By Simon Bond

    Call it a marriage of convenience in these fast-changing times for the women of Britain.
    Woman's Realm, the weekly UK magazine for empty-nesters whose children have grown up and left home, is to be merged into sister publication Woman's Weekly.
   This comes after a continuing decline in circulation that has been felt across a number of traditional women's titles. The turmoil is in fact quite similar to that being felt among the U.S.'s leading women's service titles as their readers age.
    Mature women of Britain these days are more interested in magazines that offer celebrity chitchat and career advice rather than tips on cake-baking, crocheting and home improvement, said publisher IPC, in explaining the merger.
    Woman's Realm was launched in 1958 to cater to a generation of post-war women who were used to running a household around a ration book. In those post-war years, goods of any kind were scarce, including many foods, and government rationing was common.
   Woman's Realm's closure coincides with the launch of a new weekly title from IPC called Your Life, which is aimed at younger, more upmarket women between the ages of 35 and 60.
   IPC hopes to split the readership of Woman's Realm, with older readers buying Woman's Weekly and younger ones gravitating toward Your Life.
   Women over 35 are expected to account for eight out of 10 women by 2005.
    Forty percent are the main breadwinners of the family, and the demographic has a total personal annual income of $140 billion. 
   Yet lifestyle titles such as Woman's Realm are struggling to survive in an otherwise lucrative market. IPC watched the circulation of Woman's Realm fall more than 15 percent a year, to 152,053, before deciding to fold the title. 
    A similar decline has been evident at Woman's Weekly, the market leader.
    The closure of Woman's Realm can be easily explained away as a ''generational gear-change'' as the emerging generation of 35- to 60-year-olds reject the titles that their mothers read. 
   However, there is a deeper malaise in the weekly general-interest market, which is struggling to attract readers and advertisers in the face of competition from a crop of phenomenally successful celebrity titles.
    Celebrity magazines like OK!, Hello! and Now magazine are notching up sales of around half a million copies every week. Now magazine, which is published by IPC, is growing at 20 percent a year, according to audited figures. 
    The combined impact of these magazines is drawing circulation from across the female demographic. Even at the other end of the market, pop magazines, which have a 70 percent female readership, are suffering as a result of the rise of celebrity magazines featuring pop stars, which are encroaching on their traditional territory. 
   The sales figures for the second half of 2000 reveal that the circulation of genre-leader Smash Hits magazine fell by 8.2 percent, and Live & Kicking magazine, which is a tie-in with the BBC's flagship teen TV program, suffered a massive 29.8 percent circulation drop over the same period.
    As celebrity magazines continue to take their toll on the women's lifestyle sector, publishers will be forced to add star quality to their own product.
    However, celebrity has its own value system and, in the UK at least, the drive down-market from the ''A'' list to the ''B'' list of minor celebrity features is a sign that demand for stars is already outpacing supply. 
   The question is whether the economics of the women's lifestyle sector can support the checks that need to be signed to guarantee circulation-boosting celebrity features.    

April 20, 2001 © 2001 Media Life

-Simon Bond covers European media for Media Life, writing from outside of London.

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