RT departee

So the rumours are true. Gill Hudson is to leave Radio Times.

Mediaguardian has the story, which follows fast on the heels of rumours circulating around the TV listings magazine industry this morning. The Radio Times editor is off to Reader’s Digest, after a seven-year stint on the flagship magazine.

With last week’s RT redesign still settling in, do you think she’s left he magazine in a better state than when she joined?

Back in 2006, OTT spoke to Hudson.

“I actually didn’t want the job at the start,” she reveals. “I famously turned down Radio Times three times… One of the reasons I didn’t want to do it was I simply wasn’t interested in the magazine. I looked all the way through it and thought, ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do with this ? It just isn’t speaking to me’. So I went through it again, and I still felt the same. This was getting very concerning, because I’d accepted the job by this point. Then the third time I sat down with it, I suddenly had a complete switch in mindset and realised, ‘Actually, it’s not speaking to me because it’s not speaking to me. That’s not my problem, it’s the magazine’s problem’… It had lots and lots of regular columns stripped in that weren’t particularly linked to key programmes that week, and there was a sense of lack of surprise. For me a magazine is a treat. You need to kind of go, ‘Oh, I wonder what Radio Times is going to do this week?’. It was very flat and quite ponderous style. As soon as I got into that mindset I could see this magazine needed to start talking again. So my commitment was to do that.”