Merger Results in a Re-Cycled Magazine

Motorcycle buffs will have one less magazine to read come November.

A French media giant says it will merge one of its motorcycle magazines--Cycle--into the other, Cycle World, after the October issues.

It’s a setback for Hachette Magazines Inc., which bought the magazines in 1988 in a bid to enter the U.S. publishing market in a big way. Among the 16 magazines included in that $712-million purchase were Woman’s Day, Road & Track and Car and Driver.

It’s not unusual for magazines to bite the dust lately. They’ve been disappearing at a rapid clip, the victims of high costs and ad revenues pinched by the recession. Among the victims: Egg, Fame, Wig Wag, 7 Days and New England Monthly.

What’s more, most motorcycle magazines’ circulation has been dropping, too, says a publishing expert.

“More than anything else, it’s the competition, the sheer number of titles,” said E. Daniel Capell, who publishes the industry newsletter Capell’s Circulation Report. “There must be a dozen motorcycle magazines out there.”

Cycle, the larger of the two magazines, had a certified monthly circulation of 331,000 last year, about the same as the year before. Cycle World’s circulation was up about 3% to 253,000. Both magazines, which are published in Newport Beach, are far bigger than their nearest competitor, Motorcyclist. That magazine is published in Los Angeles for an audience that averages about 215,000 a month. The merged magazine’s circulation, however, is expected to drop rapidly.

Ad revenues for both Cycle and Cycle World have been flat in the past year. And magazines like these must also compete for consumers’ leisure time with a broad array of diversions, such as VCRs, cable TV and computer games.

So Hachette Magazines, the New York-based subsidiary of the French media conglomerate Hachette S.A., says it decided to beef up both magazines by combining them.

Cycle World, for instance, covers both street motorcycles and off-road bikes, the only U.S. magazine--says Hachette--to do so. Cycle covers only street motorcycles but claims to be the technical authority on these machines.

“We looked at where we wanted to be in the marketplace, and then we looked at ways to strengthen our position,” said Larry Little, vice president and publisher of both magazines. “And we saw very few opportunities, other than combining the two magazines.”

Both magazines--which brought in nearly $12 million in revenues last year--were once competitors. They came under the same roof in 1985, when CBS, which published Cycle World, bought 41-year-old Cycle with a number of other magazines. Cycle World has been published in Orange County since it began in 1962. Both cost $2.50 at the newsstand.

CBS sold all its magazines to yet another company, which in turn sold them to Hachette in 1988. Hachette is France’s largest media concern, a $6-billion media empire based in Paris that publishes a raft of magazines and newspapers. It entered the U.S. publishing market in 1985 with the U.S. edition of the chic fashion magazine Elle.

Hachette says it has no plans to combine some of its other magazines with similar topics, such as Road & Track and Car and Driver, both based in Orange County, or Popular Photography and American Photography.

The merger is going to hurt: A couple of the 15 editorial staff members at the magazines will lose their jobs. Even worse, the magazines expect to lose as many as 250,000 subscribers, some of whom subscribe to both.

One of those is Jim Sharpe, who runs South Coast Honda in Santa Ana. Sharpe says he won’t miss getting two magazines.

“They tend to be pretty similar anyway,” he said, “and Motorcyclist resembles both of them. They all test the same bikes in the same issues.”