“Magazines are on the way back”

What we asked the Joe Bill, Editorial Director of 'cene and Padel Culture magazines

Joe Bill is the Editorial Director at the award-winning ‘cene magazine, who has recently launched a new magazine looking at the world of padel. Padel is growing as a sport across Kent, so we sat down with him to discuss his route from the Medway News to ‘cene, publishing magazines, and just what is padel?

Joe Bill.

What is your official occupation?
Editorial Director of Cene Media Ltd.

Do you have any other additional roles, paid or unpaid?
No, it’s all editorial and journalist-based.

Let’s start off with the new title. Why did you decide to launch a magazine around padel?
It’s pretty simple, actually. This time last year, or maybe August last year, I had a friend of mine who’d been playing down in Deal, which is one of the early padel courts in Kent. He was nagging me to come down to Deal on a weeknight to play with him. I’m in Faversham, and I was like, ‘I’m not going.’ Not on a Wednesday night, anyway. It turned out that one was opening at the rugby club in Whitstable. He said, ‘Play me at this new club.’ The first week it opened, September of last year, I fell in love with it. Having played sport most of my life, I’m now 40, and I can’t play football anymore. I can’t play any of those things. I’m not really a golfer. I thought my sporting days were behind me, and then I played padel.

How would you describe padel?
Padel is mini tennis in a glass box. Some people describe it as a cross between squash and tennis, because you can hit it off the glass. I would say it’s a lot closer to tennis than to squash. It’s the same layout on the court. You’ve got a net that you hit it over. It generally comes as two against two, although there are single courts available. You play with tennis balls and with what are essentially rackets.

Having played it, how does that lead to launching a magazine about it?
Well, interestingly, when you play it, you learn very quickly. It’s one of those sports that lots of people can pick up, and you get better quite quickly, which is obviously very addictive, because you can see improvement. I ended up watching clips on social media of different ways of playing different shots, and all this. I started to consider what media representation there is in this. Now it’s quite big in Spain, about eight and a half million people play in Spain. Lots of people play in the Middle East as well. It was founded in Acapulco, Mexico, 69. It’s been around, bubbling under for many years. The media presence is quite new. There are websites which are dedicated to positions and rankings, like tennis. Which player beat this player, where they are in all these tournaments around the world.
Myself and my busy partner Jim, having run ‘cene, we look at the culture side of things and how that integrates into communities. There didn’t seem to be any representation of that. That being fashion, being art, that being the food and drink around it, that being the padel sites and the personalities that are involved in the sport. One thing we say to people when we talk about Padel Culture, I’m not telling you how to serve, because there’s a million influencers out there that can tell you how to serve, but we can tell you great places to go to experience it, the great fashion brands to try out, great products, new rackets, all the things that surround it. It became very clear that the community around padel, particularly in the UK, is booming. Every year, it’s tripling in size in the amount of people that are playing. That’s official figures from the LTA. But the community’s really strong. When you see people, particularly in football, it’s very tribal. People bring each other down on social media, and the whole trolling. In padel, it’s not like that. People pick each other up and they’re very supportive and they give people tips, and they share content without even asking, it feels like there’s a community that are all pulling in the same direction. To us, it felt like there was a gap in the market because we did the research to create a magazine that reflected that culture and community around the sport.

How often does the magazine come out?
It’s starting as a quarterly for the first year. The first one came out in September, the next one is coming out in January and then quarterly after that, with the idea of perhaps going bi-monthly the following year.
The first one, the feedback’s been amazing. We’ve gone into 200 different padel sites across the UK. Hopefully, that will increase. That’s going to be the structure. It’s free to pick up. The niche element of it is that it’s a padel magazine, for padel players going into padel sites. It’s very targeted. As a magazine, it’s perfect in reaching the market that we want it to reach.

Is there enough happening in padel for a monthly magazine to exist?
For a monthly, possibly not just yet, but for a quarterly, we believe so based on the first one and the conversations we’re having around number two. If you look at the people that are making moves, particularly in the UK, it is growing at a rapid rate, and that’s everything from sites opening to coaches going through training to players taking it up. How often does a new sport come along in that way that’s made as much media impact as this one? You’ve got celebrities and ex-footballers and lifestyle influencers getting involved. Two years ago, no one even knew it existed. To me, that strikes as something that’s a great opportunity for a new magazine, but also something that I’m playing, I want to be involved in. We are a business and, yes, we are in the business of putting out magazines, but this is something we both really love. We love playing and we enjoy it. It’s a passion project as well as being a business.

Are you able to tell us what the print run is?
The first one was 5,000. We’ve just done with trying to get our first ABC certificate for it in the same way that we’ve done with ‘cene.

What’s an ABC certificate?
An ABC certificate is an auditing bureau of circulation. It’s a confirmation of how many you print and where they are distributed from. I believe we are still the only free mag in the county to do it, with ‘cene magazine, and this will be the same with Padel Culture as well. It’s a guarantee basically of the numbers.

If someone wants to check out the mag, how many locations in Kent can they pick it up at?
Well, they’re probably sold out in Kent at the moment. It was quick off the shelves. But realistically, we will be targeting everywhere. You’ve got Square One in Ashford. You’ve got Square One coming to Canterbury in January, I believe. Breakpoint Padel is also in Canterbury. You’ve got Play Padel in Deal. You’ve got Rochester Tennis Club, which is opening new courts. You’ve got Platform 26 in Chatham. You have got another one opening at David Lloyd in Herne Bay. You’ve got one court open now in Sevenoaks, and I think there’s more on the outskirts of Tonbridge. Essentially, anywhere there’s a padel court in Kent, check it out and check out the magazine. That’s the idea. You can obviously order it online as well, which quite a few people have done. When the magazine launches, you get, particularly somewhere like, Rocket Padel in Battersea Power Station, with a box of magazines on the first day, it was gone within the first hour, because the throughput of people going through there is quick. For people that don’t get around to picking it up, you can order it off our website.

You have also been publishing ‘cene magazine for over eight years. How would you describe ‘cene?
It was designed to be a platform to show off the creativity and culture of Kent. Something we felt at the time we launched was underrepresented by other news websites and other magazines. Not that I’m going to name any of them, but they would focus on lambs and selling Jaguars, which wasn’t our bag. Our bag was music, and we wanted to document it. The first one went out in March 2017. It flew out in Canterbury and we quickly grew it by the second one to Canterbury and East Kent, and then by the third one we started going into mid and west and now we’ve got 140 odd locations around the county that the mag goes out from. All free for people to pick up to really help to grow that pride in some of the amazing people that are in this county and what they are doing, whether that’s fashion designers or artists or chefs. That’s what it’s always been about.