Successfully relaunched New Skys, the leading overseas property website, which consistently appears in top 10 Google ranking. Responsibility for website editorial; writing development copy; managing four editorial and PR staff. Produced and issued weekly newsletter to 40,000; handled press releases, PR and media trips; internal and external publicity for key clients. Made redundant after downturn in overseas property market.

Editorial responsibility for 100 staff across 26 magazines for Highbury’s digital and specialist consumer magazine divisions. These include computing; digital photography; digital art; gardening; woodworking; modelling and craft magazines.
The job included managing staff across two separate offices; masterminding successful launches and relaunches; regular cover meetings; issue post-mortems; strategic planning; board presentations; brand-eye and market maps; budgetary control; staff management and appraisals and a complete range of hands-on editorial tasks. In addition, I devised and ran an editorial training and development scheme, where trainees learned about both the basics of magazine craft and the business. Two of my cadets were finalists in The Guardian and Mirror Student of the Year 2005 awards.
Highbury was sold off, after getting into financial difficulty, following a takeover by ex-Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie.

Before I took over the editorship, Amateur Gardening was losing readers – and money.
I began a radical editorial transformation of the weekly, to appeal to an emerging female gardening audience and steal sales from the monthlies that dominate the market.
Under my editorship, we went on to become Britain’s best-selling weekly for the first time in more than 25 years. We also forged ahead with successful brand extensions, such as our Golden Trowel industry awards to mark the best plants, people and products in British gardening.
Despite having low page rates, less than of those 10 years ago, I used clever financial juggling and good negotiation to attract high-profile TV gardeners every week, including Alan Titchmarsh and Charlie Dimmock.
Our Allotments 2000 Campaign led to an All Party Parliamentary Inquiry on The Future of Allotments – the first about allotments for more than 50 years – in which Amateur Gardening was one of the first consumer magazines to give evidence to a House of Commons Select Committee.
For that, I won Periodical Publishers’ Association Campaign of the Year Award. The magazine was also a sponsor of the All Party Parliamentary Gardening and Horticulture Group of MPs.

I joined Canada’s award-winning provincial business magazine as editor, but, after my daughter had a spell in hospital, she needed to re-take A-levels, so I returned to the UK.

As editor-in-chief, I secured a series of ABC sales increases, making Amateur Gardening the number one newstrade title for the first time in 25 years, with weekly sales of up to 66,000. In November 2001, I was voted the UK’s Best Lifestyle Magazine Editor by the British Society of Magazine Editors. Under my editorship, Amateur Gardening was the only gardening magazine to increase sales in four ABC periods and was the best-performing magazine for six out of eight periods. Its brand extensions thrived, too. The three-day National Amateur Gardening Show, of which I was a director, attracted more than 46,000 visitors and record revenue.
In addition, I introduced a new national Amateur Gardening roadshow, visiting more than
30 venues across the UK and promoting the brand to 500,000 show-goers – with a profit to the magazine. I also helped set up a subscriptions-generating website at www.amateurgardening.com
In my role as publisher, profits nearly doubled in two years. This took the magazine into the Top-20 earners at IPC Media for the first time and it was the best-performing magazine in the Leisure, Sport and Recreation division for the first time. Subscriptions jumped 800% in three years and in 2002 the magazine won the Best UK Subscription Campaign Award from the Periodical Publishers’ Association.

Associate for Phil Dowding PR, handling 30 national, regional and local clients. Am currently working freelance with them.