THE BATTLE FOR SUNDAYS: AN ACE MOVE?
The Nation's new Ace magazine supplement debuted today. The 32-page colour glossy publication is slightly smaller than A4 in size, in keeping with the 'Berliner' size The Nation has adopted.
Before I talk about Ace it's worrying how thin The Nation is. The news, sport and classified sections total just 20 pages, and a fair amount of the copy, including today's lead, is agency generated.
As for Ace, I get the feeling it's trying to be too many things. It's trying to be a serious, hip, lifestyle magazine - and I don't think it really succeeds at being any of these. Ace takes some decent stories from the Asia News Network, of which Nation Multimedia Group is a part, and these are good but poorly used. There's a great photo essay about the Dashain Festival in Kathmandu, yet it's restricted to the centre double pages. That could easily have been used over four or six pages and been really eye-catching.
Advertising inside Ace is poor which is to be expected from a new venture; advertisers will wait and see how it develops.
The Nation has made so many changes to its Sunday offering this year that it cannot afford for Ace to fail. Indeed the cover says Ace will be appearing "every Sunday from today" so it has to work. Tuk-Tuk, my kitten, seems to be smitten with Ace anyway.
2 comments:
dear bangkok bugle, the ace cover story on "the idea farmers" did not make sense. it was badly written (or edited). one of the problems with ace and the nation is the quality of writing. rumour in the nation is more early retirement scheme in november (at the moment it is just rumour).
Insider, thanks as always for your contributions.
To be frank I have not got round to reading most of Ace yet. I did enjoy the photo essay mentioned in the original post and I did read a couple of the other columns.
No disrespect intended to those who worked on it, but it come in very useful for swatting an annoting fly in my condo yesterday afternoon. I do intend to read the rest this evening though.
As for the rumours, that would certainly be sad. I'm guessing things are tough right now and everyone is working to maximum capacity. Something surely must break if resources are trimmed even further?
The subscription promotion with Newsweek really doesn't make business sense to me. When you do the calculations The Nation may only get 7 baht for each copy over the course of one year. That's hardly going to cover printing and distribution let alone anything else.
I can only hope for those concerned the rumours turn out to be just that - rumours.
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