Arena – what men really don't want

Not so much of a bang as a whimper greeted Bauer's announcement this week that it is folding the whiskery old Grandaddy of men's style magazines, Arena, after two decades.

The amazing thing is it lasted so long. This is a sector euthanized by the increasing apathy of both readers and advertisers. The unseemly scramble down market by publishers keen to ensure their male readers get the requisite ration of tits and bums merely underlines how desperate and intellectually bankrupt they have become.

Of course, dignifying a basic human urge with a cerebral top-dressing is as old as, well, Penthouse and Playboy. It was the penetrating articles you always wanted to talk about if you got caught reading one, not the pictures. Yeah, yeah.

Then along came the publisher of Vogue, Condé Nast, and gave birth to the chic porn lad's mag sector with a revitalised version of moribund Gentleman's Quarterly. Arena's mortifying role was to play mid-wife.

The fact that GQ was neither gentlemanly nor quarterly should not detain us; it certainly didn't detain Condé Nast, nor the enthusiastic male audience which took it up – not to mention its successively smuttier counterparts such as Esquire and later FHM, Loaded and Men's Health. Along the road there were momentary segmental diversions, such as the short-lived Jack – for older men. Inevitably the path led downhill with increasing momentum: near the bottom we meet the men's weeklies, Nuts and Zoo. Even these are now failing. Increasingly forlorn efforts to turn them into online earners have been met with indifference by an audience that's currently more interested in freesheets such as Shortlist and Sport.

So what do men want? God knows; publishers certainly don't.

Universally challenged BBC

Jeremy Paxman: And now Corpus Delicti, your starter for ten. How many major PR cock-ups have there been at the BBC in the past two years? Gail Trimble: Five. Paxman: Correct. Name 3 of them. Trimble: Er, the Blue Peter Cat, Carol Thatcher's Golliwog and the Gaza Emergency Disaster Fund appeal. Paxman: Correct. I'll give you a bonus of 30 if you can name another 3. Yes, 3 - Wake up Corpus. Trimble: Oh, er, I see what you mean. The Queen being backward in coming forward, Jonathan Ross'  reinstatement after the Sachsgate affair and now us not winning University Challenge. 

Paxman: At last. You're getting the hang of it. What's the common thread running through them? Sam Kaye: the BBC is either too fast or too slow at responding to crises. Paxman: No, too vague. I can't allow that I'm afraid; Manchester? Matthew Yeo: It's incompetent or it's corrupt. Paxman: Make up your mind. Yeo: Well, it's both. Blue Peter was corruption and... Paxman: You're missing the point. Corpus?

Trimble: It lacks common sense. Paxman: Can you be a bit more specific? Trimble: Well, it's all the responsibility of the director-general, really. He's been so frightened by the repercussions of the Hutton report, which resulted in the sacking of one of his predecessors, that he's been paralysed by political correctness. Paxman: Sorry Corpus, I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say there. He's desperate to be seen as right-thinking, but most people think he keeps getting it wrong? Trimble: Exactly. But he's much cleverer than people give him credit for, because underneath all the fumbling PC hypocrisy, he's adroitly pursuing a populist, commercially motivated strategy that's diametrically opposed to the BBC's Reithian foundation principles of...

Paxman: Mm, fascinating. I'll have to stop you there, Corpus. We've run out of time and so have you.

Sage advice from a dumb prophet

And so to this week's Sunday Times business supplement. Amid all the predictable drivel about the banks and the state of Sir Fred's nice little earner, this curious piece – 'Buffett: I was dumb in 2008'.

The article comes across as a mea culpa from the Sage of Omaha for mistiming the price of oil last year when he bought into Conoco Phillips at the top of the market. He also dived into a couple of Irish banks that looked cheap at the time - but weren't. Result, some serious losses for his investment vehicle, Berkshire Hathaway. Even so, Berkshire beat the Standard & Poor 500 index by a handsome margin last year. So perhaps we can forgive Homer for nodding on this occasion, exceptional as it has been.

One of the strongest elements of Buffett's investment strategy over the years has been his fondness for big, reliable brand names, such as Coca-Cola, American Express, and more recently Tesco. They have their ups and downs of course, but over the long term, they always turn up trumps.

The same can be said of Warren. He may not get it right moment to moment, but he has an uncanny habit of summing up the zeitgeist accurately. Sample: "Only when the tide goes out do we discover who's been swimming naked" – an apt metaphor for most of the financial community currently. But it's more than a way with words. In the long run, he's invariably proved correct. His prognosis: no quick recovery but "America's best days lie ahead". 

Let's hope so, for the rest of our sakes.