Magazine PR: The Lady Hires Taylor Herring.

LONDON, Wednesday 20th Janaury 2009; England’s first women’s weekly magazine, The Lady, has hired Taylor Herring, to handle its public relations in a bid to double its circulation in this, its 126th year.

Rachel Johnson, the new Editor, has introduced a full colour re-design and appointed a raft of high profile writers and regular columnists.

Taylor Herring will ensure that these changes are promoted to as wide an audience as possible and that The Lady, in turn, reaffirms its rightful place as England’s finest weekly.

Working closely with Rachel and publisher Ben Budworth, the agency will seek to raise the magazine’s profile, and that of its new editorial team, which include Lady Antonia Fraser, Sandy Toksvig and Penny Smith, and contributors such as Matthew d’Ancona, Will Self and Julie Burchill.

Rachel Johnson has been in national newspapers since the age of 23, when, after leaving Oxford, she became the first female graduate trainee at The Financial Times. She spent five years covering the bond markets and the economy for the FT, one of which was on secondment to the Foreign Office’s policy planning staff. She then moved to the BBC to work as a senior broadcast journalist for the BBC Radio 4 Current Affairs programme, the World Tonight, before leaving the country to pursue a freelance career – initially as a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph from Washington D.C. and then the Financial Times from Brussels.

For the last 12 years, Rachel has written weekly columns for a number of national newspapers including most recently the Sunday Times and the Evening Standard as well as the Daily Telegraph, and for magazines including Esquire, She, and Conde Nast’s Easy Living. She is a contributing editor of the Spectator, and sits on the Family Commission, among other voluntary sector commitments.

She has also written three books, The Mummy Diaries (Penguin, 2004), Notting Hell (Penguin, 2006) and Shire Hell (Penguin 2008), and is currently working on her third novel. Rachel is married and has three children. She divides her time between her homes in London and Exmoor.

Taylor Herring have handled projects for Time Out, Emap and IPC Media, as well as publishers Ebury Press.

Press Contact: Taylor Herring PR 0208 206 5151