KEY POINTS:
ACP Magazines' back-to-the-future chief executive Paul Dykzeul isn't happy with the latest circulation and readership results that show a flat result across the sector.
Women's magazine titles across different publishers were hit in surveys by the Audit Bureau of Circulation and Nielsen Media Research for the year to December 31.
At ACP, the weekly Woman's Day was down 9 per cent or 11,200 copies. Cleo was down 7 per cent and Australian Women's Weekly down 5 per cent.
Dykzeul says no publisher would be happy with the results but he is confident they can be turned around.
He says the surveys show the challenges facing the entire magazine sector and not just ACP.
Surveys regularly go down and up - and there is a low cost of entry into the market for new magazines, so new competition can make results more volatile.
But they are a sobering start for Dykzeul, who returned to ACP New Zealand recently after 11 years in senior magazine publishing roles in Australia. When he left in 1996 Dykzeul had a high profile, an almost larger-than-life image as Mr Magazines. He was blunt, spoke his mind and was passionate about the publishing business.
Dykzeul was promoted to run international operations for ACP out of Singapore then moved to Murdoch Magazines (Marie Claire) including responsibility for book publishing.
Then he joined Kerry Stokes' Pacific Magazines, where he was publisher of homemaker and monthly publications responsible for New Zealand and international licensing portfolios.
A former colleague says Dykzeul has softened since his days running ACP New Zealand from 1991 to 1996.
The company has ended an unsettled period including six-month gap since the resignation of Dykzeul's predecessor, Heith Mackay-Cruise, who came from a background in distribution.
An ACP career executive, Mackay-Cruise left after new owners restructured the Australian operations, removing a coveted post in Australia.
Last year the Packer Family, which has been at the heart of the company for years through PBL Media, sold 75 per cent of PBL to private-equity company CVC Asia Pacific.
Now James Packer is selling half of the remaining 25 per cent to Lachlan Murdoch under a privatisation deal.
The company is much bigger than when Dykzeul left but, like all traditional-media magazines, faces a challenge due to revolution of new media.
New CVC management - including ACP Magazines chief executive Scott Lorson, a former boss of Packer's Ticketek and an action man, according to Dykzeul - have been ringing in changes.
They hired Dykzeul from his role as head of publishing at Pacific Magazines.
"They would not have done that if they wanted the status quo in New Zealand," Dykzeul said.
"They want to change the business.
"My view is that it has lost a bit of its publishing culture where risk-taking is considered to be a good thing and you are prepared to try new things."
Over the past few years ACP New Zealand had become a bit conservative, Dykzeul said.
It was a reasonable assumption that if anything new was coming out of magazines it was not coming out of ACP.
"We have some great people but I don't believe ACP has done too much of the innovations that have been developed in the independent sector."
These included NZ Life and Leisure, recently bought out by Fairfax and Jones Publishing (Dish), Dykzeul said.
"My job is to revitalise the business. I want this company to be a learning culture, a publishing culture.
"I can't introduce any better financial analysis.
"You can improve a business by cutting costs, but I think they have done a good job by cost reduction."
There had been a tendency to homogenise titles, he said.
"But we can do better things from a publishing perspective."
