My Greatest Mistake: Simon Geller, editor, 'Men's Health'
'We ditched the knitting pattern and hoped we could survive the dip in readership'
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Your support makes all the difference.It's never far from my thoughts. It's to do with a magazine I used to edit called Me. I had been at IPC for years and I'd edited the teenage title Mizz there. I was in line for an editorship of a women's weekly called Me. It was in terrible trouble in terms of news-stand sales. It had 50 full-time staff, no freelancers and a multimillion-pound budget, and my big mistake was, quite simply, that I didn't have a clear picture of who the reader was.
Every week, there was a knitting pattern in the centre pages; it was our unique selling-point and was very expensive to produce. Old ladies bought Me just for the pattern and would throw the rest of the magazine away.
So, the new editor would have to have a clear idea of who the reader was. If you don't have that, you can't tell anyone else, "This is who the new reader is; this is what she wants to read." And you can't do the front cover. Every week, I used to dread having to make the front-cover decision, because – hang on – who's it for?
We ditched the pattern and hoped that the magazine could survive the dip in readership.
It was a big, big mistake to take over editing a magazine without having a crystal-clear idea of who I thought was going to be reading it. The magazine folded after 18 months, and those 50 people were made redundant – and just before Christmas, too. It might have happened to whoever edited it – but we'll never know.
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