Blog

Chapman and McLaren have joined during a period of expansion. As well as a website relaunch at the end of last year, the brand announced the Classic & Sports Car Show in association with Flywheel.

Chapman (pictured left) started his career in car industry consultancy before moving into magazine publishing in 1985. He launched Your Classic magazine for Haymarket in 1989 at the age of 24.

He completed a magazine apprenticeship with Classic & Sports Car during its early days before becoming Editor in 1991. He then moved on to Autocar.

He has written over 40 books on a range of car culture topics.

On his new appointment, Chapman commented: "This is a thrilling opportunity to return to the magazine I love and to use my wide experience to keep it driving forward. Classic cars are about dreams, aspirations and nostalgia, and I'm privileged to have a team of writers and photographers who love bringing this to our readers."

McLaren (pictured right) spent seven years at Stuff, joining as Production Editor in 2010 before becoming Digital Editor in 2014. Prior to that, he was Production Editor at NME. He has worked on brands including Vogue, Glamour and News of the World.

"There's a potentially huge new [online] audience out there – and I'll be working closely with the product and development teams to tap into it. I can't wait to get started," McLaren said.

Alastair Clements, Group Head of Content, added: "I'm thrilled to welcome Giles and Marc to the Classic & Sports Car family. Giles is one of the UK's foremost authorities on classic cars, not to mention a brilliant writer and Editor with huge experience in the publishing industry, while Marc brings with him an enviable reputation as a Digital Strategist and Developer of online communities. Their talents are just what we need as we start to implement our exciting plans for 2018."

The Festival’s aim is to discover the best new fiction and non-fiction titles in UK publishing.

It will incorporate nine Hearst brands, including Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Prima, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, ELLE, Red, Women’s Health and Men’s Health, with each brand being assigned a relevant category.

The Big Book Awards will invite publishers to submit exciting and emerging work, published between June 1, 2017 and May 31, 2018, across these categories.

Judith Secombe, Managing Director of Hearst Brand Services, said: “Books are a natural fit for us at Hearst, with both our consumers and Editors having such an inherent passion for quality content. By creating the Big Book Festival, we’re aiming to help boost the amazing work of authors across the country, as well as offering publishers the chance to amplify their consumer outreach campaigns by having the Hearst stamp of approval.”

She continued, “We want to offer publishers the chance to be involved in a fully authentic retail endorsement campaign – and with 1 in 3 adults who purchased a book in the last 12 months being a Hearst consumer – this is it!”

Hearst will ask its Reader Panel to review the titles selected at the first stage. Following reader feedback, the books that score the highest will be put forward for review by the Editors of the nine participating brands.

Using the combined scores from Hearst readers and Editors, a shortlist of titles in each category will be announced in June.

The final winners will be announced at a celebratory event in summer 2018.

Alongside the awards, Hearst will launch Big Book Live, a series of live experiences in London that focuses on bringing the pages and themes of the shortlisted books to life.

The full list of categories in the Big Book Festival are:

• Crime – Good Housekeeping

• Must Reads – Cosmopolitan

• Page Turners – Prima

• Modern Classics – Harper’s Bazaar

• Biography – Esquire

• Women Writers – ELLE

• Non Fiction and Children’s – Red

• Wellbeing – Women’s Health

• Health and Lifestyle – Men’s Health

The mark is a visual symbol that can be displayed by all 2,500 of the publications that IPSO regulates.

It shows that a particular newspaper, magazine or website is an edited, regulated product that embraces public accountability and is committed to high professional and editorial standards.

This is particularly important when we are living in an era of fake news, with the public becoming increasingly wary of the information they consume through the media – and whether that information is factually and ethically accurate.

The IPSO mark indicates responsible, quality journalism, which is represented in its strapline: “For press freedom with responsibility”.

IPSO’s Chief Executive Matt Tee commented on the announcement: “I strongly believe that IPSO membership helps our publishers distinguish themselves from the unregulated, thereby demonstrating that they choose to hold themselves accountable to higher standards.”

He continued: “The newspaper and magazine industry faces a number of complex challenges over the short term and I firmly believe that one of the ways in which it can thrive and prosper is by its commitment to independent, effective regulation. That means IPSO – and that’s why I’m proud that so many of our member publications will display our mark on their pages.”

The IPSO mark has been designed in partnership with the award-winning agency McCann.

A full-scale advertising campaign will be launched by IPSO this year to raise awareness of its work and services.

The new quarterly title launched with licensing partner 2000 Publishing & Media Co. on November 30, 2017.

Enzo Thailand features all things Ferrari, including road cars and race cars – past and present – and the designers, engineers and drivers involved with the Italian sports car manufacturer.

