Battle of the Red Rose lifestyle magazines - North West Media Features

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Battle of the Red Rose lifestyle magazines

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By William Hall

Thursday, 26 April 2007

Lancashire Life, the flagship brand in Archant’s fast growing stable of monthly lifestyle magazines, is facing one of its toughest tests in its genteel 60 year history of chronicling the lives and loves of Lancashire’s county set. Owen Oyston, Lancashire Life’s flamboyant former owner, wants his business back.

At first sight it seems an unlikely battle. Oyston’s media ambitions, which once extended to the Miss World contest and a failed 1987 rescue attempt of the trade union-backed left-wing News on Sunday newspaper (advertising motto “no tits but plenty of balls”), seemingly ended in 1996 when he was jailed for six years for rape and indecent assault.

The Preston-based entrepreneur was stripped of his four radio licences in 1998 because he was no longer deemed “a fit and proper person”, and sold the remnants of his media empire - Lancashire Life, plus Yorkshire Life and Cheshire Life - to Archant in 2001.

Since then Lancashire Life, which provided the template for Archant’s rapid expansion into lifestyle magazines across the UK, has gone from strength to strength. Despite being Archant’s highest priced monthly magazine, it has a fantastically loyal readership and was recently crowned magazine of the year at the annual Newspaper Society awards.

Record circulation

Lancashire Life’s ABC audited circulation for 2006 rose 4 per cent, to 23,428, and its December 2006 circulation of 29,256 was an all time record both for itself and the 50 plus magazines in the Archant Life stable.

However, never under estimate the 73-year-old Oyston, an entrepreneurial business figure who made his first fortune in estate agency before selling out to Royal Life for £30m in 1987 just weeks before the stock market crash.

He is ploughing a not inconsiderable part of his £100m fortune into ensuring that Lancashire, a little known bimonthly, dislodges Lancashire Life as the North West’s top selling life style magazine.

Lancashire, bought by Oyston’s Ridings Publishing Company three years ago, does not yet have an audited ABC circulation, although it says it will have one shortly. It claims a circulation of around 20,000 (Lancashire Life’s editor Roger Borrell speculates that actual paid-for sales are nearer to 7,000) and has ambitions to go monthly.

Until recently Lancashire’s main editorial assets were a couple of Oyston’s old buddies – William Roache (Coronation Street’s Ken Barlow), and sports pundit/game show host Stuart Hall - both of whom are in their 70s.

Poaching

However, a year ago Oyston poached the bulk of Lancashire Life’s top management team led by Peter Bourhill, an old ally who had been promoted to Archant’s Northern regional boss after Oyston sold out, and Anthony Skinner, Lancashire Life’s long time editor.

Joanne Geddes, Lancashire Life’s former advertising chief, and David Chambers, head of property advertising, also defected from Lancashire Life’s plush Tustin Court offices in Preston docks, and into Lancashire magazine’s headquarters at the rundown Oyston Mill, half a mile away. It has just appointed three new merchandisers to boost the magazine’s point of sale presence in outlets such as supermarkets.

Apart from the fact that Oyston’s Lancashire only comes out six times a year whereas Archant’s Lancashire Life comes out every month, both magazines now look surprisingly similar both in size and content. Lancashire Life’s April 2007 edition ran to 272 pages whilst Lancashire’s March/April issue ran to 227 pages.

The editorial diet of both is heavily illustrated profiles of towns, villages, social events plus “feel good” stories aimed at a more elderly and affluent reader base.

“We have increased pagination and brought a more professional flair”, says Lancashire’s Skinner. His magazine has been redesigned with a better use of pictures, but “we do not regard ourselves as a picture book”, says Skinner who accuses Lancashire Life’s new editorial team of using ever bigger pictures and shorter stories to pad out the pages in a magazine where well over half the content is advertising.

Advertising rates

The other big difference is cover price (Lancashire costs half Lancashire Life’s £3.20 per issue) and advertising rates. Oyston’s Lancashire charges £1,500 for a full colour page which is a third below Lancashire Life’s rates.

Roger Borrell

Roger Borrell, a former editor of the Lancashire Evening Post, who replaced Skinner plays down Oyston’s threat. He notes that Lancashire Life’s circulation had been falling prior to his arrival in April 2006.

