Hello and welcome to my easy to understand guide to the big issue and the magazine industry. This video is relevant to you if you are studying the EDUCAS A-level media studies exam spec and if your school is teaching the big issue as one of the optional set texts for the component two exam for the magazine section. Not all schools will study the big issue but if you do then you are going to need to know everything there is to know about industry.
The Big Issue Limited is a small independent company, it's not part of a big media conglomerate and they work with Dennis which is a publications company in order to publish the magazine and it is done in a not-for-profit basis. This means that they are not trying to earn a lot of money to give to shareholders or stakeholders or CEOs of the company. The goal of The Big Issue is to take all of the money that they make and plough it back in to helping people who are living on the streets, people who are living in poverty and in particular people who are homeless. The major difference between The Big Issue and a lot of other magazines is the way it is distributed to customers.
Most magazines people go into shops and are able to buy, you know, direct through places like Asda and WH Smith. The Big Issue is sold on the street by people that they call vendors. Now vendors are individual people, most of whom are homeless in some way.
And what they can do is if you are homeless, you can approach the big issue to become a vendor. You can pay them £1.50 per magazine that you want to purchase and then sell on. So those vendors purchase the magazines at a cheaper cost and then they are able to then sell them to customers on the street for £3 per issue.
So they make a profit on the magazines that they sell. Vendors are then free to use that money to supply magazines. support themselves, you know, to buy themselves food, to get themselves clothes, etc. So it is a way of giving back to the community and ensuring that people who are living in poverty, people who do not have housing, have a way of making money that is legal. When the Big Issue Limited wanted to set up this idea of the Big Issue magazine, they needed funding.
It was quite a niche idea, it was quite a risky idea, and it's not like they had a load of investors, you know, big companies wanting to invest in them. They're not part of a bigger conglomerate, so they didn't have the money from a larger company to invest. So they actually went to the Body Shop.
So the Body Shop, as you might be aware, is a high street shop which specialises in beauty and bath products. But they are also very much into entrepreneurship and environment and giving back to people who are in need. And the Body Shop had a fund that was available. The Big Issue Limited applied for that money to start up their magazine.
So they managed to secure £50,000 in funding from the body shop to be able to start the magazine. And obviously it became popular and became a self-sustaining model. And so it went from there.
As the popularity of the magazine grew, they wanted to do more and more to help people in need. So they have diversified into other areas, not just magazine publishing. And in 1995, they started the Big Issue Foundation. The Big Issue Foundation is an organisation which is there to support the homeless directly, so providing them with training, with workshops, with information about how to get support on various issues like mental health, domestic abuse, housing.
So they use a lot of the money that they make from the magazine in order to go into community projects to help other people that are in need. In 2005 they started the Big Issue Invest. which is a kind of financial fund available for charities and small businesses, individuals who've got an idea of a business they want to start but they're finding it difficult to get funds, perhaps they come from an impoverished background or a homeless background and the Big Issue Invest are able to provide funds to people who have good business plans that they want to start something up.
In 2016 they launched their own online shop which means that customers can now go onto their website and purchase merchandise and all of that money then goes and gets ploughed back into helping the needy. So the Big Issue is quite a good example of a magazine which is not all about profit and power. It's not about trying to make somebody rich. and it is about perhaps ploughing that money back into the community which makes it very different from a lot of other magazines on the market.
Because the readers are typically quite affluent it means that advertising in the magazine is quite a good way for them to make extra money. Lots of brands are quite willing to place adverts in the magazine knowing that the readership of the big issue is quite wealthy so advertising is another great way for the big issue to make money. But they don't just... advertise consumer products or high-end brands.
They also place a lot of adverts for charities and community support groups. So... although they could give all their advertising space across to brands and make lots and lots of money they actually do reserve a chunk of their advertising space for companies that perhaps might find that difficult financially. So again another demonstration that it's not all about profit and power.
