Media Forum: Will lads' magazines have to grow up?

The next ABC figures may provide a wake-up call for men's monthlies. Are they likely to listen, Alasdair Reid asks.

Nobody is likely to dispute Dennis Publishing's assessment of the men's monthly magazine it has just closed. Jack, it announced in the obituary notice, 'was an excellent, innovative and clever product'. Yes, quite.

But perhaps the really stupid thing was to believe it had a fighting chance of taking on the new generation of male fantasy mags. In that particular contest, the likes of FHM and Maxim are absolutely bound to come first.

Judging by the personal services ads in the leading titles (sex chatlines, escort girls, hydroponic grow-your-own-skunk systems, replica guns, lubricated rubber vaginas, hair-restoration kits and, almost inevitably, treatments for short-sightedness), you get the feeling that the readership is not entirely sophisticated.

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