This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Media Top Stories
Observer Music Monthly to close
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 11 November 2009
The Observer Music Monthly supplement, possibly the music industry’s favourite music magazine, is to close as a result of a raft of changes being introduced by the struggling Sunday newspaper. The demise of the OMM, long expected in media circles, was confirmed yesterday as Observer management announced a major revamp of their paper, a bid to save the entire title, which some expected to close altogether when its owners Guardian Media Group undertook a review of its operations in September.
As part of the revamp The Observer will shrink back to a four section newspaper, with a main section, a sports supplement, an expanded Review supplement and the customary glossy magazine. Business and media news will lose its own supplement and be merged into the main paper, while the travel supplement will be incorporated into the magazine.
But for music fans it is the abolition of three of the four monthly magazines that the Observer publishes which is of most interest. The four monthly titles constituted an extra supplement, with each of the four magazines appearing on a different week of the month. The sport, music and women’s monthlies will go, with just the Observer Food Monthly remaining, the average Observer reader preferring to stuff their face with overpriced delicacies than do anything sporty, buy a new CD or, erm, be a woman.
Confirming the changes and cut backs, Observer editor John Mulholland told reporters: “Like all newspapers, we had to make changes both to the way we work and to the products we publish. It has been a difficult few months for staff while we have worked through these changes as part of Guardian News & Media’s publishing review, and some hard decisions had to be taken given the extremely challenging economic environment for newspapers”.
As expected, some of the Observer’s operations will be merged with those of The Guardian – the two sister titles have, until now, been autonomous. However there won’t, as some predicted, be a total merger of operations, which would have basically made The Observer the Sunday Guardian; a core Observer-specific editorial team will remain. It’s not clear how many job losses will occur as a result of the cut backs, though a voluntary redundancy scheme has been announced.
The Observer Music Monthly was launched in 2003 and was edited by Caspar Llewellyn Smith from the word go. Probably aimed at those slightly older music fans who are keen to be in with the latest new music but who don’t consume other music media, it was especially popular with music business types, especially the slightly older ones who were keen to be in with the latest new music but who don’t consume other music media. The title will certainly be missed if the response to CMU announcement of OMM’s closure on Twitter last night is anything to go by.
Whether the latest revamp will be enough to rescue The Observer remains to be seen. There has been a slow move at a number of national newspapers to merge the operations of daily and Sunday editions, and it seems likely that will continue at most newspaper firms until the only difference between the daily and Sunday titles is their, well, title.
