Something New In Vogue As Mags Taste Healthy Success

The Sunday Age

Sunday August 27, 2006

JOHN ELDER

Magazines for diabetics and for barbershop blokes are leading the way, writes John Elder.

GLOSSY bibles such as Home Beautiful and Vogue Entertaining are apparently losing readers like dead petals off a flower arrangement - suggesting the lifestyle magazine as a species is on the decline. But it depends on what kind of lifestyle you're talking about. The diabetic scene, for example, is hot.

Diabetic Living, published every two months, sells for about $8, is tasting sweet and astounding success - with 47,500 sales per issue and healthy advertising revenue. With only four issues under the belt, Diabetic Living has been in profit from day one - a veritable miracle in magazine publishing - and on projected figures is expected over time to leave big-noters such as The Bulletin in the shade.

Says Diabetic Living's editor in chief Julie Zaetta: "Unfortunately, we see diabetes as an extraordinary growth area. We actually started off as a quarterly, but the response to the first issue was so terrific we immediately went bi-monthly."

According to a survey by Diabetes Australia, there are 600,000 Australians diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, another 600,000 who have the disease and don't know it, 2.5 million people with pre-diabetes conditions - while one in four adult Australians has something wrong with their glucose metabolism.

Says Zaetta: "The idea of a lifestyle magazine came from America - where there'd been a huge demand for diabetic recipes. Instead of just a recipe magazine, we decided to come up with something more broadly based. We've got a piece about your legal rights in the workplace. There's a fabulous story about a woman who saved $25,000 in medical costs by following an exercise program. We give people a light at the end of the tunnel. Because there's lots you can do to make a great life despite having the disease."

Diabetic Living isn't the only diabetes magazine in the country - it's not even the biggest-selling one. Pat Phillips, director of the endocrine unit at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Adelaide, edits Conquest, a quarterly that has a more medical focus. It also enjoys more than 170,000 subscribers.

Says Dr Phillips: "It's not a lifestyle magazine but there are aspects of lifestyle in it. We've got one or two recipes but the focus is on medical research and new developments. And how people can deal with some of the problems they're having. The surveys suggest two to three people read each copy - and that they read it like a book, from cover to cover."

Subscription to Conquest is automatic with membership of Diabetes Australia, the Canberra-based advocacy and research organisation for people suffering the disease. Membership had grown 10,000 over the past two years.

"In Australia, someone new is diagnosed with diabetes every 10 minutes. That's about 60,000 people a year," says Dr Phillips.