It’s been a week since Conor McNicholas announced that he was leaving the editor’s chair at NME to take on the same role at Top Gear magazine. Judging by the sheer weight of newscopy piling up on the subject, it seems that whoever sits in that coveted position is still of interest to many people across the media. It seems strange though that the rumour mill of who is going to be taking his place at IPC has been noticeably quiet.
Naturally, in the underground of alternative music, the topic has come up a number of times, with many potential candidates I’ve talked to in no certain terms distancing themselves from any desire to take on the role.
That may seem wise, for to be responsible for the print version of the NME seems to be a poisoned chalice at the moment. In the last six months of 2008, the magazine saw its circulation collapse by 24.3% to just 48,459 – a drop off of around 30,000 readers since McNicholas took over in 2002 – and the massive push to digital overseen by McNicholas and NME and Uncut Publishing Director Paul Cheal seems to have positioned its print companion as a night watchmen – slowly being wound down to be replaced by a young, fresh big hitter on the web. Any new editor would be seen by many to be ushering the title further towards the grave.
It is exactly for this reason that I want the job, I’ve long said that I don’t believe that reducing the vital strengths of print over the web is a viable way of turning more people onto print, and it has been a point sadly illustrated as magazines reducing costs by lowering paper quality have just hastened their decline. Although I’m obviously not privy to the financial workings at IPC or the NME, I’m certain that the company has the resources to significantly improve the print quality of the magazine.
This reduction in quality over the years of McNicholas’ tenure has highlighted a point I’ve already mentioned – that of the magazine playing second fiddle in IPC’s brand development campaign. What McNicholas has done phenomenally well (and why he’s probably got the Top Gear job) is develop the NME brand across media platforms. There is little doubt that the NME has the strongest brand of any music magazine in the world. Instantly recognisable worldwide, its often something that is scorned by the NME’s naysayers, but in the real publishing world, it is also invaluable.
But with this multilateral brand comes the main problem facing IPC in hiring a new magazine editor. They don’t need somebody to develop the brand, they need somebody who will save the magazine. Someone who’ll turn it into a widely-read, indispensable weekly music magazine that people read because it turns them on to great artists and gives them quality features on artists they already like. Quality journalism and a decent breadth (or appreciation at least) of genres and subject matter. The magazine needs freshening up, not being a recycled paper from a few weeks before.
As for me personally, after years of editing a range of magazines – from transforming an international golf trade publication from a boring quarterly newsheet to an informative, sought after bi-monthly to creating a niche alternative music magazine from nothing and turning it into a magazine read by 40,000 people and distributed through high street big hitters like WHSmiths and Borders within eighteen months – the chance to go to town on an industry standard like the NME would be a challenge to relish. With it would come almost universal hatred from the blogs and music snobs (just search for comments on McNicholas’ departure), but it would also come with an amazing brand, and amazing resources to turn the weekly music mag market on its head. I’ll squeeze in here that I’m also around the same age McNicholas was when he took the job…
The music magazine industry is in a really interesting place now: Plan B and FACT have both disappeared off the newsstand almost in unison, a massive hole of people have no music to read about when on the bus, train, tube or toilet. Yes web is a massive source of musical inspiration, and it is for that reason that the NME won’t be selling 300,000 copies a week again, but there is a massive market out there that can be encompassed by a publication that writes about artists its readers like, ones they think they might like, and represent, discuss and appreciate other genres that might be emerging across the world.
Now is the time for the NME magazine to make its change. Not by looking to the past, but by giving people what they want, offering them a reason to pick up, keep and love the magazine all over again. We can fall back in love…