“We have taken a magazine that had lost its entire management team and changed it fairly fundamentally and come out with a 4 per cent circulation increase for 2006, “ says Borrell. “We have modernised the design and vastly improved the content. Lancashire Life contains all the traditional formula that you would expect from a county magazine but we have also turned it into a good read”.

Archant has moved quickly to fill the gaps in its Northern management team. Liz Page from Newsquest in York, has replaced Bourhill as Archant’s regional MD in the North, and Andy Phelan, a former Trinity Mirror executive, has taken over as Lancashire Life’s publisher.

"Pure Lancashire"

It has also launched “Pure Lancashire”, a cut-price bimonthly which is supposedly aimed at Lancashire’s “up and coming” residents, but is clearly designed as a “spoiler” magazine to counter the threat from Oyston’s rejuvenated Lancashire.

However, Skinner is upbeat about the outlook. “When Oyston took over Lancashire three years ago it was doing 60 pages and selling around 3,000 copies. Now we are doing around 240 pages and selling around 20,000 copies”.

Archant’s Yorkshire Life, its second biggest county magazine, is also under attack from Yorkshire Ridings, which is also in the Oyston stable, and Cheshire Life is another obvious target.

Archant, with revenues of close to £200m a year and 3,000 staff, has the resources to combat Oyston’s challenge. But it could be painful. Archant’s county magazines, led by Lancashire Life, have been fuelling Archant’s profit growth at a time when profits from its traditional newspapers are declining.

Oyston’s return to the publishing scene may well have put paid to that – for the next couple of years at least.

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Comments (13)

1 By Nimrod, on 07-05-2007 01:33
I would like to suggest to Mr Oyston a new title to expand his portfolio and one which would surely thrive in a market he has a unique insight into,
Features such as "Get up, slop out - a day in the life of the proprietor, "Things to do when the kids are on holiday No1: Apply for A Visiting Permit," "A Cell of My Own" or "A Day Out to D Wing" could become popular features with an audience that could be highly targeted and serviced by one economical bulk drop of copies.
My provisional title for this new publication would be: "Doing Life in Lancashire."

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2 By Andrew Rosthorn, on 07-05-2007 14:45
There’s more to this than Owen Oyston “wanting his business back.”
Owen Oyston was released from prison in December 1999, after winning a judicial review against further detention under the notorious Catch 22 technicality that a prisoner claiming his innocence could not be paroled.
He funded a ground-breaking legal case that has freed wrongly convicted prisoners.
He planned to spend his first year of freedom trying to get his conviction investigated.
I was a reporter, working on new evidence that convinced me he was wrongly convicted. I was even more convinced of his innocence after the woman in the case telephoned me.
Early in 2000 he was funding research to expose a GBP 250 million political conspiracy against Labour Party supporters in Lancashire and spending big money on a new stadium for Blackpool FC.
He told me he had no plans to sell Lancashire Life, or any other title in the stable of glossy county magazines carefully coaxed into profitability by his colleague Peter Bourhill.
In fact he said it was Archant’s present managing director, Johnny Hustler, who approached him “out of the blue” with an offer to buy the Life series for Eastern Counties Newspaper Group, the firm that is still partly-owned by the Colman mustard family and was rebranded as Archant in 2002.
He turned down Hustler’s offer and complained about being “hustled”.
He was then approached by Winston Halstead, one-time editor of the Driffield Times, who wanted a new partner for a stable of small-circulation county magazines that he had owned and edited on a shoestring since the late sixties.
Oyston and Halstead shook hands on a deal to protect the future of Ridings Publishing Ltd..
Just a few days later, the entire board of ECNG in Norwich came back, “very politely, this time”, with an increased and very acceptable offer for the Oyston Life titles.
Oyston says he told ECNG that he had been buying the small Ridings Publishing titles in the meantime and that he would “throw them in – for nothing”.
But after the big deal had been signed, according to Oyston, “Johnny Hustler re-appeared.
“He told me he didn’t want the Ridings magazines at any price. He said, ‘I am only interested in number ones in the market place.’
“So I had to telephone Winston to say I was dreadfully sorry that I could not honour the handshake deal, as I was now contractually banned from the magazine business for the next three years.
“Three years later, when Winston Halstead telephoned to remind me of our deal, I worked out that I could honour my handshake and invite my old friend Brian Hargeaves, former editor of the Blackpool Evening Gazette and Lancashire Life’s freelance food critic, to come and edit The Lancashire Magazine as a small bi-monthly - no serious competition for Archant.
Oyston has admitted taking on “one or two people treated harshly by Archant” to help Brian Hargreaves. This is what seems to have triggered the staff poaching war that was reported by William Hall.
Oyston said, “I then heard that Peter Bourhill, chief executive at Lancashire Life, had been instructed to hire all ‘Owen’s best men’.
“I was flattered, but a bit shocked. So I rang Peter Bourhill and asked him, ‘What are you doing Peter? I thought we were friends.’
“Peter said, ‘I’m sorry. Those are my instructions.’

