TI Media Ltd. (formerly International Publishing Company, IPC Magazines Ltd, IPC Media and Time Inc. UK) was a consumer magazine and digital publisher in the United Kingdom, with a portfolio selling over 350 million copies each year. Most of its titles now belong to Future plc.
The British magazine publishing industry in the mid-1950s was dominated by a handful of companies, principally the Associated Newspapers (founded by Lord Harmsworth in 1890), Odhams Press Ltd, Newnes/Pearson, and the Hulton Press, which fought each other for market share in a highly competitive marketplace.
Fleetway
In 1958 Cecil Harmsworth King, chairman of the newspaper group, The Daily Mirror Newspapers Limited which included the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Pictorial (now the Sunday Mirror), together with provincial chain West of England Newspapers, made an offer for Amalgamated Press. The offer was accepted, and in January 1959 he was appointed its chairman.
Within a few months he changed its name to Fleetway Publications, Ltd. after the name of its headquarters, Fleetway House in London’s Farringdon Street.[2]
Shortly thereafter, Odhams Press absorbed both George Newnes and the Hulton Press. King saw an opportunity in this to rationalise the overcrowded women’s magazine market, in which Fleetway and Newnes were the major competitors, and made a bid for Odhams on behalf of Fleetway that was too attractive to ignore. Fleetway took over Odhams in the month of March 1961.[3]
International Publishing Company
In consequence, King controlled publishing interests which included two national daily and two national Sunday newspapers (the newspaper interests being informally tagged The Mirror Group), along with almost one hundred consumer magazines, more than two hundred trade and technical periodicals, and interests in book publishing. This included the combined business interests of Fleetway, Odhams, and Newnes.
All of the companies involved had been acquired without any significant change in management, save for the appointment of Mirror Group directors as chairmen. In 1963 all the companies were combined by the creation of a parent (or “holding”) company called the International Publishing Company (known informally as IPC). All of the existing companies would continue to exist, but as IPC subsidiaries.[4]
IPC then set up a management development department in 1965, to rationalise its holdings, so that its various subsidiaries would no longer be in competition with each other for the same markets. This led to a reorganisation of the Group, in 1968, into six divisions:
- IPC Newspapers – including The People and The Sun (soon sold), as well as the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror
- IPC Magazines – consumer magazines and comics
- IPC Trade and Technical – specialist magazines (later known as IPC Business Press Ltd.)
- IPC Books – all book publishing (headed by Paul Hamlyn, whose own company had been acquired by IPC).
- IPC Printing – all non-newspaper printing operations (headed by Arnold Quick, whose own company had also been acquired by IPC).
- IPC New Products – launching pad for products that used new technology (headed by Alistair McIntosh).
All the divisions were headed by chairmen who originated in Mirror Group, except for Hamlyn, Quick and McIntosh.
IPC Magazines
The turmoil at IPC in 1969 led to major consolidations in the joint comics publishing divisions, IPC Magazines Ltd., which was under the responsibility of Jack Legrand, formerly the managing editor of Fleetway’s juvenile publications.[5] Odhams’ Power Comics line of titles were cancelled, as was Hulton Press‘s long-running adventure comic Eagle (merging with Fleetway’s Lion from 2 May 1969). The humour comic Giggle, aimed at the slightly younger market dominated by Fleetway’s Buster, was also dropped, being merged into Buster in the spring of 1969.[6] Buster, like Odhams’ Smash!, also now became a publication of IPC Magazines Ltd. (IPC Magazines also took over another UK publisher, City Magazines, around this time.)
| Successor | Future plc |
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