Worawut Bhirombhakdi, Enzo Thailand’s Editor, described Ferrari as a brand that is “all about passion”.

Each issue of the magazine contains road tests of the latest models, drive stories, track tests of iconic racers, tales from the past and interviews with the leading figures in the Ferrari community.

Carlotta Serantoni, Senior Licensing Manager at Dennis, commented: “Ferrari is the world’s most famous and glamorous motoring marque. With the classic Ferrari market experiencing astonishing growth in recent years, there is a big demand for a high-end, beautifully produced magazine that’s dedicated to the brand.

“We’re delighted to have partnered with 2000 Publishing & Media Co. to launch in Thailand. They are leaders in the luxury car market, so Enzo is a perfect fit for them. ”

2000 Publishing & Media Co. publishes BMW Car magazine and GT Porsche magazine.

Enzo Thailand is 150 pages long, with a cover price of 180 Thai baht (about £4.11) and a print run of 3,000 copies.

The Code sets out rules that newspapers and magazines regulated by the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) have pledged to follow.

It has now been amended to state that Editors should avoid naming children after they are arrested for a criminal offence, but before they appear in court.

The law currently allows newspapers to name children arrested for a crime before they appear in court, when anonymity comes into force. The amended clause says Editors should avoid naming these children.

Youth justice campaigners, including the Standing Committee for Youth Justice, the National Association for Youth Justice and the Children’s Rights Alliance for England called for a change in the Code to protect these children. The Code also distinguishes that these children are young people under the age of 18.

Neil Benson, Chair of the Editors’ Code of Practice Committee and Group Executive Editor of Trinity Mirror, commented: “A great deal of careful thought and debate has gone into the Code review and the ongoing development of the Editors’ Codebook.

“The latest changes strengthen and give even greater clarity to the Code, which sets the professional practice standards for the vast majority of the UK’s journalists.”

There will also be amendments to Clause Two (Privacy) and to Clause 11 (Victims of Sexual Assault).

Clause Two, which was proposed by Associated Newspapers and was supported by IPSO, clarifies that the extent to which material is in the public domain or will become so may be considered in Clause Two complaints.

Clause 11 has now been aligned more closely to the law to emphasise the responsibility that Editors have under the Code to prohibit publication of material that could lead to identifying a victim of sexual assault.

Trinity Mirror submitted the change, which was accepted by IPSO.

The review was carried out by the Editors’ Code of Practice Committee, which is composed of Editors and Lay Members.

They considered several thousand submissions on the Code from a wide range of organisations and members of the public. For the first time, the submissions have been published on the Committee’s website and the Committee has produced a report explaining how it reached its decisions.

Chairman of IPSO Sir Alan Moses said: “The Editors’ Code of Practice is the cornerstone of IPSO’s contractual agreement with the press and I welcome these changes, which further strengthen its protections for the public.

“The new Code, along with the Editors’ Codebook, provides a framework for a trusted, thriving and free press, which is vital to our democracy. It is also important that so many individuals and organisations contributed to these changes through the consultation,” he continued.

The three changes to the Code will be effective from January 1, 2018.

The ceremony will recognise and reward the best British riders, racers, products and people involved in UK road cycling.

The Awards will combine Cycling Weekly’s Editor’s Choice Awards, which acknowledge the products that have taken the market by storm, and the crowning of the coveted British Rider of the Year title.

The Cycling Weekly Award winners will be chosen by an expert judging panel comprised of the Cycling Weekly team and names from the world of cycling, as well as by reader vote.

Simon Richardson, Editor of Cycling Weekly, said: “You only have to look through previous winners of our coveted British Rider of the Year title to realise what a who’s who of cycling it is. I can’t wait to expand this out to more categories and to celebrate the winners in style.”

Sean Igoe, Head of the Cycling Commercial Team, added: “I’m absolutely delighted to announce this launch. A lot of hard work has already happened behind-the-scenes to make sure this is the biggest awards ever seen in the world of cycling.

“Road cycling has seen huge growth and it's an amazing sport to be involved with for so many reasons. I’ve always been amazed that there's never been a beautiful ceremony to celebrate road cycling until now,” he continued.

The Cycling Weekly Awards ceremony will be held at 8 Northumberland Avenue, a luxury central London venue. This black tie event will be hosted and attended by renowned cyclists and will be live streamed globally.

Cycling is the UK’s third most popular sport. After 126 years of publication, Cycling Weekly remains at the heart of Britain’s cycling scene – with a reach of over 5,000,000 cyclists a month through print, online, social media and events.

Tsirkas (pictured right) will join from Initiative, the UK media planning and buying agency, where she is Group Client Director and is responsible for clients including Amazon Fashion, Patek Philippe and Beko.