“So when I met him in the Lake District, I felt I was on the moral high ground by headhunting the headhunter. I offeried Peter the chance to join us and he accepted my offer of shares and salary. But Johnny Hustler and the board of Archant quickly sent him on gardening leave for a whole year, as they were entitled under his contract.

By the time Peter Bourhill eventually arrived to work at The Lancashire Magazine, the Lancashire Life editor, Anthony Skinner, had moved in as editor of The Lancashire Magazine and joined the rush of defections from Archant to Ridings that was noted by William Hall.

All this has reminded me of a wonderful “own goal” suffered in 1994 by Trinity International when they decided to make life easier for their heavyweight Southport Visiter by paying Reed Elsevier half a million pounds to close down a pesky free competitor known as the Southport Globe.

Reed told the DTI what they were planning, but not their editor.

As copies of the last Globe dropped through 73,000 letter boxes in Southport, editor Phil Maddox and his 25 reporters and salesmen were sacked and told to wait for redundancy pay.

Maddox, a feisty former deal maker for Lockheed in Saudi Arabia, persuaded his unpaid staff to fight back.

He edited from an hotel room, sold eleven thousand pounds of adverts and delivered a new free paper, The Champion, to all 73,000 former readers of the Globe – just six days later.

The half million spent on killing the competition had been utterly wasted by Trinity, but it did improve the journalism. Maddox’s Champion was a much classier racehorse than Reed’s Globe.

I see a parallel in the way that Owen Oyston’s pesky Lancashire Magazine, undoubtedly causing problems for Aechant in 2007, was actually offered free of charge to Johnny Hustler in 2000.

Hustler’s contempt for “number two” in the market may well have blown back on Archant, but it does gives Lancastrians the chance of some competition in the market and that often means better journalism. I hope so. I have contributed stories to both these rival magazines - but I actually bought some shares in Ridings.

When there’s no shortage of money on either side of a circulation battle, the race can sometimes be won by the editor who trains the classiest horse.

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3 By Nimrod, on 07-05-2007 16:05
Business must be hard in the freelance journalist world when you are obliged to be an apologist for a convicted rapist.

Hmm, interesting your story about being convinced of Owen’s innocence (“I was even more convinced of his innocence after the woman in the case telephoned me.”) doesn’t seem to tie in with historical records (http://archive.thisislancashire.co.uk/1996/6/3/851814.html).

So maybe some of your other suggestions should be taken with a nip of the proverbial NaCl?

But then, Andrew, as you are a regular contributor to that well known peddler of conspiracy theories, Lobster magazine, (sample headlines: “Microwaves and mind control” and “Did the CIA sink a ship-load of buses in the Thames?”) your veracity must already be beyond question.

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4 By Harold Heys, on 08-05-2007 22:15
By Harold Heys

Surely Nimrod knows the How-Do website is all about journalists and public relations men.

So if he wants to join in the fun, he should play by big boys' rules.

He should cut out the cheap abuse and have the guts to tell us who he is - and perhaps even where he is coming from - like Andrew Rosthorn, the reporter he slagged as "an apologist for a convicted rapist". Oh, and me.

I know Rosthorn well. He is a real reporter. We've had our differences over the years, but he has the guts to write under his own name and stand by what he writes. And when it comes to Oyston, Rosthorn knows the territory. He has worked on the story for nearly 20 years. He certainly knows more than Nimrod about the man.

Nimrod clearly wants us to believe that Rosthorn was lying to How-Do. He says Rosthorn's claim that the woman in the Oyston case phoned him is not true. I ask you, why on earth, writing under his own name, would he lie to readers of How-Do about that? He spoke to me just after that phone call and told me about it. I remember he was quite surprised.

And what does Nimrod have against Lobster magazine? Its layout is more Old Moore's Almanack than Playboy but it's a unique small publication with a 24-year history of being first to uncover important villainy, things like "shoot to kill" in Ireland and Gibraltar.

