Spectator Business is due to launch at the end of April with an initial print run of between 40,000 and 45,000.
It will be aimed at the same readership as The Business; business leaders working in investment banking, private equity, the hedge-fund area, analysts, researchers and fund managers.
Contributors for The Spectator’s business pages, including Matthew Lynn and Judi Bevan, will also write for the new title while The Business’s former editor and City AM’s incoming editor Allister Heath is likely to contribute.
Spectator Business will be in the same marketplace as the well-established, authoritive Management Today and Spears Wealth Management. Spectator Business editor Martin Vander Weyer says it will have The Spectator’s entertaining tone.
‘It will have a quite different feel from The Business and will have recognisable elements from The Spectator. Despite heroic efforts by the team, it wasn’t commercially a triumph and something had to be done. We will be elegant and entertaining, thoughtful and provocative rather than gritty.”
Vander Weyer was an investment banker for 15 years. Latterly he was a director of Barclays de Zoete Wedd – the forerunner of Barclays Capital. He left the City in 1992 and, with no journalism qualifications, he joined The Spectator as a contributor.
He claims his reputation as a journalist is based on being able to make business and economic subject matter ‘accessible and entertaining to the general reader”.
His roles at The Spectator have included associate editor in 1992 under Dominic Lawson. He was City editor at The Week from 1997 to 2001, and returned to The Spectator where he edited Conservative-contract magazine Heartland, and edited The Spectator’s 175th anniversary issue in 2003. In 2005 he became business editor under Boris Johnson and established the business section as it is now under Matthew D’Ancona.
Spectator Business will go on sale for £4.50.
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