Glamour

See that December 2017 edition of Glamour magazine that’s currently on your local retailer’s shelves? It’s the last monthly issue you’ll ever see in the UK.

Not such a surprise. Print is struggling everywhere, and the beauty pages are not immune. In Style closed its print edition in 2016 while Company waved goodbye to print in 2014.

Over 2016, Glamour‘s circulation fell by 26% year on year to 260,422 (that includes print and online).

In response, at the start of 2017, Glamour dropped its cover price from £2 to £1.

That wasn’t enough to halt its decline.

The loss of revenue was a huge blow for the title, the tenth biggest-selling magazine in the UK. Glamour has a proud history, first published in April 1939 in the United States, and originally called Glamour of Hollywood.

Glamour (without any Hollywood) landed in the UK in April 2001, in the unique “handbag size” format. Its tagline: “fits in your life as well as your handbag”. A small, fun, bright, tactile, and successful little magazine. Then we stopped putting it in our handbags. Or any other bags.

Our smartphones have killed it.

Glamour now turns its focus to “digital first” and to becoming the “ultimate online beauty destination”, says its publisher, Condé Nast. This means it will battle in a frenzied social space against bloggers and online media stars.

Good luck.

It’s not goodbye to print completely for Glamour. The magazine will appear in the real world in the UK twice a year from now on.

In a darker note to my ears, however, the editorial and commercial departments will now be “fully integrated”. What does that mean? Barriers between the editorial and commercial departments were once iron-clad. You saw on a magazine’s pages something the editorial staff liked and valued, not what had been paid for. Will the commercial team now actually control the editorial content? We wait to see…

But bye-bye, Glamour. We loved you. Once.

Perhaps we’ll now all take up something more useful in print instead

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