The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 39

15 The Guardian Monday August 5 1996 Now it's lads Forget women's glossies, men's titles are where the readers are. Dan Glaister reports hike in February), is undoubtedly the big winner. The lads are obviously on to something. Its nearest rival, the revamped FHM, should also feel pretty pleased with itself, with a yearly rise of just over 100 per cent. Both titles show that to sell magazines to the growing men's market, all you need is a picture of a reclining female in a low-cut dress and liberal use of the word "sex" on the cover.

Alan Lewis, editor-in-chief of Loaded, confirms that the good news doesn't stop at Friday's ABC figure of almost 239,000. "The last couple of issues have sold more than the ABC figure and the current Simpsons cover promises sales in excess of 270,000." Perhaps there is more, after all, to the new laddishness than reclining females. "All we did is get back to basics and acknowledge that men are pretty simple souls." Tom Moloney, chief executive of AGS out for the lads is the unlovely refrain that will be heard in magazine offices next week as the lat est round of ABC circulation figures are digested. Where once girls were on top, with the women's glossies and the teen girlie mags resplendent atop an ever-growing market, it is now the men who dominate. Led by IPC's irre-pressibly laddish Loaded, the men's sector surges ahead while women's titles struggle to maintain their market share.

In the past, ABCs have emerged piecemeal, with publishers divulging them at their leisure. But after pressure from some proprietors and advertisers, the decision was made to release the Jan-June '96 results for the first time across the whole market in one go. Loaded, with a year-on-year rise of 87.2 per cent (following a 82 per cent Men's Media on top Emap, publishers of FHM and which rose 3 per cent to stay above 200,000 sales, enthuses that "the quality of magazines on sale targeted at men has never been so high." But Moloney has concerns elsewhere. Just 17, the big sister of teeny mags, dropped by 33 per cent year on year. To balance the decline, Emap has It's launched a year ago, which has grown to a circulation of 322,000, double that of Just 17.

The sector winner was Attic Futura's Sugar, which recorded a rise of al-mbst'38 per cent. Another worry for Emap is the arrival of Top Of The Pops magazine, 10,000 behind Smash Hits. The BBC is crowing, claiming TPOP now outsells Smash Hits in the UK. Although the Radio Times shows a slight dip, the Beeb can boast gains in unlikely quarters, notably Noddy magazine, up 20 per cent to smash past 50,000. One sector that might have been expected to boom over the period, football magazines, actually recorded substantial losses.

IPC's Shoot and World Soccer, for instance, lost 12.8 and 34 per cent respectively. The amount of football in mainstream media, from newspaper supplements to saturation TV coverage, could be the fatal factor. But the main battleground for the magazine industry, and the focus for media scrutiny, is traditionally the women's glossies sector. Here there was bad news again for Emap, with Elle recording a loss of 14 per cent, and New Woman a drop of 1 1 per cent. The surprise was that NatMags' Cosmo managed to fend off the challenge from IPC's Marie Claire.

"Everyone said that Marie Claire would pip Cosmopolitan, but it hasn't happened," says NatMags MD Terry Mansfield. His group did not record significant rises but neither did it sustain the expected losses. She dropped 9 per cent, not as bad as some of its rivals, while Good Housekeeping, dropping 6 per cent, did better than expected. The message seems to be that the women's glossy market, in its current incarnation, is past its peak. Publishers looking for growth are turning their attention to the men's glossies.

One group that showed no losses and no spectacular gains was Conde Nast. Its portfolio, including Vogue, Tatler, GQand Vanity Fair, all proceeded steadily to give the group its third consecutive across-the-board rise. "The magazines are looking good and the feel-good factor at the top of the market helps them," says MD Nicholas Coleridge. The success of NatMag's Harpers Queen, up 7 per cent, seems to confirm the analysis. The other story behind the figures is the rise and rise of listings and TV magazines, aohe evolution of titles connected withthe electronic media.

While Future Publishing's Sega Power has lost 61 per cent of its circulation, Emap's Internet is up 40 per cent, and Cable Guide goes up by 74 per cent to 625,019. Even Inside Soap, from the publishers of Sugar, has gained 54 per cent. What does this tell us about our reading habits? The last word belongs to the market's traditional leader, Reader's Digest, now second behind What's On TV. "The listings titles are not reading magazines," says editor-in-chief Russell Twisk, loftily. "It is rather like being overtaken by the telephone directory." Juliet Warkentin no agenda for big changes at Marie Claire picture her at the top of a pyramid, her influence trickling down.

She sets trends. She's nice to edit for, particularly after More! where, at 35 I was 15 or 20 years older than the readers. The Elle reader isn't defined by gender, age or class. That sounds strange, doesn't it, but it's actually quite radical." More of these readers obviously need luring and an advertising campaign was launched last Thursday, again shot by Bailey, showing a naked Naomi Campbell and the slogan "Get Dressed, Get "The company is investing a lot hi the campaign," she says. "In fact, we're so confident we've even put the price up (from 2.20 to 2.30) for the September issue." It remains to be seen whether other magazines will follow O'Rior-dan's move towards an androgynous product.

