Attitude
The magazine
attitude began publication in 1994 as part of the Northern and Shell Group owned by Richard Desmond, and having been through a succession of owners subsequent to its sale in 2004 (commensurate with Desmond's takeover of Express Newspapers) it was acquired in September 2016 by contract publisher Stream Publishing. The owner of Stream Publishing, Darren Styles, had previously launched the successful attitude awards for the brand (in October 2012) and acquired the English-language rights to Winq, the luxury lifestyle magazine for gay men, from its Amsterdam-based owner (the Media Mansion) in August 2013.
Many commentators go much further than I have above in pointing to change. Some claim, for example, that digitalisation has transformed cultural production beyond recognition. The internet and the mobile phone have triumphed. The music industry is dying or already dead, they say. Television is over. Book publishing as we knew it is finished. Yet these industries continue to pour out huge amounts of product, employ tens of thousands of people, produce considerable amounts of revenue, and occupy vast amounts of our time. Some optimistically see a new age where distinctions between producers and audiences disappear, and ‘users’ become the new creators. Commentary of this kind often implies, and sometimes explicitly states, that all the old notions and models need to be thrown out, and the history of cultural production is irrelevant because we are now living in an ‘information age’ rather than an ‘industrial age’ (or some other term that serves to simplify the past). Others see transformation just over the horizon. In many cases, it is unclear whether we are reading an analysis of what is happening now, or a prediction of the future.
The magazine
Editor | Cliff Joannou |
---|---|
Categories | Gay, Men's lifestyle |
Frequency | Monthly |
Circulation | 11,000 (digital only) plus print circulation unspecified [1] |
First issue | May 1994 |
Company | Stream Publishing Limited |
Country | United Kingdom |
Based in | London |
Language | English |
Website | http://attitude.co.uk/ |
attitude began publication in 1994 as part of the Northern and Shell Group owned by Richard Desmond, and having been through a succession of owners subsequent to its sale in 2004 (commensurate with Desmond's takeover of Express Newspapers) it was acquired in September 2016 by contract publisher Stream Publishing. The owner of Stream Publishing, Darren Styles, had previously launched the successful attitude awards for the brand (in October 2012) and acquired the English-language rights to Winq, the luxury lifestyle magazine for gay men, from its Amsterdam-based owner (the Media Mansion) in August 2013.
- the pink pound
- Horizontal integration - They buy up other companies in the same sector to reduce the competition for audiences and audience time.
- Vertical integration - They buy up other companies involved in different stages of the process of production and circulation. Companies might buy ‘downstream’, such as when a company involved in making films buys a DVD distributor, or ‘upstream’, which is when a company involved in distribution or transmission (such as a cable television company) buys a programme-maker.
- Internationalisation - By buying and partnering other companies abroad, corporations can sell massive amounts of extra copies of a product they have already paid to produce (though they will have to pay new marketing costs, of course).
- Multisector and multimedia integration - They buy into other related areas of cultural industry production to ensure cross-promotion.
- Also important is the attempt to ‘co-opt’ (Hirsch, 1990[1972]) critics, DJs and various other people responsible for publicising texts, by socialising with them and sending them gifts, press releases, and so on.
Hesmondhalgh - The Cultural Industries (3rd edition) (2013)
Argue that media intergration avoids risk. Buy competition in order to create a better enviroment for their own company.
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