By Ruth Addicott
‘Damaging’: Max Power’s nurse
Emap has suspended in-house magazine EM – just a month after it highlighted a row between two of its titles.
Earlier this year EM ran a story about its raunchy car magazine Max Power, whose agony aunt Nurse Jakki was criticised by the Red Cross for contravening the Geneva Conventions Act by wearing a red cross on her outfit.
Nursing Times news focus editor Rob Munro responded in the next issue with an angry letter criticising Max Power and Nurse Jakki for "damaging Emap’s reputation within the nursing profession". It said: "At the risk of sounding po-faced, images of nurses in PVC appearing in sister publications do little to increase our appeal to an audience that is central to Emap’s continued success. Surely it’s time for some joined-up thinking on what this company is doing?"
The row sparked amusement among staff at Emap and made front- page news in Press Gazette.
However, Emap group communications director Miranda Acland stressed the suspension of EM was part of a wider restructure that has also resulted in two redundancies. EM editor Charlotte Coleman recently left to move to Pregnancy & Birth so it was a "good moment" to rethink the plans for an in-house magazine, she said.
Staff are now expected to be consulted as to whether they want keep EM or close it permanently. "Each of the four divisions does a newsletter, so we need to think how a company-wide magazine can complement those things," she said. "I think there are a small number of people who feel a bit aggrieved that we did it suddenly, but I am sure it’s not representative of the whole company. It is difficult for a magazine to cover the breadth of Emap meaningfully and that is what we need to think about."
The restructure also coincides with the departure in September of EM publisher and founding editor John Dilley, who is leaving Emap after 10 years to launch his own publishing and communications consultancy.
Acland said there would be further changes to the department, including a new internal communications manager to oversee Emap’s trade press and an extra person to manage the company’s intranet Planetemap and a forthcoming relaunch of emap.com.
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