About
From Cub To King
Taking a first job as a cub reporter on The Tamworth Herald, Peter Jackson worked his way though a series of provincial newspapers to reach Fleet Street where he quickly decided his future lay in magazines and proceeded to build a remarkably successful career.
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His first editorship was of DRIVE, produced by the Reader’s Digest for distribution to the 4 million members of the Automobile Association, thereby making it the largest motoring magazine in the world from Day 1.
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He then launched TVTimes which became Britain’s most popular family magazine and followed by creating Sunday magazine, a colour supplement for the News of the World which averted a threatened terminal decline in its sales.
Taking over the prestigious Sunday Times Magazine he proceeded to give it increased topicality.
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Finally he launched ELLE magazine into Britain, devising a formula for interpreting its distinctive ethos that its French publishers followed in launching no less than 44 other foreign editions around the world
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"Peter Jackson is the Harold Evans* of the Magazine World"
DAVID HEPWORTH
*Harold Evans, legendary Editor of the Sunday Times, was named by his fellow editors as Newspaper Editor of the 20th Century
An Unlikely Candidate
Peter Jackson was drawn into politics when Grayling Publishing was called in by the then Liberal Party to save its rapidly dwindling party newspaper, the Liberal News. Coming from a Liberal background and knowing the party was cash-strapped, he volunteered to take the journal over as honorary chairman and set about streamlining its production costs, modernising its design and appointing an ex-Fleet street editor with orders to sharpen its political views -- prepared to provoke internal controversy to the point where the party journal was criticising its own party’s timid policies.
He went so far as to stand as a Liberal candidate in the 1979 General Election, fighting a colourful campaign as “Jackson for Action” in what was to prove an impregnable Tory stronghold. But in coming a gallant second with 18,000 votes he could claim one first. Lacking an army of workers to knock on doors he took to the streets throughout the constituency blaring out Liberal slogans through a megaphone while riding pillion on a scooter driven by his old friend, Stirling Moss
“We could at least claim to be the fastest canvassers in the whole general election”
Peter’s political career ended with a summons to go and work for the not-very-Liberal Rupert Murdoch.
