Dylan Jones
GQ is bucking the recession with a huge investment in editorial, adding extra pages and new contributors, including Robbie Williams, Peter Mandelson and Amanda Platell.
The financial boost, believed to be in the region of £250,000, will result in 20 more editorial pages, 10 of them devoted to fashion. GQ is also expected to grab headlines with a forthcoming issue which features shots of Neil and Christine Hamilton naked.
Editor Dylan Jones stressed he was not going to "eradicate sexuality" from GQ but was hoping to increase the amount of investigative journalism, politics and foreign reporting.
"Next year is going to be very difficult for lots of people so we are making huge investment by adding 20 extra pages," he told Press Gazette. I am thrilled we have got Peter Mandelson and Robbie Williams writing in the same issue."
The former Cabinet Minister will write a political column from the January issue onwards and Jones is hoping Williams will also agree to become a regular contributor. Williams was approached through a mutual contact and would be paid the "going rate", said Jones, who this week was named best men’s magazine editor in the BSME Awards.
GQ has also signed up Sean Langan from the BBC2 series Langan Behind the Lines and Robin Morgan, editor of The Sunday Times Magazine. It has also poached Danny Kelly from Arena to write a regular music column.
Style guru Peter York will start a new column in February and Tom Sykes, former showbiz reporter on the Evening Standard, has joined as assistant features editor.
GQ is understood to have signed a deal with a national newspaper to promote the Hamiltons feature and picture spread based on the theme of "Innocence in the Garden of Eden".
GQ, which recently tested a smaller A5 format, will be hoping to reverse its 8 per cent sales decline in the latest ABCs announced in August.
by Ruth Addicott
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