Friday, January 19, 2007

Here's your hat, what's your hurry? Hello! dumps its Canadian management

So much for the Canadian edition. So much for a particularly Canadian spin on celebrity coverage. Gone yesterday were Hello! Canada's publisher, Shelley Middlebrook, editor Christopher Loudon and art director Benjamin MacDonald. Rogers Publishing, which launched a joint venture Canadian Hello! magazine only six months ago, has essentially ditched the Canadian operation in favour of it being run from the Madrid head office. Hello! originated as Hola! in Spain and went on to spin off a very successful British version.

A skeleton crew, made up of managing editor Ciara Hunt (formerly editor-at-large) and someone from advertising, will report to Countess Isabella de Courson, the Madrid-based editorial director of international publishing, according to a story by James Adams in the Globe and Mail.

This is not the first instance of a big publishing company getting in the celebrity publishing game and bailing out in almost indecent haste; Torstar's venture into celebrity publishing, Weekly Scoop, also lasted only a few months.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

This was a clear case of the upper management (Editoral Director, Lise Ravery and VP Consumer Marketing, Tracey McKinley, ) covering their own asses.
For months the editor and art director where bullied by these two and the strong handed circ dept. into running stories and adjusting design templates that clearly went against the international editoral objectives and guidelines of the magazine. Madrid, obviously angered wanted change.
Both Ravery and McKinley would take no responisblity for their interference but clearly sacraficed those who built any of the success and integrity the magazine ever had.
Hats of to Rivary for her outstanding abilities to defned her team as "Editoral director"....nice work!

9:04 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

C'mon. Stop kidding yourself. Did you ever see the magazine in question? No matter the internal politics, Hello! was a dog to begin with. Same with Scoop. Canada is an extremely tough market in which to start a magazine and slavish copies of foreign products have limited chances of success, esp. when the real thing is available on the same newsstand.

8:03 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The Canadian edition has very much out performed both Scoop and the UK edition on the newstand. Just a shame that those that launched it and contributed to the success are gone

10:39 pm  

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