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The publisher is building an Olympic-sized team of titles for its just-launched Raw Sports Group
In April, Petersen Companies acquired the InLine Publications unit of Sports & Fitness Publishing, including the extreme sports titles Gravity and InLine Hockey News. In May, the Los Angeles-based publisher snagged the hip-hop basketball magazine Slam, Slam Presents and Blitz, an annual football book, from Harris Publishing for an estimated $3 million. In June, the company closed an estimated $8 million deal for Century Publishing's Inside Sports, which will soon be folded into Petersen's monthly Sport. See a pattern here? Petersen's recent spending spree is anything but random. The rapidly growing sports division, which barely existed a year ago, has taken on a life of its own. Under the stewardship of vice chairman D. Claeys Bahrenburg, a dozen titles with total circulation of more than 2 million have become part of a new marketing effort dubbed Petersen Raw Sport group.
"Special-interest publishers [with] very heavy circulation and readership in the male market [need to be] a significant player in the sports arena," Bahrenburg says. "That's why we've built this collection." For advertisers, Petersen is offering a four-color page in all of the Raw Sport titles for $70,625. Individual pages in the books, each targeting males 16 to 34, run from $3,595 for the skating magazine Box to $32,260 for Sport.
Petersen is in talks to acquire another six to eight titles for Raw Sport, possibly by next month. The negotiations are said to be with a West Coast publisher whose properties include a surfing book. Petersen is also preparing Teen Sport, a test issue that will be polybagged with the October issue of the company's Teen and would ultimately join the Raw Sport unit.
The group takes its name from a regular section in Sport. "Raw Sport is so popular in terms of research," Bahrenburg says. "It's clearly a hip name that our audiences related to."
To bring its sports titles added branding and promotional exposure, Petersen has been linking with broadcasters for programming deals. Petersen will soon add Slam, Dominators of Sport and Sport Heroes to its roster of syndicated radio vignettes. Blue Sky Radio currently airs Sport Brief, sponsored by Jockey, in 385 markets. Petersen is also...