Gay Magazine ‘Attitude' Sold
Vitality Publishing, the owner of lads' magazine Loaded, has sold gay lifestyle magazine Attitude to a new joint-venture publishing and events company.
The company, which acquired Loaded and three other titles from IPC Media in October 2010, was subject to a management buyout in January, led by publishing director Peter Hatch, who took the role of managing director.
Attitude has been spun off into newly formed publishing and events company Attitude Media, which has three shareholders.
Triactive, which had owned Vitality, takes a 50% stake in Attitude Media; 25% is held personally by Julian Agostini, the owner of Mash Media, which publishes business titles including Exhibition News and Conference News. The remaining 25% is held personally by Darren Styles, owner of Stream Publishing, which handles customer and in-flight publishing for Vauxhall, Flybe and CityJet.
Styles will become publishing director at Attitude Media, which has 20 editorial and design staff, while Agostini is to launch an events division. The fledgling division, which currently has four staff, is to launch Club With Attitude to mark the magazine's 18th birthday in April, and the Attitude awards in October.
Attitude is published every four weeks at a price of £4.25 for the printed edition. It also has 5,000 digital-only subscribers via its website and is available as an iPad edition.
Vitality has previously sold off titles such as Women's Fitness, which was acquired by Dennis Publishing in July last year.
Triactive, the former parent company of Vitality Publishing, also owns Magazine Cloner, which makes digital versions of about 300 titles including the iPad version of the Independent newspaper.
• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".
Comments