Fallouts in family and teen circles in Britain

I'm as fascinated as the next person by the cover line "Crazy lover tried to hack off my head" but it's not as comforting as a perfectly prepared pudding, is it?

Kira Cochrane of the Guardian thus bids goodbye to the British version of Family Circle magazine, aimed at that endangered species, the homemaker.

In recent years...Family Circle has been challenged by a huge group of low-priced women's weekly titles - Heat, Closer, Now, New etc, etc, on and on- all of which shriek their hunger for the biggest audience from their fluorescent covers. Family Circle has tried, valiantly, to keep up. There have been attempts to revamp the title, but the difficulty, it seems, is how to compete without losing the magazine's raison-d'être. Reading the latest issue, the answer seems to have been to try to promote their real-life stories, but with a much softer touch than their rivals.

For instance, this month's most startling "real-life reads!", as plugged on Family Circle's cover, are "Why my ex cooks dinner for me & my new man!" and "Holiday health horror!" All well and good, until you compare them with the other weeklies' cover lines. "Toby's wife BARBECUED him and fed him to the tigers," screams Reveal. Love It! tantalises with "My boob exploded [while] breastfeeding," and, by a pinch, Pick Me Up romps home with the cover line of the week. "A beast ate my baby," it screams, before adding darkly, "but I got the blame."

As for cover stars, while the weeklies offer the usual, phenomenally popular mix of Paris-Posh-Britney-Brangelina, Family Circle features ... a peach cheesecake. An "amazing peach cheesecake - perfect for the summer!", but a peach cheesecake none the less.

* * *

The teenage magazine market is in freefall everywhere, apparently. Emap has suspended Sneak magazine after four years because British teenagers are turning to the internet and mobile phones to get their fix of celebrity gossip."The closure comes just six months after Emap closed one of the UK's talismanic teenage titles, Smash Hits, after nearly 30 years, citing the same reason - the rise of digital media," said the Guardian.

Although Sneak's circulation peaked in the second half of 2003, at 104,174, sales have been in decline ever since, falling most recently to just 74,299.

Mark Frith, editor of Emap's Heat magazine and a former editor of Smash Hits, said the music mag had been caught out by the rise of digital media.

"Today's teens want faster, deeper information about music and can now satisfy their hunger by accessing information on a whole range of new platforms including TV, the internet and mobile," he said.

In 2004, Emap closed its teen stalwart J-17, formally Just Seventeen, after losing one-third of its readers, and in 2005, Hachette's Elle Girl, the spin-off from monthly glossy Elle, was suspended.