Reveal: tackling hard news
NatMags has launched its new women’s weekly Reveal – calling it four magazines in one.
Editor Sarah Edwards said the magazine combined the editorial features of celebrity, real life and lifestyle titles, plus a TV guide.
Comparisons have been made with Emap’s Closer, launched two years ago, which has a circulation of 500,000.
Reveal is priced at £1 with a print run of 500,000 and is backed by a £16m advertising campaign.
Edwards said Reveal has the emotional clout of the real life titles and the gloss and glamour of weekly celebrity magazines. She promised it would make women “laugh, gasp and cry”.
“The main thing about our celebrity content is that we are not just blindly following the news agenda of other newspapers and magazines. Our stories really do pack an emotional punch. Our real life section has extraordinary stories about everyday women,” she added.
Many of the 35 editorial staff have experience on newspapers as well as magazines. Edwards joins from H Bauer where she was on special projects for five years. Before that she was acting editor of That’s Life and spent many years on news and features for The Sun and the News of the World.
Her deputy, Maria Trkulja, is a former editor of Hello! who has also worked on the Sunday Mirror .
Edwards believes the mix of experience will help the direction of the magazine. She said: “I think the newsy aspect is very important. Firstly we’ve the pace of a newspaper as far as celebrity and real life is concerned so we will be tackling hard news stories where they are interesting to women.
“The benefits are that we have a very hard working, determined, professional team of journalists who will be consistently breaking both real life and celebrity stories.”
Other staff include Kirsty Rhodes, previously Closer ‘s deputy features editor, who is associate editor, features. The celebrity editor is Sally Eyden, formerly Night and Day ‘s entertainments editor.
Reveal has been developed and launched by NatMags but will become a joint venture with Australian Consoldated Press (ACP) once the partnership is fully operational.
NatMags, whose experience of women’s weeklies has been limited to Best, wants to draw on ACP’s expertise in that area.Group publishing director Jessica Burley said: “We nurture our brands for the long term.”
Duncan Edwards, NatMags managing director added: “We are launching into a growth market.We are confident that within three years Reveal will rank alongside our other power brands.”
Free promotional issues were available on Tuesday. The first issue goes on sale on 19 October.
By Sarah Lagan
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