The well has dried up dry Juicy, a monthly magazine for young women published by local media house Mladá fronta. The December 2010 issue marks the end of its five-year print run.
“It is true this is our last issue, but it’s not as bad as it seems. We will start working on a new project,” said Klára Horáková, editor-in-chief of the magazine, declining to give more details about the media house’s future plans.
Juicy began its run on the Czech market in December 2005 and had a readership of 108,000 people per issue in the second and third quarter of 2010, according to Mediaprojekt. ‘It is true. This is our last issue’
Among Czech magazines for women, it held the seventh place after Glanc, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Joy, Marianne and Moje psychologie. The closing of Juicy comes one month after the shutdown of another one of Mladá fronta’s women’s title, MyLife.
The word on the street is that the recent closures plus the change in periodicity of the media and marketing business-to-business (B2B) weekly Strategie into a monthly are tied to changes in Mladá fronta’s management that occurred this summer.
Karel Polcar, former commercial director with the media house Ringier, was appointed Mladá fronta’s new general manager in May 2010. He was joined by strategy specialist Silvia Lepiarzyk. Polcar took over the publishing house from Markéta Nováková, who went on maternity leave but remained the president of the board.
Shift in focus
Sources in the media market say it is likely the new management did an audit of the titles in the portfolio and decided to close down everything that was below a certain profitability level. The long-term goal of Mladá fronta is to focus more on its online activities.
This year the media house became the country’s fifth-largest online information publisher after Seznam.cz, Mafra, Centrum.cz and TV Nova thanks to the purchase of the Brno, South Moravia-based media house CPress and its online title portfolio.
Mladá fronta is not related to the daily newspaper Mladá fronta Dnes, which is published by Mafra.
