The Word

» see wordmagazine.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

On 29 June 2012 David Hepworth put out a short statement saying that the August issue of The Word, due on sale in the second week of July, would be the last. That issue was number 114. The magazine had launched in February 2003 as the first title from Development Hell Limited, the London publisher Hepworth had set up with Jerry Perkins, and it ran for nine years and five months.

Hepworth and Perkins came out of EMAP with more than thirty-five years of magazine-making between them, on titles including Q and Mojo. Mark Ellen edited The Word, with Smash Hits and Q already behind him. Guardian Media Group held 29.5 percent of Development Hell. The company's other main title was Mixmag, which meant a dance monthly was effectively carrying the one written for people who read about music in paragraphs.

The reason Hepworth gave was plain enough. In the nine years since launch there had been dramatic changes in the media and in the music business, and those changes had made it harder for a small independent magazine to survive and to provide its staff with a living. The awkward part is that the magazine was not failing on quality. It had been voted UK Music Magazine of the Year in 2007 and again in 2008.

~ the chronicle ~

~ who it was for ~

The Word was aimed at readers in their thirties and forties who still bought music magazines and had no interest in being told what was cool this week. It ran books and television next to the records, and it assumed you would sit through four thousand words about someone whose last hit was twenty years behind them. That readership existed in Britain in 2003 in numbers large enough to start a magazine around.

I never saw a copy. Imported British monthlies did reach Turkish bookshops in that period, at roughly triple the cover price and a month or so behind, and that filter lets Q and Mojo through while stopping the small independents. The Word was one of the small ones. A title at that scale does not get shipped into a market where the importer has to guess whether anybody will ask for it.

~ the arithmetic ~

Development Hell was independent, with no large group underneath it other than the Guardian's minority stake, so The Word paid for itself out of copies sold and pages of advertising. Both of those went the wrong way after 2008 for every print music title in Britain, and a magazine built on long features has a cost base it cannot cut very far without becoming a different magazine.

Hepworth's statement does not blame anyone, which is unusual for a closure announcement, and it puts the staff first: the business could no longer provide them with a living. Nine and a half years is a long run for an independent launch in a shrinking category. The two Magazine of the Year awards landed in 2007 and 2008, four and five years before the end.

~ the readers kept going ~

The Word blog had started in 2007 and it let readers write their own posts rather than just comment under the staff's. When the magazine closed that community did not scatter. They built theafterword.co.uk, which describes itself as the new home of the Word readers' community, and it still runs as a collective blog where the members write the posts.

The podcast survived too, in a different shape. The Word's weekly podcast was unscripted and ran to whatever length it happened to run to, with Ellen and Hepworth at the center and a rotating cast of contributors around them. After the magazine folded they carried it into Word In Your Ear, live evenings talking to musicians and authors in front of an audience, and later a podcast under that name. The magazine is the only part of the operation that actually died.

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