Gordon's Republic

Gordon Macmillan

Time Out boss Tony Elliott has joined that growing band of ranters who like to blame the BBC for all of their woes. It is 2008 and Time Out sells less than 80,000 copies and it is struggling to face the digital future. Of course it must be the BBC's fault.

Elliott might have built a global cottage business out of Time Out, but he has missed several boats in pushing the business forward to ensure its survival in a digital and freesheet world. It is in danger of going the way of dinosaurs.

The magazine now faces one of the most perilous times in its history as a magazine as its main sources of revenue, namely cover price and a rapidly deteriorating advertising market, fall away. Must be the BBC's fault.

The magazine's circulation is down to just over 76,000 copies a fall of 12.5% year on year. That's a hefty fall, but you can understand why. It is a magazine in a city of 7m plus people that very few buy. That problem will only exacerbate.

In an interview with the Guardian today Tony Elliott says "you've got a situation in two to three years where the main role that we play is online ... the question is what shape does the print magazine take?"

In two or three years? That's terribly optimistic in my view. Time Out should already be a free magazine, but with the London freesheets Thelondonpaper and London Lite on the streets and several free magazines (Sport and Shortlist) it is a tough and crowded market with little ad revenue to go around.

It seems that the thinking the magazine is doing now should have been done two years ago not looking two years down the line. Must be the BBC's fault.

Time Out should also already have a great website. It should be the first and only stop for listings in London or elsewhere in the UK. It could have owned free listings across the UK and built up a powerful website. But it hasn't and there are many other places to go and find that information. If Time Out wants to get there now it will have to hustle and muscle to do so and that will be expensive. Time Out doesn't have deep pockets, Elliott is talking about partners, but in a climate where cash is fast drying up they will be hard to find. Must be the BBC's fault.

And that brings us onto the BBC. Elliott goes on in the Guardian interview to vent about BBC Worldwide's acquisition of Lonely Planet, which hits Time Out's own travel guides. He desperately wants to see BBC Worldwide broken up to help boost his business and he tells the paper he thinks this will happen while at the same time saying "I think the BBC is fantastic".

However, the piece in the Guardian goes on to reveal that Some within the BBC believe Elliott's anger is all down to the fact that Time Out and the BBC for several years had talks about making Time Out's listings available to the corporation.

The deal never happened, which is no surprise as Elliott is very hands on and wants to keep control of his business. This can work for him, but it can also work against him as it seems to have done in failing to cut a deal with the BBC.

"BBC Worldwide were not really prepared to entertain, let's call it a joint venture, of any description. Really what they wanted, in the two or three times we talked about it seriously, was to own the business and I was not interested in selling the business. We just never got anywhere and then they went off and bought Lonely Planet, which pissed us off to say the least."

So when he calls for the BBC to be broken up it seems to me that Elliott is a sore loser with an axe to grind. He should have signed the deal when he had the chance.

I for one hope BBC Worldwide is not broken up. I think Lonely Planet was a perfectly legitimate service. It is a business that could work commercially really well for the BBC and the people who use it.

It would be great to see a brand like Time Out survive, but if it fails to innovate it has no right to do so and that is nothing to do with the BBC.

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