What is TEARAWAY?
TEARAWAY is the longest-running, most widely-read general-interest youth magazine in New Zealand
It is aimed at young people aged 13 to 19, with a secondary readership aged up to 24 – although many adults also read it.
It’s a lifestyle publication – in other words, it aims to cover a wide range of subjects of likely interest to its target readership.
Circulation varies a little from year to year, but is usually around 65,000 copies
During term-time, the main distribution is through secondary schools. During the school holidays, most copies go out through fast food outlets. Some are also distributed through public libraries and some ‘street’ outlets.
Although it is free everywhere else, schools are charged . It costs a huge amount to produce each issue. TEARAWAY sees schools as partners – the magazine provides a special service to teachers, providing ‘real-life’ material that’s very useful in the classroom, or just to encourage reading. In return, schools are asked to support the magazine financially.
Costs, and revenue sourcesCosts
• Printing (the biggest single cost
• Distribution (the magazines have to be delivered around the country within a few days of
printing). We use a courier company
• Wages. People don’t come cheaply!
• Phone and internet charges (the sales and editorial teams spend a lot of time on toll calls)
• Travel (especially the sales team moving around the country seeing clients)
Revenue
There are two main sources of revenue:
• Advertising and sponsorship. They are the ‘biggies’
• School subscriptions for bulk copies. While this is a much smaller figure, it is an essential
second income source for the magazine
The TEARAWAY philosophy
The name: TEARAWAY
The strapline: The Voice of New Zealand Youth
The mission statement: To inform, enrich, enthuse and empower young people; to encourage them to live full, productive, enjoyable lives, with respect and care for themselves, and others.
Our philospophy: • Taking youth seriously
• Speaking to the Head and Heart, not just Hormones
… CONNECTING at a very personal level
Our approach:
• The Voice of New Zealand Youth – their issues, their writing
• Advice/guidance: not from ‘adult to kid’, but as from an ‘older sibling’
• Design that speaks their visual language
• Staying ahead of the play
How it startedBack in 1986, John Francis was working as a newspaper journalist at the Wanganui Chronicle. He saw that there was no magazine in New Zealand – in fact, really no popular medium at all – that took young people seriously. There were fashion mags, music mags – but nothing that catered for the ‘whole person’.
So, the idea was born, to create a publication that could be fun to read, but have more depth to it than just consumer stuff.
These were the first stages:
1. A pilot edition was created. Black and white only, most of the material just mocked-up (not ‘real’ stories), but giving the flavour of what was intended
2. John took the pilot to a handful of schools, gave copies to classes of students, and asked for their feedback. He also did the same thing with advertising agencies. The word? Yes, there was a real need for something like this
3. John kept doing the rounds of the advertising agencies, until he had sold enough advertising to print the first (small, 24 pages!) edition. (He’d been given good advice from a more experienced publisher – “don’t publish ‘til you’ve got the money to pay for it”)
4. A copy of the pilot, with a covering letter, was sent to all secondary schools in New Zealand, explaining that free copies of the new magazine would be coming their way soon.
5. As a result of this feedback, modifications were made to the first proper edition. Biggest was to the name. The pilot was called ‘Newsbusters’ (because this was around the time when the film ‘Ghostbusters’ came out.) Students laughed at it, it was too cheesy. it had to go. So the name TEARAWAY was born
6. The first edition (and for the first year), the magazine was black and white (mono) with one extra (spot) colour on some pages
7. The magazine was an instant hit – with students and schools. Getting the advertising needed to pay for it however, was not so easy! For the first year or so there were only six issues a year. Even so, the fourth issue was cancelled due to lack of ad revenue.
Readership, and how it’s measured
Research, and statistics are very important to us. They:
• enable us to see how we are going alongside other youth titles
• enable us to analyse the age-groups of our readers, and get an idea of their lifestyles and
other interests
• give us important data that we can pass on to our advertisers, so they can have confidence
that we are reaching the right people for them
