Thank God for EMAP's radio division, that's all I can say, otherwise the media conglom's financials would be looking gloomy, and if that was to happen I'm not sure how I'd sleep at night.
The group's consumer magazine division did score some successes in the first half of its current financial year, especially with woman's weekly Grazia, but elsewhere things were not so groovy. FHM, for example, is still the biggest selling men's monthly, but its revenues were down. New gossip mag First "got off to a slower start than anticipated" while teen mag Sneak was closed down after it failed to grow readership and profits as quickly as expected. Some of EMAPs titles outside the UK, especially FHM in the US, also achieved lower revenues than hoped.
The radio bit of the company, which includes the Kiss and Magic franchises, saw revenues rise 39%, thanks in part to their acquisition of Scottish Radio Holdings, though revenues would be up 5% even without the newly acquired revenue streams. While profits there were down 1%, given trends elsewhere in the radio sector that was still good news as far as many city types were concerned - the Guardian quoting one (Citygroup) thus: "One of the positive surprises of the pre-close statement was the performance of radio, [especially] given Chrysalis's comments that the radio market had deteriorated in September and October".
The EMAP TV business, which houses those jukebox TV channels, also increased revenues by a million in the six months up to the end of September.
All of which means overall revenues group wide were down for the period, though bosses expect things to improve slightly in the rest of the year, meaning over all revenues will be pretty much the same this year as last year. And despite talk of gloominess, profits were up 4% to £93m.