New magazines on Estonian market

One of the world’s most popular car magazines, the British Top Gear will be published in Estonia. The magazine will be in Estonian language and covering partly also Estonian topics.

The magazine with challenging humour and master piece photos will have one third of its content covering Estonian topics written mainly by the Chief Editor of the new magazine, Urmas Oja. Oja will have co-writers from among Estonian top journalists specialized in cars.

The Estonian language publication will include also the freshest British Top Gear stories, however the editorial board will have free hands in picking the articles. The magazine is not a coverage of the TV programme, where Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May entertain the audience, but it will include their opinions or reviews on some specific cars.

Currently available magazines in the market that are specialized on technical issue hope that the new competitor will not create turmoil in the market. The biggest influence will be felt by the car magazine Autoleht, as the other magazine in this sector, Tehnikamaailm writes also about other topics, not only cars. The publishers of Autoleht hope that they will maintain their position in the market thanks to the bigger emphasise on local matters and practical hints. „Top Gear is an entertaining reading, we have more practical value for readers and we pay more attention to Estonian rally stars,“ acknowledged the Chief Editor of Autoleht, Kristjan Sooper.

Top Gear will be published on 160-pages. The exact number of circulation is expected to be 20 000. In Lithuania, country with 3.2 million population the car magazine has a circulation of 10 000 copies.

In Latvia Top Gear will also be launched in March.  Lithuanian publisher SC Baltic Media has the licence to publish Top Gear in Estonia and they do it in cooperation with local Ajakirjade Kirjastus. Top Gear was launched in Lithuania in 2011 and became a huge success. Top Gear is published in 30 countries.

At the same time with Top Gear another new magazine will be launched in March in Estonia, Forbes Estonia, which is  an Estonian edition of American economy magazine Forbes. The most famous and best selling product of this publication is the Top of the World’s and local richest people. Publishing is done in cooperation with a Latvian publisher SK Group, and the circulation of the first edition will be 20 000 copies. Forbes Estonia will have 60% of the content on Estonian economy news and 40% covering content from US Forbes.