Obviously, like any sloppy beginner in the trade, Nimrod did no no more than Google his opponent's name in the middle of the night.

Rosthorn certainly wrote a cracking story in Lobster about retired CIA men claiming they had sabotaged an East German ship in the River Thames, carrying buses to Cuba. It was a big story. Those were Leyland buses, built in Lancashire.

What's wrong with Lobster? It investigates state espionage, government conspiracies, the abuse of governmental power and the influence of the intelligence and security agencies on contemporary history and politics. Just what we need in Blair's Britain, I would suggest.

Nimrod implies in a snide way that Rosthorn nobbled witnesses for Oyston. He was actually freelancing for the News of the World, like the Sunday Times a member of the Murdoch stable, when he interviewed some witnesses. Not for the first time, his work was investigated and cleared by Det Sup Bill Roberts of Greater Manchester Police.

If How-Do wants a good forum, let's have more detailed research and less sly abuse. And let's know who we are talking to. Put up or shut up, Nimrod.

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5 By Nimrod, on 09-05-2007 00:00
Mixed feelings here. First of all - these guys (unless they have way too much time on their hands which I conceive is possible) are costing a convicted rapist money on a per word basis. But then these rapist apologists are making money on a per word basis.
Actually I think my demolition job on Rosthorn was rather effective. Maybe I'm just a gifted amateur.

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6 By Harold Heys, on 09-05-2007 09:44
Are you suggesting that I am making some money out of Oyston? You ignorant ****. I've never met the man, have never had a penny from his vast coffers, and have little time for his apparent bluff and bluster. "Maybe I'm just a gifted amateur" you write. No, you are a ****. So **** off whoever you are.

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7 By Nimrod, on 09-05-2007 12:46
You see, Harold, much as I hate to give you high-profile media professionals any advice, a man tends to be judged by the company keeps.
Andrew Rosthorn, a man deeply compromised by years of association with Publisher Cell Block H, springs to Oyston's defence after a fairly light-hearted jibe.
Rosthorn's own all-too transparent manifesto and mixture of half-truths and groundless (easily exposed) assertions renders any bid for him to defend himself rather pointless.
This is where you spring out of of the Womwoodsscrubwork and act as apologist for the convicted rapist's apologist. I'm sure that I'm not the only one who saw a pattern emerging here.
In fact the two of you came on rather in the fashion of underworld goons asserting, as you emerge from the shadows: "Here Nimrod, you've been a very naughty boy. Mr Oyston wants a word with you. Get in the back..."
But, regardless, I will accept your assertion that you have never taken the Oyston shilling. This, however, merely changes your bid to excuse Oyston and his associate from being of a pecuniary bent to just being peculiarly stupid.
My initial comment was posted really as just a light bit of joshing. However, all these subsequent self-serving shenanigans have made me (and no doubt others) wonder whether Oyston really is the kind of person that North West advertisers should be putting on their schedules or whose publication North west readers should be wanting on their coffee tables.
Nevertheless, I feel my work here is done.

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8 By Come on you pool, on 25-05-2007 08:34
“I would also like to see the re-emergence of Owen Oyston actively and openly taking an active roll in BFC instead of pulling the strings from behind the scenes! I believe this would certainly signal steps in the right direction and a major positive, showing signal of intent on the clubs part.

Here`s to the Championship!
COME ON YOU POOL!!!!!!!

Koppite
Thailand”

If Owen’s busy, maybe Gary Glitter or Peter Sutcliffe can do the honours

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9 By rick card, on 08-06-2007 14:23
I went on net researching Andrew Rosthorn and came across this site.

I know nothing of the Oyston affair.

I give Rosthorn some estimation points for being an open writer of rights vilified by a masked jouster of justs.

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10 By Nimrod the Grey, on 08-06-2007 16:35
"I give Rosthorn some estimation points for being an open writer of rights vilified by a masked jouster of justs."

You know what, Rosthorn, whilst he's checking his latest little brown envelope from Oyston, is wincing.

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11 By rick card, on 08-06-2007 22:20
Nimrod you none too bright.

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12 By Nimrod the White, on 08-06-2007 22:49
Aw, shucks, as semi-literate defenders of convicted rapists apologists go, you are not so bad yourself...

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13 By rick card, on 10-06-2007 10:42
As label hangers go you still ain't too bright.

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