Opera Now fails

The monthly magazine Opera Now is to appear just four times from next Spring – and as a supplement to its stablemate Gramophone magazine.

The Mark Allen Group which owns the struggling sheets, as well as Classical Music magazine, last week made managing director Paul Geoghegan redundant in a ‘restructuring’.

Here’s what editor Hattie Butterworth is telling Opera Now contributors:

Dear writers of Opera Now,

It’s great to be in touch with you all again, although I’m sorry it’s not to provide better news.

We have been made aware that the Mark Allen Group, our media company, will be making Opera Now Magazine a quarterly publication, reducing its current monthly output. You may remember it becoming affiliated with Gramophone Magazine as a sister publication back in the summer – as this continues we will become a supplement to Gramophone, though continuing with the same format – albeit with a slightly ‘wider’ or more ‘general’ outlook on the industry and events.

More contemporaneous content will continue to appear on the website, with reviews, opinion and features. I’m yet to find out whether any additional budget will be provided for these between print months, but I hope it may be possible to commission some online-only content for our website, which seems to be doing really well at present.

Do let me know if you have any questions about the changes – there are still quite a few questions to be answered internally and I’ll endeavour to keep you updated as more is revealed.

For the meantime, the January and February issues will go ahead as planned, with February being our ‘Spring’ issue and the start of the quarterly pattern.