Morriss (pictured left) will join from Oath, where she is Agency Group Lead for WPP. Before that, she worked as Head of Agency Sales at AOL.

They will be responsible for driving Hearst’s agency relationships across the Hearst business, leading and facilitating more partnership-led solutions with greater customer engagement.

Jane Wolfson, Chief Agency Officer of Hearst UK, said: “Sarah and Joni have a wealth of experience across multiple disciplines. Their strong commercial and strategic focus, coupled with excellent relationships, mean they will be a great addition to Hearst. They join the business at an exciting time as we look to drive even deeper engagement with agencies and clients.”

Morriss commented on her new role: “I am absolutely thrilled to be joining Hearst and feel truly spoilt to be working with such an amazing portfolio of brands. As an industry, everything we do is built on engaging consumers, and Hearst has the enviable benefit of a legion of brand fans across multiple passion points. I cannot wait to leverage these rich audiences in new and exciting ways for advertisers – from display, through to events, accreditation and licensing.”

Tsirkas added: “The role at Hearst was an opportunity too good to turn down. The vision the team have for evolving the business is an exciting one and I want to take a forefront position. Hearst UK has brands to be envious of and they are available across multiple touchpoints. Hearst UK is uniquely placed to deliver partnerships that cannot be matched by other media owners.”

Tsirkas and Morriss will begin their roles in January 2018. They will be working alongside Group Agency Director Matt Downs, who joined from Future Publishing in October 2016, and Group Brand Director and Director of Client Sales Matt Hayes.

The partnership aims to drive awareness of smart meters as a key way of managing the cost of energy in the home for millennials across the audiences of Cosmopolitan, Digital Spy and Men’s Health.

Hearst UK has created four videos on “The Power of 10p”, in which brand-specific challenges are set to find out how far consumers can get on 10p’s worth of energy.

The campaign will be supported by print and digital branded content articles across Cosmopolitan and Men’s Health and digital branded content articles on Digital Spy. It will also be promoted heavily via social media activation.

Jane Wolfson, Chief Agency Officer of Hearst UK, said: “Hearst can reach and engage millennials at scale. Cosmopolitan, Men’s Health and Digital Spy have highly-valuable audiences and we are delighted to partner with Smart Energy GB to help drive awareness to these key consumers.”

Gavin Sheppard, Director of Marketing at Smart Energy GB, commented: “We know that engaging young people with a subject as manifestly boring as energy metering technology is a real challenge. So we didn’t try to do that.

“Instead, we needed a content strand that would bring to life not what smart meters are, but what they can do, and would make energy use tangible and meaningful to people with more interesting things on their mind. We needed a media partner that could reach different groups of young people around different passion points. Hearst provided us with both.”

The first Cosmopolitan video can be viewed here. The further three videos will be rolled out this month.

RADAR (Reporters and Data and Robots) was set up to meet an increasing demand for fact-based insights into local communities by using Natural Language Generation (NLG) software to create up to 30,000 localised stories a month from open data sets.

The service received launch funding in July from Google’s Digital News Initiative Innovation Fund – a €150m commitment from the company to stimulate and support innovation in digital journalism across Europe’s news industry.

RADAR has at its heart a team of reporters finding interesting stories in open data sets, then writing these stories and crafting NLG templates to localise them for hundreds of markets. The project builds on this core to develop advanced database and distribution tools.

Gary Rogers, Editor-in-Chief at Urbs Media, said: “We believe these are the first automated local news stories published in established news brands anywhere in the world. We’re delighted to be up and running with a great user group who are already helping to steer our thinking on the topics and style of the stories we generate.”

A closed pilot began at the end of November, involving 35 regional titles from 14 publishing groups, including Archant, Independent News and Media, Iliffe Media, Johnston Press, Newsquest, Midland News Association and Trinity Mirror. Feedback from this initial set of brands is helping to shape the ongoing development of RADAR ahead of a six-month open trial next year, which will include hyperlocal publishers and broadcast outlets.

Tim Williams, Managing Editor at Archant, welcomed the new content: “RADAR is an exciting new service and a very welcome positive boost for Archant’s newsrooms, giving us access to data sets and information that are enabling us to share important stories with our readers.”

Multiple versions of four stories were distributed in the first week of copy testing. The first focussed on trends in birth registrations across the UK, specifically how many children were registered by married, cohabiting or single parents, based on figures from the Office of National Statistics.

This was followed by stories on cancelled operations across England extracted from NHS data, a breakdown on social mobility and life chances for disadvantaged children based on data from the government’s Social Mobility Commission and localised Department of Transport data on average A Road delays.

