{"id":4286,"date":"2010-11-04T14:02:19","date_gmt":"2010-11-04T13:02:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uk.cision.com\/?p=1731"},"modified":"2021-12-03T13:21:29","modified_gmt":"2021-12-03T12:21:29","slug":"journalist-spotlight-ruth-prickett-editor-of-financial-management","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/blog\/journalist-spotlight-ruth-prickett-editor-of-financial-management\/","title":{"rendered":"Journalist Spotlight \u2013 Ruth Prickett, Editor of Financial Management"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cision Europe recently reviewed the UK\u2019s financial media industry and produced various rankings<\/a> across social and print media, including the top 25 UK finance magazines<\/a>. Top place went to Financial Management, the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants\u2019 magazine. It covers all aspects of managing the finances of organisations and the role played by management accountants from financial controllers and analysts to FDs and group CFOs.<\/p>\n

Ruth Prickett has been Editor of Financial Management since 2003, having joined the title in 2000. From early days as a sub-editor on the weekly Estates Gazette, she has worked on a variety of business titles including CIPD magazine People Management and Accounting Technician. She has also founded and continues to run her own magazine, Illustration.<\/p>\n

\u201cI studied history at Cambridge University and when I went up people were leaving with three or four job offers,\u201d Ruth says. \u201cWhen I graduated in the depths of the 1990s recession most companies weren\u2019t recruiting anyone at all and the \u2018milk round\u2019 fairs had pretty much dried up.\u201d Ruth\u2019s first journalistic break was at a small private magazine aimed at rich tourists to London, distributed in the big hotels and airport lounges. \u201cThey\u2019d just got their first computers so I learnt to make up the magazine on a Mac Classic. I did everything from chasing ads, buying stamps and fetching and carrying ad copy from the big agencies to fobbing off the landlords when they complained that we were behind on the rent\u201d. However, Ruth did get the opportunity to review theatre, film and restaurants and after nine months moved to Estates Gazette as sub-editor.<\/p>\n

After Estates Gazette, Ruth took on the role of sub-editor\/features writer at the fortnightly magazine People Management. She says: \u201cPeople Management provided excellent experience and a lot of the team were still in their mid-twenties so we had fun. After a stint on the news desk, I then moved across to be deputy editor on the monthly title Accounting Technician when Redactive won that contract from the AAT.\u201d<\/p>\n

A year later Accounting Technician\u2019s editor became head of magazines at CIMA. She relaunched Management Accounting as Financial Management and introduced a separate student magazine called CIMA Insider. Ruth was offered the twin roles of deputy editor on the CIMA member magazine and editor of CIMA Insider. \u201cThe idea of splitting the magazine wasn\u2019t a bad one,\u201d she comments, \u201cbut I\u2019m not sure anyone realised the full effect that online advertising would have on recruitment sales. The idea then was to make it more generally appealing to business readers and less focused on the technical aspects of management accountancy. Readers, however, liked the layout, but disliked any impression that it was \u2018dumbing down\u2019 or losing its specialist focus.\u201d By 2003 the magazine had re-introduced some of the in-depth technical accountancy pieces. It was then outsourced to Caspian Publishing and re-amalgamated into a single title. \u201cMembers generally welcomed having the student articles back in the main magazine because it enabled them to keep abreast of changes to the syllabus and helped those managing students to understand what they were studying. This also coincided with the period when continuing professional development was made compulsory, so member development gained importance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Financial Management has always been regarded as a key benefit for CIMA members and students and is the main channel of professional information for most of them. \u201cMember surveys show that it is well read and that it enjoys a very high level of member satisfaction. This is great, but it does mean that readers feel proprietorial about it and are happy to let you know exactly what they think of changes to format, content and design\u201d Ruth says. \u201cThe up side to this, of course, is that we get a lot of interesting material from members who regularly contact me and ask about opportunities to contribute articles or case studies. We are also lucky that the subject is so wide ranging \u2013 almost everything and anything to do with managing finances in business \u2013 and that we have such an amazing pool of CIMA members to talk to. Our readers occupy a vast range of roles in organisations of all types and sizes in over 150 countries around the world, so it\u2019s a vast and fascinating subject. The financial crisis of the past few years and continuing issues surrounding the recovery have provided opportunities for us to cover incredibly interesting international topics \u2013 from the latest thoughts on risk analysis and management to the ethics of investing in certain markets and currency wars.\u201d<\/p>\n

CIMA\u2019s major growth areas are south-east Asia, South America and China, so Ruth says Financial Management has huge potential to develop stories of global financial significance. \u201cThe continuing focus on economic recovery and international markets means that management accountants have never been in a more important position, both for their organisations and for national economies. Non-accountants sometimes think accountancy sounds dull, but in reality the work our readers do (and, therefore, the things we can write about) underpins everything that affects all of us \u2013 from what we earn to where we shop and what we buy to how much we pay, our pensions and new product development.\u201d<\/p>\n

CIMA recently awarded the contract for Financial Management to Seven Squared, so it\u2019s all change again at Christmas. \u201cThe change of publisher in the new year will lead to a redesign and some changes, but CIMA has made it clear that it does not intend us to make any fundamental alterations to the current editorial mix or the topics we cover. The key subjects that we write about will, of course, remain as important as ever, since they reflect the main concerns of our readers and the challenges they face in their day-to-day roles.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to working on Financial Management, Ruth set up her own magazine, Illustration, with a couple of colleagues in 2004 and it publishes quarterly. It covers all aspects of illustration \u2013 from books, magazines and posters to film storyboards and packaging, historical and modern (www.illustration-mag.com<\/a>). \u201cIt\u2019s great to be able to use the skills I\u2019ve gained as a sub, features writer and news hack over the years to produce something that\u2019s totally our own and is unique in its market. It doesn\u2019t make our fortunes (we plough most of the proceeds back into production) but it\u2019s enabled me to meet some of my heroes (eg David McKee, creator of Mr Benn) and to learn huge amounts about a subject I\u2019m fascinated by \u2013 I\u2019ve always collected illustrated books, but this has taken me into areas that I knew nothing about, from 1960s graphic novels to medieval German wood-engravings. A more unexpected advantage is that it\u2019s given me real insights into setting up and running your own small business, which has proved extremely useful for understanding this side of FM\u2019s work.\u201d<\/p>\n

UPDATE: Ruth’s Pitching Tips for PRs<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Download Cision’s Finance Briefing Book – 50 UK\/US premium profiles for key finance influencers, including Ruth Prickett<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cision Europe recently reviewed the UK\u2019s financial media industry and produced various rankings across social and print media, including the top 25 UK finance magazines. Top place went to Financial Management, the Chartered Institute of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":322,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3532],"tags":[3059,3062],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4286"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/322"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4286"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":137325,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4286\/revisions\/137325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}