The troubled UK B2B publisher Haymarket is closing down two of its media-focused titles, Mediaweek and the digital media-focused Revolution Magazine.

It couldn’t hold back the tides of poor advertising revenue and structural change in the B2B magazine industry any longer: today’s edition of Media Week dated November 17 will be its last. Mediaweek.co.uk is being integrated into the company’s Brand Republic media content aggregation site as the publisher looks to cut back and avoid duplication in its portfolio. As part of the restructuring, 18 out of 58 editorial jobs will be cut.

Mediaweek.co.uk will retain an online editor who will get the benefits of an “enlarged” Brand Republic team, although any new additions to that must be redeployed from Revolution and Media Week: Haymarket is hardly in a position to go on a hiring spree. Mediaweek.co.uk gets around 80,000 monthly unique users, the company says, compared to Brand Republic’s 690,000. The Media Week awards and its annual conference both survive.

Revolution magazine will now be published as a give-away supplement four times a year with Haymarket’s Marketing magazine, plus the company says Revolution will be somehow “backed by a new blogging initiative” in 2010.

Haymarket Business Media’s MD Martin Durham says the move comes after the business has been hit by a “combination of a severe advertising downturn and unprecedented structural change”, but he paints the plan as something that will make the brands stronger—it certainly won’t feel like that for Haymarket staff today.

HBM’s editorial director Dominic Mills tell paidContent:UK that while the Mediaweek and Brand Republic sites would remain unchanged, advertising-reliant Mediaweek magazine has to go: “It’s sadly not viable in print any more because of the lack of display advertising and the movement of print to online.” The company felt it was unable to charge enough in subscriptions to make up the advertising shortfall, he says, so there was only one option.

But why do Haymarket’s other media titles, Marketing and Campaign, escape the cuts? “Campaign is a subscription title so it’s been protected and it has a lot of different brand extensions, Marketing is similar,” says Mills. He stresses that all the different brands will still serve their different markets: Mediaweek.co.uk the commercial on- and offline media audience, Revolution the client marketeer crowd, and so on.

When advertising is rising and business sectors are doing well, you can make your B2B publishing portfolio as niche and targeted as you want: Media Week can live alongside Revolution and Marketing magazine. But those times are over: Haymarket is narrowing its overheads and concentrating on its core titles. As a precursor to this, the company shut down Printing World and merged it with its Print Week title earlier this year.

The privately-held company saw its pre-tax profits drop from £8 million in 2007 to £4.5 million in 2008, despite a revenue rise of 8.9 percent to £269 million. Haymarket laid off 50 staff last November.

Here’s the release in full…

17 Nov 2009 11:39
Haymarket Business Media to restructure Brand Media

Haymarket Business Media is to restructure its Brand Media Group, which includes Campaign, Marketing, MediaWeek, Revolution and BrandRepublic.com.

Martin Durham, managing director and chairman of Haymarket Business Media, said: “It’s no secret that the advertising, commercial media and marketing communications sectors have been hit by the economy and our brands, although they are leaders in their fields, have suffered too.

“We, like other media owners, have been hit by a combination of a severe advertising downturn and unprecedented structural change.

“Our proposed restructure consolidates our marketing communications brands into a stronger and more integrated portfolio that puts them into a commercially sound position well-placed for the recovery. We will continue to provide the best and most comprehensive coverage of the marketing communications sector in print and online.”

Following the restructure, MediaWeek will no longer be published in print but will continue online under the control of a full-time editor and drawing on the resources of an enlarged Brand Republic news team. MediaWeek.co.uk has monthly traffic in excess of 80,000 unique users along with two daily email bulletins that are read by more than 25,000 commercial media professionals.

The successful MediaWeek Awards, annual Media 360 conference and other marketing communications events run under the MediaWeek brand continue unaffected.

Revolution will now be distributed as a quarterly supplement with Marketing magazine, and will be backed by a new blogging initiative in 2010.

Haymarket is committed to further investment in its market leading website Brand Republic with a redesign of the site in early 2010. Online-only brands Marketing Direct and Promotions & Incentives will be integrated into Brand Republic, bringing further specialist content to its audience of 689,000 unique users per month.

As a result of the changes, editorial staff in Brand Media have entered into consultation, from today. Eighteen editorial positions from a total of 58 will be lost from Brand Media.

Jane Macken, managing director of Haymarket Brand Media, said: “We will do everything we can to keep job losses to a minimum, and we are looking to redeploy affected staff in other parts of the group.

“I would like to place on record my appreciation of the efforts of all our editorial staff. Throughout a very difficult time they have continued to produce editorial content of exceptionally high quality.”