Families Slow To Get The Mail The New Post Is Delivering

THE SUNDAY AGE

Saturday August 24, 1996

Geoff Strong

IT WAS always the bloke's barbershop magazine - busty women on the cover and inside, off-beat stories about boxers or someone who built a garage out of beer cans. `Australasian Post', the country's oldest magazine, also used to be one of its biggest sellers.

That was in the innocent early 1960s when illustrated articles about whether attractive women should wear skimpy bikinis on our beaches pushed its sales to more than 330,000 copies a week. Now it's a different story.

In 1993, the `Post's' finances were in the red and circulation was just above 120,000. Management decided on a relaunch. Mr Graeme Johnstone, a long-time newspaper columnist, was brought in as editor and the last vestiges of girlieness abandoned.

It became a family magazine - mothers and babies on the cover and good-news stories of teenagers overcoming serious illness. As if to prove the publishing adage that good news doesn't sell, circulation is now just over 70,000.

Mr Johnstone is determined: that is as far as it will fall.

He believes that part of the decline is the loss of the older- bloke readers and the failure to get across to the new target market - the 35-plus age group whose children are growing up and might have some spare money to spend.

``I was given the opportunity to make the magazine into what I believed would work best and I don't regret the path we have taken," he said. ``The result is that we are now more efficient and, even though the circulation is lower, we are back in the black."

The `Post's' new format has a heavy emphasis on bushwalking and places to go on budget holidays.

Mr Johnstone hopes that a new, one-hour `Australasian Post' radio program broadcast on country radio stations will improve the magazine's profile.

Originally part of the `Argus' newspaper group, the magazine was launched in 1864 as a weekly digest of news for country people and was called `The Australasian'. Curiously, the first story in the first issue was about a diet.

Bikini girls were put on the cover in the 1950s and sales began to climb.

Can a magazine like the `Post' survive? The head of media studies at La Trobe University, Dr Sue Turnbull, has her doubts.

``I think the changes to the `Post' reflect the anxieties and identity problems being felt by older men around Australia.

While the magazine has an identity problem so do many men.

``They can't quite be sensitive new-age guys but they don't identify with the totally unreconstructed blokes who read `Picture' and `People'. With its small circulation, I think it will have great trouble surviving the changes that wil hit print media in the next 10 years."

Mr Michael Cathcart, a lecturer in Australian Studies at Melbourne University, disagrees. He believes the new formula of giving readers escapist looks at country life and travel destinations will appeal to city dwellers with a hankering to get out.

``Australians might live in cities but they don't necessarily see city life as the ideal. They might have dreams of going to live in the bush or maybe just taking a four-wheel drive holiday . . . fantasies about the bush are still big.``