over a couple of pints in the beer garden of the Ship. Both Adam and Daniel shared an interest in music and the arts, a desire to "do their own thing" outside a corporate structure and, through their work on the local paper, a clear view of the market. Previous attempts at launching lifestyle magazines in Eastbourne had failed. They had tended to be A4 glossy with high production values, a business model which ultimately could not be sustained in a small town. Another reason for their demise was, in Adam’s opinion, inadequate listing sections which meant that they did not have the durability to see out the month. At the end of 2002 the Eastbourne Herald itself launched a monthly lifestyle supplement. According to Daniel and Adam it suffered from two major weaknesses: firstly it was not aimed at a consistent demographic so lacked focus and secondly it was inserted into the newspaper and, since the Herald did not have a high readership in the 16-40 age band, it missed the key audience.

Go 4 it

How many of us have sat around the pub with colleagues and concocted new business ideas (normally prompted by some slight – real or imagined – by our employers)? For most the process of sobering up normally marks the end of it. But for Adam and Daniel the idea seemed just as good in the cold light of day. They got down to the task of creating templates, design ideas and drafting articles for the launch issue and ….. they handed in their notice. Brave. By the time they left the Herald on New Years Eve 2002 the launch issue had been written and put to page. What was missing was the all important advertising.

Armed with the new publisher’s tool kit (dummy issue, media pack and business cards) they split up and hit the streets. In terms of sales technique Daniel adopted the "talk around the houses" approach whilst Adam went in for the more direct "give us your money" style. Their standard rates were £85 for a black and white quarter and £110 for colour. The prime back cover slot was priced at £550. From the start they resisted sliding down the discount route and have been largely successful at keeping to rate card. Advertisements were payable in two instalments: half up front and half on publication. Their very newness was both a help and a hindrance; there was no direct competition for the advertising but a lot of time had to be spent explaining the concept. The inevitable early hard sell has now been replaced by a much less stressful environment where potential advertisers, like new bars and clubs are contacting them. They have also discovered that advertisers, once they had seen the product, were happy to come onboard, because they had previously been starved of advertising vehicles with which to target the youth market.

The distribution

By now the "to do" list was shortening. The mag was written, launch issue advertisers were in, all they had to do was print and distribute. They got a great deal from local printers Zeta Colour working out at 15p a copy (for a 44pp half colour/half b&w product). Distribution though would be harder. Since there was no viable (for them at any rate) distribution network to utilise, they would have to handle it themselves. The intention was to distribute the magazine through every retail and leisure outlet in the town and achieve blanket coverage. The task was twofold; firstly to persuade a critical mass of the town’s retailers to take a box of magazines each month and to display them prominently – preferably on the counter. Secondly was the wearisome and time consuming job of actually delivering the boxes of magazines around town. A failure to get retailers on side would have rendered the project dead in the water. There was only one way to do it – hit the streets again and lay on the charm. The tools - a persuasive manner and the gift of the gab. With a few notable exceptions (take a bow, Threshers in the precinct) the vast majority decided to take the magazine. They struck some interesting deals along the way. The UCG multiplex regularly takes a thousand copies for its foyer and Elvis Hau (local Elvis impersonator and Chinese restaurateur – does every town have one?) inserts a copy into every takeaway! Another 1,000 gone.

For the task of shipping the copies to the retail outlets additional resources were needed, in the shape of Daniels’ granddad and his helpfully large car. Once a month they load the boxes up and drive around the town dropping off a box at every retailer.

They toyed with the idea of devising point of sale material and did produce an A5 flyer ("Get East Here") which some retailers put up. But they concluded that it wasn’t worth the cost. Being an unobtrusive A5 format meant that many businesses had no objections placing the magazines on their counter.

These monthly runs also became their opportunity to pick up "unsolds" – normally between a couple of hundred and a thousand each issue. In the early days they came across some horror stories (previous month’s box sitting unopened under a table etc) but their hands-on approach has helped to keep such instances to a minimum. Would they audit their circulation I asked, explaining that this would involve getting signed distribution notes from each retailer. Err …. I don’t think so.

The editorial style

As with many free magazines the style is relentlessly positive, vibrant and unstuffy. The ethos is to support Eastbourne and be inclusive. There are lots of opportunities to enter competitions, send in text messages and be photographed in one of the town’s clubs. Music inevitably plays a large part and the magazine prides itself on being one of the early voices plugging the merits of Keane – a view clearly reciprocated by the band, because they came and did a thank you gig in Eastbourne as their first album topped the charts. The two big draws of the magazine are club pictures and the text messages and these anchor the front and back. The magazine is 40-44 pages (including covers) with the front and back twelve being the colour feature pages and the middle sixteen being the black and white listings pages. The weakest page is currently the comedy listings, but they bolster it with competitions. They are keen to make it broadly appealing and not too club focused. A forthcoming issue features an article on local artist Stuart Pearson Wright who recently painted Prince Philip.

Where now?

In the course of the past eighteen months Daniel and Adam have established East as part of the Eastbourne scene and now have a stable product. There are still headaches and production deadlines still cause some loss of sleep, but less so with every issue. Where do they take East from here? The core product is set fair and they don’t see any mileage in either increasing pagination or page rates. In the Ship they are mulling over options: extending the reach of the magazine to neighbouring towns like Bexhill, Hastings and Lewis is one route, possibly through some kind of franchising arrangement. Other options include spin offs capitalising on the strength of the East brand – possibly a web site offering, amongst other things, recruitment services. In terms of expansion, their greatest strength is also their possible Achilles heel. The success of East is inextricably linked with their own skill sets and boundless enthusiasm and it is a big question as to whether they could ever find people or a scenario that they would be happy with. Time will tell.

The world of the local free sheets, operating off the radar of the mainstream regional publishers, is a dynamic one. They are popping up everywhere, run on very tight budgets, usually from the attic (or Mum’s front room in East’s case) and put together with real verve by one or two people who manage to combine and juggle all the various roles that in larger companies are delegated far and wide. Will big publishers see the margins as too tight to get involved? You almost hope so, since you can’t help feeling that the energy of the magazines owes a lot to its seat-of-the-pants origins.