About More!

More!

More! was a British women's fashion and lifestyle magazine published in London, in England, from 1988 until 2013. Published first by Emap and later by Bauer Media, as Bauer London Lifestyle, it spent most of its life as a fortnightly title before becoming a weekly in September 2007. Over a twenty-five-year run it moved from a magazine for older teenage girls to a glossy celebrity, fashion and lifestyle weekly for young women, published on Tuesdays, before Bauer announced on 22 April 2013 that publication would cease with the issue of 23 April 2013 because challenging economic conditions had made the title no longer viable.

The magazine's history captures a wider story in British women's publishing: the shift from monthly and fortnightly glossies bought for fashion and relationship advice towards fast-turnaround weekly celebrity titles, and then the pressure placed on all of those titles by free online celebrity news, social media and a prolonged advertising downturn after the financial crisis of the late 2000s.

Launch in 1988 and the original audience

More! was launched in 1988 by Emap, aimed at older teenage girls. That positioning placed it above the younger teen titles in reading age but below the established women's monthlies, at a point when publishers were segmenting the young women's market ever more finely by age and life stage. A reader could progress from early-teen titles to More! and then on to monthlies aimed at women in their twenties and thirties, and advertisers could buy access to that progression.

London was the magazine's base throughout its life, as it was for most national British consumer magazines of the period. Editorial, fashion and celebrity coverage were produced in the capital, close to the public relations firms, fashion retailers, broadcasters and record and film companies whose products and personalities filled its pages. The batch record for More! correctly places it in London, England.

What the magazine contained

More! combined celebrity news and interviews, high-street fashion and sex and relationship advice. The emphasis on high-street fashion, rather than designer fashion, was central to its identity. Its readers were shown clothes they could plausibly buy on their own high street or, later, from the retailers whose ranges it featured, styled and priced for young women rather than presented as unattainable editorial fantasy.

The celebrity element worked in the same accessible register. Interviews and news stories treated famous women in television, pop music and reality and soap programming as figures whose clothes, relationships and everyday choices could be copied, judged or debated by readers of a similar age. Alongside fashion and celebrity, the magazine's frank sex tips and relationship features gave it a cheeky, irreverent tone that its final publisher later singled out for praise, describing a sense of fun, cheekiness and irreverence that would be missed.

The 2002 relaunch as a young women's lifestyle title

In 2002 More! was relaunched as a lifestyle magazine for young women, rather than for older teenagers. The change acknowledged that its readers had grown up with it and that the commercial value lay with women in their late teens and twenties who had their own spending on clothes, beauty, going out and holidays. Later descriptions of the title defined its core audience more precisely as women aged eighteen to twenty-five.

Relaunches of this kind were a recurring feature of the British women's market. A title's name and newsstand recognition were valuable even when its original audience definition had dated, so publishers repeatedly repositioned familiar brands for the next life stage of the same readers. More! followed that pattern, retaining its exclamation-marked name and its accessible tone while broadening its lifestyle coverage beyond its teenage beginnings.

Frequency changes: monthly, fortnightly and weekly

The magazine's frequency changed repeatedly as the market changed around it. It was originally a monthly, moved to fortnightly publication in 2005, and then became a weekly in September 2007. That final move to weekly publication was made to compete with Look, the weekly fashion title then making an impact with a similar promise of fast, affordable fashion and celebrity coverage.

Going weekly was both an opportunity and a risk. A weekly title could react to celebrity news and fashion drops within days rather than weeks, and it gave advertisers more frequent access to readers. It also multiplied production costs and demanded a much faster editorial operation, and it exposed the title directly to comparison with the big celebrity weeklies. More! remained weekly for the rest of its life, published on Tuesdays.

Circulation and the late-2000s revival

Circulation figures published by the Audit Bureau of Circulations trace both the title's scale and its volatility. In the late 1990s More! was selling around 300,000 copies a period as a fortnightly, with an average of 300,194 recorded for July to December 1999. After its move to weekly publication it suffered a sharp fall, recording about 200,033 copies in the second half of 2007, down heavily year on year.

A substantial redesign followed. In 2008 Bauer relaunched the magazine with a larger format, in line with its other weekly titles such as Bella, Closer and Grazia, with more features and more pages. The relaunch worked in the short term. ABC figures reported in August 2009 showed year-on-year growth of 17.3 per cent, which made More! at that point the fastest-growing glossy celebrity weekly in the United Kingdom. For July to December 2010 its average net circulation was 188,265, before falling to 170,033 in January to June 2011, a drop of 9.7 per cent that foreshadowed the end.

Editors, awards and brand extensions

The magazine's later editors included Lisa Smosarski, who left to become editor of the new ShortList Media title Stylist, and Chantelle Horton, previously the deputy editor, who succeeded her and was editor at the time of closure. Bauer's chief executive Paul Keenan publicly thanked Horton and her team when the closure was announced, noting that many people who had worked on More! over its twenty-five years had gone on to build significant careers elsewhere in media.

More! also extended beyond the printed page. It launched its own annual fashion awards in 2004, a natural extension for a title whose authority rested on judging high-street fashion. In 2009 it sponsored the MTV showing of The City, the reality television series, aligning the magazine brand with a programme watched by the same young female audience it sought in print. It maintained an associated website alongside the magazine, which closed at the same time as the print title in 2013.

Ownership: from Emap to Bauer

More! spent most of its life as an Emap title. In February 2008 the German publisher Bauer acquired Emap's consumer magazine arm, a deal that transformed Bauer from a major British publisher into the country's largest consumer magazine publisher by market share, with more than eighty titles. More! thus became a Bauer title for its final five years, sitting in a portfolio of women's weeklies and glossies that included Bella, Closer and Grazia.

That portfolio context mattered at the end. Bauer owned several titles competing for similar readers and advertisers, and in a shrinking market the case for keeping every overlapping brand weakened. The separate American magazine also called More, published by Meredith Corporation in the United States, was a different publication and was unaffected by the British closure.

Closure in April 2013

On 22 April 2013 Bauer Media Group announced that it would cease publication of More! magazine and its website. The final issue was the one published on Tuesday 23 April 2013. Bauer said that the title had constantly evolved to remain relevant to its audience, but that continuing challenging economic conditions meant the product was no longer viable, and that the decision to suspend publication had been made with effect from that week's issue.

The closure was framed by the publisher as suspension, with consultation with staff reported at the time, but the magazine did not return. Its end came in a period when British women's weeklies and glossies were contracting rapidly under the combined pressure of falling print advertising, cover-price competition and free digital alternatives that could deliver celebrity news and fashion imagery instantly and at no cost to the reader.

Place in British women's magazine history

More! is remembered as a durable example of the British young women's glossy at its most commercial: fashion-led but price-conscious, celebrity-driven but intimate in tone, and frank about sex and relationships in a way that had become expected by its generation of readers. Its progression from teenage monthly to young women's weekly mirrors the ageing of the audience it was created for and the acceleration of the celebrity news cycle it had to serve.

Its twenty-five years, from 1988 to 2013, also bracket a complete era in British magazine publishing, from the late-1980s expansion of segmented consumer titles, through the celebrity-weekly boom of the 2000s, to the closures of the early 2010s. For former readers its name evokes a particular newsstand moment, and for media historians its circulation arc, its relaunches and its eventual closure under Bauer provide a compact, well-documented case study of how that market rose and contracted.