James Brown (editor)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
James Brown (born September 1965) is a former editor and owner of English male-oriented lad mag magazines. He is the creative director of Cellcast-owned SUMO.TV, and a business entrepreneur.
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[edit] Early life
He went to Lawnswood High School in Lawnswood, north Leeds. He gained five O levels. In 1987 he joined the NME.
[edit] Magazines
From 1992-4 he was freelance journalist.
[edit] Loaded
He founded and became the editor of IPC Media-owned Loaded in 1994 with Tim Southwell (currently editor of Golf Punk), after being the deputy features editor at NME in 1992. In 1998, Loaded was selling around 450,000 copies a month.
[edit] GQ
After being this editor, he went on to edit Condé Nast-owned GQ (UK version) in July 1997, and he began feature more in your face pictures of partially-undressed women. He resigned as editor of GQ in February 1999 when an article about the 200 most stylish men of the 20th Century included Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, praising him for being stylish in the face of adversity.
[edit] IFG
His company, IFG (I Feel Good), founded in 1999, bought the Bizarre magazine in 2000 for £5m. The company was floated on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) in May 2000, raising £3.6m. In IFG, he created the magazine called Jack in August 2002 - a more clean-living version of Loaded. He created the film magazine Hotdog, later sold to Paragon Publishing in 2002. It also bought Viz in May 2001, buying it from John Brown Publishing and Fortean Times, in a deal (with Bizarre) worth about £6.4m. In October 2001, he increased the frequency of publications of Viz from two months to five weeks. His company IFG collapsed soon after, mostly due to the failure of Jack, being bought for £5.1m by Dennis Publishing in May 2003, netting Brown about £1m. Jack's readership had dropped to 30,000 by this stage.
[edit] Newspapers
He was asked by owners of the The Daily Sport, Sport Newspapers, in November 2007 to revamp their journalistic products with EMAP's Barry McIlheney.
[edit] Latest project
SUMO.TV aims to be the first company to broadcast user-generated (Web 2.0) web content - spectacular voyeurism - across all media platforms. This is a derivative of what YouTube has to offer. SUMO.TV has now 4m users permonth, generating about £124,000 per quarter. He has been involved with SUMO.TV since October 2006 with former editor of Bizarre, Alex Godfrey.
He also has a media consultancy called Black Ops.
[edit] Personal life
He is divorced with a son.