Juliet Warkentin's first fully edited issue of Marie Claire will be the October issue and for the moment she is playing her cards close to her chest. But she has insisted that "there's not an agenda to make big change" and it is generally accepted that she was appointed, rather than someone who wanted to relaunch the magazine radically, because of her caution. The current Marie Claire has its traditional sexational coverlines (Sex Scandals: Romeo politicians in their underwear; Cuba: where lovers hire beds by the hour; Your body on the beach: how men see it). But it shows signs of exactly the stagnation that Mcintosh and O'Riordan are fighting against. 'Romeo politicians in their underwear' for example, turns out to be a dreary piece by Edwina Currie about Tory sex scandals illustrated with politicians' heads stuck on Chippendale bodies.

The Emotional Issues section, to which many turn first, is missing. You feel that you've read everything before. Still, Warkentin dramatically overhauled Drapers Record during her editorship, bringing it out to the front of its market. Whether she'll manage to keep Marie Claire in its pole position in a shifting and evolving market is something that will be watched with interest. ways talking about how much he spends on Vogue photo shoots' 10 maintain the highest quality.

A half-hour show called Vogue TV on IT could destroy that brand reputation forever." "The way forward is the route we've taken with Top Gear," Phippen explains. "Top Gear is a TV show, a radio show, a magazine, a CD-Rom, an internet site, a book, a video. In fact, there is no medium that Top Gear is not involved in. That's what we plan to do with other shows. Of course, most media owners are looking at doing that sort of thing now, but we have 10 years' head start on all ofthem." Marie O'Rlordan editing Elle for 'feisty opinion-formers' strong feature at the front of the magazine and has started covering subjects which are not necessarily on the traditional territory of women's monthlies.

"We had a feature on Dunblane in July. I don't think that would have happened before." She isn't unduly worried by the sizeable decline in sales. "We knew they were going to be down. My first issue was the June one. I'm confident that by the time the next figures come out the circulation will be up." O'Riordan edited the late-teen magazine More! for two years before moving to Elle.

This Initially seems a strange leap, but Riordan insists that it is not. "I always felt that More! stood apart from the mainstream of its contemporaries. We treated our readers like their male counterparts, and in that sense what happened there is not dissimilar to what's happening here. There are gender-specific issues which women want to read about, of course, but they don't want to be treated differently." SHE picks up the August issue and opens it at its front feature, a series of portraits of "Brit Bad photographed by David Bailey. The boys include Liam and Noel Gallagher, Ewan McGregor, Will Self and a naked Damien Hirst with "I luv you" scrawled on his chest in lipstick.

"Unlike many other magazines," says O'Riordan, "we've recognised that women are just as interested in the Gallagher brothers as men are. Vogue does celebrity interviews, I suppose, but it's always people like Michael Hesel-tine. As for Marie Claire, they don't really do interviews, and if they do you can bet it's Sharon Stone or Cindy Crawford." Twenty two per cent of Elle's 1.1 million readership is male, the largest proportion of any women's title. "That's a huge amount, isn't it?" she says, genuinely surprised as a' researcher hands her the figures. "They'll mostly be men reading their partner's magazines." The reader she has in mind as she edits is she says.

"She's feisty, confident, an opinion former. I Mansfield's IPC counterpart, Nigel Davidson, agrees: "The BBC gets millions of pounds worth of free air-time, uncluttered by any other advertising. We still need to level out the playing field whether they're banned from BBC TV and radio, or we get into programming." The BBC claim to be sympathetic and; bizarrely.Phippen has even joined the lobby for other magazine publishers to have access to TV. But perhaps this is not pure altruism: "I'm not too sure which magazines would make a successful transfer to TV," he says. "Nicholas Coleridge at Conde Nast is al Title Publisher Jan-Jun 96 Period on Year on Circulation Period Year Loaded IPC 238,955 36.7 87.2 FHM Emap 181,581 57.8 100.4 Men's Health Rodale 131,887 9.6 14.7 GQ Conde Nast 131,074 1.8 Maxim Dennis 113,264 15.5 na Esquire Nat Mags 107,058 0.9 Arena Wagadon 93,513 10.3 21.6 Women's monthligA (selected) Title Publisher Jan-Jun 96 Period on Year on Circulation Period Year Cosmopolitan Nat Mags 460,141 0.8 0.9 Marie Claire IPC 455,477 0.7 0.1 Company Nat Mags 291,078 0.3 She Nat Mags 245,839 New Woman Emap 231,657 Elle Emap 191,243 Options IPC 156,531 Woman's Journal IPC 149,641 TeenagePop Title Publisher Jan-Jun 96 Period on Year on Circulation Period Year Sugar Attic Futura 361,764 13.7 37.8 It's Bliss Emap 322,063 22.6 na TV Hits Attic Futura 204,154 6.3 11.4 Smash Hits Emap 202,202 Top Of The Pops BBC 192,674 58.9 na Big! Emap 175,049 Just Seventeen Emap 162,490 Sky Emap 154,281 Mizz IPC 150,889 Live Kicking BBC 141,833 28.1 3.1 Others 44OTVSN Source-tables: ABC; Die chart: The Magazine Business Based on 1995 ABC figures IPC Weeklies 13.53 BBC 7.89 -Bauer 7.61 IPC Southbank 7.19 Publishers' market share Total circulation DC Thomson 3.05 -t, Reader's Digest 3.73 IPC Specialists 4.26 EMAP Elan 4.44 4.63 -5m i.