Categories Women's magazine First issue 2000 Company Haymarket Media Group | Frequency Monthly Final issue 2008 Country United Kingdom | |
Eve was an illustrated magazine for women published in London.
History and profile
Already in existence in the 1920s, in 1926 it took over a long-established British publication called The Gentlewoman, which was merged into it.
An unrelated monthly magazine using the same title was launched by BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, in 2000. Created under a working title Project Urma, the first edition was dated September 2000 and was sold on newsstands from early August 2000.
As with much BBC activity at the time, the magazine attracted criticism from those who believed that the broadcaster was over-reaching by using its licence-fee funded programming to promote commercial activities, harming other businesses.
Although the magazine was a circulation success, a 2005 restructuring of the BBC led to the decision to sell the title as it didn't directly support a programme. Haymarket Media Group purchased Eve with the intention of building a women's magazine business around the publication.
Haymarket's stewardship of Eve was not a success, and circulation started to decline. In April 2008, there was an overhaul which saw a new masthead and a revamped format, but the global financial crisis of 2007–08 and the advertising downturn which followed made the title too unprofitable for Haymarket, and in September 2008 the company announced its closure.