Media Spotlight: The Face and J17 pay for losing touch with readers.

Falling circulations meant the two magazines were not viable, Emma Barns writes.

It's the end of an era. This week all have been lamenting Emap's decision to suspend its iconic title The Face and close the teen magazine J17. Despite the strength of feeling toward these titles, they are closing down because hardly anybody is buying them.

The reason cited by Emap for ending J17's 21-year life and suspending The Face is that, in a changing world, the relevance of these magazines has declined, something reflected by their falling sales. The official line is that all options to make J17 a viable proposition on newsstands have failed and, despite assurances that Emap will be exploring opportunities to radically reinvent or sell The Face, it looks likely that it will meet the same fate.

Certainly, neither magazine has been performing well and the figures speak for themselves: UK sales of The Face are down to 24,556 copies a month when, at its height, in the early 80s, its sales were nudging 100,000.

Sales of J17 have also been dwindling with a 6 per cent fall in circulation this year. In a recently ungifted issue, designed to test the pull of the editorial, sales are said to have dipped to 65,000 (average sale was 134,650).

Originally, both titles were groundbreaking. The Face was launched in 1980 by Nick Logan out of his small publishing house, Wagadon, and marked the first style-led publication, serving to define a decade of fashion, music and popular culture. Just Seventeen, too, opened up a whole new market, launching the unexplored teenage sector on newsstands. But unique positions haven't guaranteed them success.

Peter Howarth, the former editor of Esquire, sees Emap's acquisition of The Face from Wagadon as the beginning of the end for the magazine.