Mandy Appleyard, editor of News of the World’s women’s magazine Fabulous, is stepping down four months after its launch.
Appleyard, who has been editor for over a year, will stay on as senior contributing editor when she leaves on 31 July, when deputy editor Sally Eyden will be promoted to editor.
A former head of features at Press Association and part of the launch teams at Closer and Grazia, Appleyard has said she will be working on ‘other projects across the magazine and newspaper industry”.
She said in a statement today: ‘It’s been a privilege to launch Fabulous. This has been one of the most exciting chapters of my working life and I’m proud of what the team and I have achieved. I’m looking forward to my continued involvement with Fabulous as senior contributing editor.
‘I also plan to finish my MA in Creative Writing and am looking forward to working on a variety of other journalism projects.
‘I’d like to thank Colin Myler and Jane Johnson for their support, and to acknowledge the dedicated team who have worked so hard to make the magazine what it is. I couldn’t have asked for a better deputy than Sally Eyden, so I am delighted that she will be leading Fabulous into the future.”
Jane Johnson, the News of the World’s deputy editor, said: ‘I’d like to thank Mandy for her huge contribution to the launch of Fabulous magazine. She has created a great team and been absolutely key to the magazine’s successful development.”
Eyden, a former assistant features editor at The Daily Mirror, said she was ‘looking forward to the challenge’of running the magazine.
Fabulous was launched amid much fanfare in February and replaced the paper’s 26-year-old Sunday supplement. The 76-page magazine has about 23 journalists, and according to Appleyard was designed to be ‘unashamedly feminine’in its approach. News of the World said the magazine ‘has the biggest reach in the magazine market with four million female readers every Sunday”.
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