Sports Illustrated to become monthly magazine in 2020 (nypost.com)

In its half-year results to 24 September 2017, the group posted a slight sales increase of 2% to £4.83bn, while operating profit both before and after transformation costs were down sharply, from £206m to £89m and £148m to £26m respectively. Royal Mail put this down largely to an increase in its ongoing UK defined benefit pension service costs of £114m. Pre-tax profit fell 30%, from £110m to £77m, but post-tax profit almost doubled to £168m - largely due to a tax credit related to the closure of its pension scheme to future accruals. Net debt was down 15.5%, from £452m to £382m. The group expects its net cash investment to fall to £450m for the full-year, down from £590m per annum for the past three years. Chief executive Moya Greene described the first half as successful despite the “headwinds we are facing”. Click Read More below for additional information.

Meredith Corporation's category-leading brands—PEOPLE, Allrecipes, Better Homes & Gardens, Southern Living, Entertainment Weekly, People en Español, and InStyle—have achieved momentous performances in audience rankings, according to the first Magazine Media 360° Brand Audience Report produced by the Alliance for Audited Media (AAM) for December 2019, which covers 93 magazine brands and 21 publishing companies. PEOPLE, one of the world's leading entertainment media brands, ranks No. 1 in Total Brand Audience across platforms with 93.6 million, followed by Allrecipes, America's largest digital food media brand, at No. 2 with 79.4 million and Better Homes & Gardens at No. 9 with 41.0 million.

As big box bookstores Barnes & Noble and Borders spread across the landscape in the 1990s, retail observers sounded the death knell for small, independent booksellers. But they had no idea of the onslaught that was coming. Amazon.com launched in 1995, offering customers seemingly unlimited inventory without the need to step foot in a bookstore; and then Amazon launched the Kindle e-book service in 2007, challenging the very idea of a physical book. Something miraculous started happening in 2009, however. After falling for decades, the number of independent bookstores started to rise, climbing 49 percent in the next decade to nearly 2,500 stores nationwide.