Stories have already appeared in 20 daily and weekly titles, both online and in print. As the pilot is gradually stepped up over the coming months, in parallel the RADAR team will be introducing new channels to distribute these large volumes of stories to local news outlets, including PA Explore, the new customer portal being developed by the PA. RADAR will then start to develop graphics and animated video to distribute with localised copy.

Pete Clifton, Editor-in-Chief at the PA, said: “I’m pleased to see our customers actively engaging with the content. Their feedback is providing us with valuable insights as we scale up production to reach our target of 30,000 stories each month for a much broader user base.”

RADAR will rely on a core editorial team of five to identify, write, template and edit the data-driven stories. Two reporters, Niamh McIntyre and Ralph Blackburn, have been recruited to join Rogers.

McIntyre joined RADAR from the data desk at The Guardian, which she joined in June 2017 as a Google News Lab fellow. She has also worked for the PA on the agency’s election coverage and for The Independent as a freelance writer.

Blackburn was formerly Chief Reporter at Archant, writing for the Ilford Recorder, Romford Recorder and Wanstead & Woodford Recorder since February 2015.

As the magazine prepares to enter its 30th anniversary year, it is continuing to invest in high-end, agenda-setting journalism and fashion coverage. Appointments include significant additions to the fashion and political teams.

GQ has appointed Luke Day (pictured) as Fashion Director with immediate effect. He also retains his position as Editor of GQ Style, a role he has held since February 2015. He was previously Fashion Director of the title.

Prior to this, Day was Fashion Editor of Arena HOMME+ and Fashion Director of Attitude magazine. He has worked with brands including Topman, MSGM and Tommy Hilfiger.

Day commented, “I’m honoured to be extending my role within the GQ family as the newly appointed Fashion Director of GQ. I feel proud to be given this prestigious opportunity at such an exciting time for the magazine and for Condé Nast. I am looking forward to working even more closely with Dylan Jones and his world class GQ team as we continue to lead the way in men’s style.”

Teo van den Broeke has been appointed as Style and Grooming Director of British GQ. He is currently Style Director of British Esquire and Deputy Editor of Esquire’s luxury biannual The Big Black Book and the title’s annual Big Watch Book.

Jones remarked: “I’m delighted that Luke will now be working across GQ, as well as continuing to edit GQ Style – his ability to speak visually to a wide audience, while also showcasing cutting edge creativity and finding the most exciting new talent, is a rare combination.

“I’m also thrilled to be welcoming Teo to the team, who will bring his considerable experience to both print and digital. GQ is the most important luxury men’s title in the country, with fashion at its heart, and all these additions to the British GQ fashion team will further reinforce the brand’s position in the market place.”

Previously van den Broeke worked for Wallpaper* and he has written for The Times, the Evening Standard, The Telegraph, The Guardian, Matches Fashion and Mr Porter, as well as giving regular talks and seminars about men’s style for brands ranging from Louis Vuitton to Gieves & Hawkes. He will take up his new position from January 2, 2018.

Van den Broeke added, "GQ is the foremost men's media brand in the world and I am both excited and honoured to join the brilliant British team as Style and Grooming Director. I look forward to a long and illustrious tenure at this prestigious magazine."

Elgar Johnson has been promoted to Deputy Editor of GQ Style. He also remains in his role as Fashion Director of the title. With a background in modelling, Johnson began his styling career assisting the legendary Simon Foxton before joining i-D magazine, where over four years he moved up the ranks to become Senior Fashion Editor.

Johnson joined GQ Style from Man About Town, where he held the position of Fashion Director.

Sophie Clark has been promoted to Fashion Editor of GQ Style. Previously Sophie was Junior Fashion Editor on the magazine.

Grace Gilfeather remains Fashion Editor of British GQ and Carlotta Constant, previously Acting Style and Grooming Editor, has been announced as Junior Fashion Editor.

Nick Carvell, previously Associate Style Editor of GQ, will continue writing for the magazine and website as a Contributing Fashion Editor. Tom Stubbs, renowned and distinguished Menswear Stylist and Fashion Writer, has been announced as Contributing Fashion Editor. He and Carvell join a line-up of Contributing Fashion Editors, including Lou Stoppard.

Matt Kelly, Editor of The New European, joins GQ.co.uk as Contributing Editor. Guto Harri, former BBC Chief Political Correspondent and Communications Director for Mayor of London Boris Johnson’s administration at London City Hall, and Journalist Tanya Gold are also announced as Contributing Political Editors.

Matthew D’Ancona remains Political Editor of the magazine, with Alastair Campbell as Chief Political Interviewer.

Anna Conrad has joined the British GQ team as News and Features Editor for GQ.co.uk. GQ’s online audience has increased by 8% year on year, with the platform receiving an average of almost three million unique users per month, based on Google Analytics for the August to October 2017 period.