The Wear Business management team of (left to
right) Colin Young, Martin Walker, Dave Allan and
Graeme Anderson have worked hard to strengthen the
magazine’s digital presence during the Covid.pandemic.
Guess who’s back?
Wear Business returns – but we never really went away
During the pandemic, many Wear businesses diversified away from their core
products. Wear Business magazine was no different. We made a dash for digital
while parking up the print offering.
The strategy has been a success but the publishing world, in general, remains in
peril, as Graeme Anderson explains.
When the French statesman Emmanuel
Siesyes was asked, decades later, what he
had done in the French Revolution, he
replied, simply: “I survived.”
The same answer may be given by many Wear business
owners in years to come when they’re asked about the
great 2020 pandemic.
Survival has been an admirable achievement for
so many of our businesses in Sunderland, Durham,
Houghton, Hetton, Peterlee, Seaham, Chester-le-Street
and Washington which were genuinely threatened with
extinction.
A tiny fraction of Wear businesses have seen their
services more in demand and their balance sheets
improve.
But the vast majority have been hit hard, and some have
been hit hardest of all by horrendous economic data, the
likes of which has not been seen for hundreds of years.
The public-facing services industry suffered terribly,
with millions serving in pubs, restaurants and hotels
unable to work.
The arts and entertainment industry remains crippled
by the ban on large gatherings with smaller theatres, in
particular, facing crisis and thousands of performers
falling down the cracks of the furlough scheme.
But the publishing sector was also dramatically hit as
newsagents were closed during lockdown, adverts were
cancelled and financial controllers at companies large and
small circled the wagons around marketing funds and
hunkered down.
This presented obvious challenges to Wear Business
magazine, fresh from celebrating our first issue in January
and ready to move towards the deadline on our second,
due out at the end of March this year.
We were far from being the only ones.
All publishers in the region and beyond were in the
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