Rogers retreats from print media
TORONTO Rogers Communications Inc. announced Friday a major retreat from print media, shuttering the print versions of four of its lead magazine titles in favour of more digital distribution and putting its stable of trade publications up for sale.
Beginning in January, Canadian Business, Flare, MoneySense and Sportsnet magazines will become what the company calls “content brands,” regularly publishing content online and through apps. Maclean’s, Canada’s only newsweekly magazine, will appear monthly, but continue to publish a weekly digital edition. Chatelaine and Today’s Parent, currently published monthly, will be reduced to six editions a year, and follow the same publishing schedule online.
Hello! Canada magazine’s print schedule is unaffected by the announcement, and will continue to print a weekly edition.
“We are going where our audiences are, and doubling-down on digital to grow our consumer magazine brands,” Rick Brace, president of Rogers Media, said in a media release.
Rogers also announced that it has put French-language magazines Châtelaine and L’Actualité, and the bilingual LouLou, up for sale. Its notice to subscribers says that it will cease publication of these magazines in December. The company “is going through a thoughtful process” to sell them by the end of 2016, as part of a new strategy that focuses on Englishlanguage consumer brands.
Steve Maich, senior vice-president of digital content and publishing at Rogers Media said there will be staff reductions “primarily in classifications where people are overwhelmingly focused on print.” However, Maich said any changes will be determined over the next few months and that the company will look for ways to retain staff by moving them to other positions.
“The decision to sell the trade magazines came down to a strategic review where we had to ask ourselves what were our greatest opportunities,” Maich said. “We are now in a position to grow the audiences we want to speak to and produce content that’s most naturally distributable across all of our platforms.”
Maich said that trade publications and French-language publishing fall outside of the company’s core strategy, which will now focus on entertainment, lifestyle, parenting, news, and sports.
Declines in print revenues are hardly news in Canada any more, with almost all newspaper and magazine companies struggling to adjust to a digital ad market where they are competing against search engines, social media sites and content aggregators that often provide wider and more targeted audiences. Rogers Publishing most recently saw print revenue declines of more than 30 per cent year-over-year.
“It’s been clear for some time now that Canadians are moving from print to digital, and our job is to keep pace with the changes our audiences are demanding,” Maich said. “We are so much more than a collection of magazine brands, and we’ve seen rapid growth on our digital platforms over the past few years. Now is the time for us to accelerate that shift.”
Rogers Media said it has committed more than $35 million in capital and marketing to transition its business to a “digital-first infrastructure.” Part of that investment includes upgrading the company ’s marketing and IT tools.
According to Maich, the company’s online and tablet magazine service Texture has over 100,000 subscribers paying $119.88 a year or more, and will this year turn a profit. Maich said that digital media revenues at Rogers Media have grown 20 per cent year over year.
“We understand that digital media is not a risk-free business,” he added. “But the question for us was: Do you have the decisiveness to jump at the right opportunity? And this is a company is all about taking risks, and this feels like the right opportunity.”
Rogers further noted that digital consumer revenue for its magazines is outpacing newsstand revenue by 50 per cent, and that unique visitors to their online platforms have increased 41 per cent in the last two years.