Next Gen News

Apps and an improved website are key to the future of the BBC's TV listings magazine

'Last year we switched from being a Strictly family to being an X Factor family," says Ben Preston, the former newspaper executive who became the editor of Radio Times a year ago. This may not please his superiors at the BBC, which has published a list of the magazine since 1923, but he would quickly note, it does 't get the last word, who looks in the house Preston. "If 've got a 14-year-old and 12-year-old frilly dress then don' t have enough currency, which was before."

When asked to namecheck his favourite shows, however, Preston reels off a list of BBC programmes: Sherlock, Simon Amstell's sitcom Grandma's House and Rev, while he "can't wait" for The Apprentice to return. Perhaps a man who is regarded as one of journalism's nice guys is shrewder than his reputation.

Preston, a former deputy editor at the Times who spent more than 20 years on Fleet Street and was acting editor for a year at the start of the decade, says he is finding time to watch a lot more television since he left newspapers. Preston left Rupert Murdoch's daily for the Independent, where he was the executive editor, in February 2008 after missing out on the Times editorship, which went to James Harding. He left the Times in a hurry, he says, because: "James got the job, I didn't … there's no point in just hanging around. It's his paper and he was going to make of it what he wanted."

Reasonable shape

A year after his appointment, Preston sits in the Radio Times room at the head office of the BBC's magazine arm, surrounded by framed front covers of the title stretching back decades, and declares himself happy with 12 months' work - "We've got the magazine in pretty reasonable shape.". A circulation fall has been arrested, if not reversed, and Preston has assembled a team of writers who, he says, have made the magazine "sing". The television and radio listings are much improved following a redesign, he adds, and his next challenge is to improve the website before turning his attention to developing apps for the Apple iPad.

It also represents a significant problem. Radio Times is the third bestselling TV listings magazine in the country. Only TV choice and that "on television more readers. Name is ?? 1,10 and competitors, including 2 who sell more, valued at only 50p, while newspapers and Internet competition flares up.

"We have to do good listings, but what we also have to do is make the front end of the magazine that much more compelling because we are charging a premium price for it," says Preston. "We've got a smart readership: our readership figures are more upmarket than Harper's Bazaar, more upmarket than Tatler."

There are some signs that the changes Preston has instituted are helping to bolster its sagging circulation. Sales topped 1m in the second half of 2009 â€" which includes the lucrative Christmas period when they traditionally peak.

Yet circulation fell by 2% to 947,201 in the first six months of 2010 compared with the same period last year. In its 1980s heyday, the weekly was regularly achieving sales in excess of 3m. So is 1m the new 3m â€" a floor under which the title should not drop? "It's a very nice figure," he says, "but it's quite hard to keep it going in the summer months. I want the circulation to grow â€" any editor would say exactly the same. But the TV listings market is ferociously competitive. Our last ABCs were down by just under 2% year on year [but] the year before we were down by more than 4%. It may not be where you want to end up but it's certainly progress and I suspect many newspapers would be quite cheerful with figures like that." Nearly 20% of readers are now subscribers, Preston notes, all added in the past three years.

There may be a more serious threat to a title that is almost as old as the BBC, however. Preston says Radio Times is more profitable than ever â€" he won't give a figure but industry sources say its 2009 Christmas issue made profits of around £1.6m. Rivals eye its revenues greedily. Its owner, BBC Worldwide, the corporation's commercial arm, has confirmed it will seek joint venture partners for its magazine division, although the terms have yet to be finalised and Radio Times may be exempt. Preston refers those questions to John Smith, the chief executive of Worldwide, but the constant focus on the BBC's profitable commercial assets could make life uncomfortable.

Internet traffic

In the meantime, growth is likely to come from digital innovation, Preston implies, which will help Radio Times to appeal to a younger audience: the average age of a reader is 54. "If you look at our online traffic we have lots of students because if you've had the Radio Times at home and you go away to college you come to the website. We need some more investment in the website, which I think we are in a position to do. Once you get the website right you are in a position to think about what you do with other platforms." Radio Times launched an app last April, and it briefly made the top 10 of the iTunes chart, but Preston believes it can be vastly improved.

He bought an iPad a few weeks ago, and was impressed by its portability. "They are astonishingly easy to use and if you can find a way of making people pay for it … " The sentence trails off but Preston hardly needs to spell it out: the iPad is a potential "game-changer". He adds: "It's very generous of the Guardian to give me all their content for £2.30 [the Guardian iPhone app is priced at £2.39] and I hasten to add I still buy the paper every day, but I probably find myself using the app more than I use the paper and that's just in two weeks. That's mark one of the iPad. Imagine what it's going to be like in three or four years' time."

He applies a similar approach to the Radio Times. "People are smart and curious people," he says. "They want to read about the world, and they want to filter for it. It 's very much that we' re trying to do as a magazine."