The exponential rise of the internet and its failure to adapt to a changing media landscape ultimately killed off The Bulletin, agency executives claim.
The growth in the number of online news sites and the move by daily newspapers to offer more analytical, in-depth reporting, enabled other media to dominate the marketplace at the expense of the weekly title.
Mat Baxter partner at communication strategy agency Naked said: “The Bulletin editorially was a little arrogant at times, and refused to realise that the marketplace is evolving. You have to constantly tweak your product in line with the marketplace and the consumer’s changing needs. It just didn’t do that.”
Baxter said advertisers have been reluctant to embrace the title for awhile. “From an advertisers’ point of view, who wants to go into The Bulletin? It is a tough title to sell, if you want to go for that audience there are more effective ways of reaching them in greater numbers. I am guessing that its failure was directly related to that. I haven’t seen The Bulletin on a schedule for a long time, it hasn’t played a role for a lot of the clients that I have dealt with for a long time.”
Baxter added: “It is sad to see that ACP is not prepared to keep it going, given the importance it had in the market, not just on a commercial level but at a piece of media heritage, but at the end of the day they have to be commercially viable enterprises, and it is clearly not.”
Simon Davies head of print at OMD said the title’s competitors have dominated the marketplace. “The whole news magazine category has been a pretty tough area, not just in this market, but if you look globally, it is has been a difficult marketplace. I think a large part of that is that newspapers do a lot more in-depth reporting that those news magazines were built on, and there has been sort of a shift there.”
Davies added: “In addition with online media, and the immediacy of news, it means you can access the information very quickly. You have got those two things working against that general category.
Adam Peruch head of trading at Ikon agrees the increased accessibility through online news has replaced hard copy formats. “Everything you get in that magazine, you can get off either newspaper’s websites or Blackberrys. So much of what was there was about world news, and you can just get it anywhere now.”
