Four members of the team at Foresight News have taken over the planning service in a management buyout from Centaur Media.
Foresight News is a subscription service for news organisations and PR clients to receive a calendar of upcoming news events to help with editorial and communications planning.
The brand has a partnership with Press Gazette in which it shares with us its news diary, a look ahead at the key events leading the news agenda, each week.
Clients listed on the Foresight News website include Reuters, CNN, Al Jazeera, News UK, AFP, Getty Images, and some UK Government departments.
Centaur acquired Foresight News in 2012 as part of an £8m deal for digital information company Profile, which also included online celebrity directory Red Pages, Fashion Monitor, Entertainment News and Year Ahead.
The team taking over the ownership of Foresight News is: publisher Nicole Wilkins, UK editor Rhys Morgan, head of news Jasper Wenban-Smith who have all been with the brand for around 15 years. They are also joined by Centaur’s head of engineering John Taylor-Tangen who will be chief technology officer for Foresight News.
Wilkins told Press Gazette: “We have worked here a long time and helped build it into what it is. Centaur was doing this strategic review – they have been divesting lots of the other brands – and we just thought in terms of looking for a new home for Foresight News, the best place was with us.”
The team taking over Foresight News are keeping the rest of its current staff (a small but unspecified number). They plan to continue what it does and expand it further at a later date.
The terms of the deal are confidential.
Centaur has divested several of its media brands this year. It sold Marketing Week and Creative Review to Haymarket Media Group for £3.9m in cash and The Lawyer to Triple Private Equity-owned Legal Benchmarking Group for £43m, both in September.
Centaur now consists of two main businesses: its Econsultancy training business and The Influencer Group, which is comprised of the Influencer Intelligence (now encompassing the former Red Pages) and Fashion & Beauty Monitor brands which work with PRs and journalists. It is also in the process of significantly downsizing its central functions.
Centaur said earlier this year it was conducting a strategic review of its business units to define its future strategy.
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