Review 2007: the Magazines

review2007_small.gif Last year was a crazy, exciting and scary hell-ride of a year for the major magazine publishers in the U.K. — exciting to see the industry get a well needed shake up; scary for those on the inside. Still, there’s no denying change, especially for an industry that seems to have been slowly rotting from the inside out for years now. The big news was that Emap finally folded under the weight of it’s own inherent corporate greed [news.bbc.co.uk]. But not after laying waste to much of Britain’s world-renowned magazine culture. Emap’s tenure saw the purchase and demise of many titles that embraced the U.K.’s alternative culture and helped define what made this place so different to anywhere else in the world. The Face [ebay] and Smash Hits [ebay] are the most popular titles that spring to mind, both closing after a disastrous remodelling at the hands of a company that seemed to forget how to make magazines that people liked and felt a part of (other titles included Select, Frank, Sneak, Minx, Kingsize, J-17 (formerly Just Seventeen), Sky… there’s loads of ‘em). So Hurrah! The U.K.’s No.1 magazine killer is dead! Boo Emap! We won’t miss you, although your legacy will always live on in the sole gift you chose to bestow, sorry, blight the world with… horrible, hateful Heat magazine…

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The biggest shift in magazine culture this year came from the Men’s sector. Knock-off male versions of Heat like Nuts and Zoo (a format may have seemed new to British readers but has actually been tried and tested in Australia for decades) began to falter for 2 main reasons… one being that every issue looked the same making people assume they were being fooled into paying for, what was essentially, the same magazine over and over again and secondly because pornography is so much easier to get online and much more, shall we say, ‘detailed’ than the brand of ‘oo-er missus’ titillation these mags could only go so far to offer. The result was that Men’s mags stopped getting dumber and started getting smarter… and slicker. This is where I have to mention Monocle. The most blogged about magazine this year. Tyler Brulê’s legacy revived itself this year not just with a smashing new magazine (with global media network in tow) but also in the editorial sensibilities that remained intact at the reinvigorated Wallpaper and the newly relaunched Esquire.

Those were the biggest stories in a pretty eventful year for magazine culture that included an ‘end of print’ revival and saw the first ever independent magazine symposium launched. At Boicozine we always lean towards the more independent minded publications, so with that in mind here’s our brief list of favourite mags from 2007…

032c [032c.com] / A10 [a10.eu] / Acne Paper [acnepaper.com] / Another Man [exacteditions.com] / Dwell [dwell.com] / Entertainment Weekly [ew.com] / Fantastic Man [fantasticmanmagazine.com] / Grafik / Ideas Illustrated [ycnonline.com] / Little White Lies [littlewhitelies.co.uk] / Monocle [monoclemagazine.com] / Palais [palaisdetokyo.com/magpalais] / Pin-up [pinupmagazine.org] / Pyramid Power [pyramidpower.ca] / Sup [supmag.com] / Uniqlo Paper [uniqlo.com/uniqlopaper] / Varoom [varoom-mag.com] / Wired [wired.com]

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