The Big Issue have done a lot of things over the years to try and ensure the magazine's popularity including working with a lot of celebrities. They've actually managed to get loads of people to collaborate with the magazine. Some celebrities have actually guest edited the magazine so they've been in charge of the whole style and look and content of the magazine and they've managed to acquire a lot of celebrities to appear on the front cover and to do feature interviews. People like David Bowie, people like the Dalai Lama Robert Downey Jr.
So they've really managed to secure quite a lot of exclusive interviews with people that perhaps might have made this magazine seem unique and exciting and would have drawn people to purchase it. Sometimes they also have collector's editions of the magazine as well. as well so various celebrities will design special covers.
There was an artist called Ben Ime who did several celebrity covers for the magazine so they kind of became collector's items. A lot of the people who wanted or liked this particular artist will have bought the magazine to be able to collect various editions. The model worked so well in the UK that they actually managed to start several international editions in other countries with the same idea of dismantling.
poverty. So there are issues of the big issue in places like Japan, Australia, Ireland, South Africa, South Korea, Namibia, Kenya, Taiwan, Malawi. So a really quite a global experience but still you know an independent company and still one that is not all about profit which is quite unusual.
Although the magazine is distributed on the street with vendors selling them to customers they have also branched into digital distribution as well they've sort of had to because the magazine industry in general has been declining and so many people now are getting their content online they have had to move into that digital distribution distribution. So they actually work alongside a company called Zinio. Zinio is their digital distribution company. Zinio is a massive company that distributes thousands of magazines to millions of customers a year. And the big issue is one of those that is available on that website.
The great thing is that Zinio will let customers subscribe to just one copy at a time, or you can subscribe to 12 months up front. And that's quite good because a lot of people, if they're trying out a new magazine, don't necessarily want to pay for a whole... whole year in advance.
So letting customers subscribe to just one issue is a great way of kind of teasing them with some content, getting them to like your magazine and then hoping that they will go on and subscribe for longer term. Being digital it's also obviously very accessible, lots of people have tablets and phones these days and it makes it easy to download. It also is global obviously, so Zinio has millions of customers worldwide.
So that means that the big issue can reach a lot more people. people than if they were just distributing print copies on the street. They still use all of that revenue from their digital sales to support homeless people and their vendors.
So even though it's not an actual homeless person selling the big issue on the street, the digital sales are still used to support people who are in that situation. At the height of their success in the early 2000s, they were selling around 300,000 copies a week, which is a really big amount for such a niche magazine. But the magazine industry, as I said, is in decline and lots of people were getting their content online. And as we went through that first decade of the 2000s, sales did start to decline, as they did with all magazines really at the time. By 2011, their sales had declined to 125,000 a week.
So they decided to relaunch and rebrand the magazine. And what they did was they released lots of political stories, much more politically focused, lots of social... awareness.
So lots of information about particular issues that were going on in the country at the time. And they also started to include a lot more celebrity columnists. So people who were celebrities who were writing regularly for the magazine, people like Joey Barton, who's a footballer, and Mike Shinoda, who was quite a famous singer at the time. And so that this was a way of bringing in extra audiences.
Because of this Brie brand, they did launch it at a higher price so I think they were trying to make more money out of the fewer copies that they were expecting to sell and although over the following few years their sales did continue to drop they did eventually start to pick back up again so the big issue is actually one of the only magazines on the market at the moment whose sales have actually increased in the last few years and that makes it quite different from a lot of other magazines and perhaps it reflects the context in Britain at the moment where politics and current affairs is actually becoming a much bigger thing for a lot of people in that kind of ABC1 category. So overall the big issue is a quite niche magazine which is quite unusual, very unique in the way that it is produced and distributed and is very unusual in the fact that it is actually doing a little bit better than a lot of the other magazines that are on the market at the moment. So that was my easy to understand guide to the big issue. Don't forget to check out my channel, I've got lots of other videos relevant for A-level media. studies including Vogue which is the historical magazine that you will study if you are studying the big issue.
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