I remember learning from some top-class newspaper sub-editors about the importance of the cover of a print product that would go onto the shelves.
I remember learning about the positioning of words, headlines and pictures.
Of course, some of that came from the college course I completed in Radio and Journalism and some from my degree, but much was from being on the desk with some great journalists at the Hampshire Chronicle.
It was a crash course, for me, in what mattered, what sold, and they weren’t always the same.
I suppose it’s the same now with the front end of a website, but it was also the case when I was in ‘the chair’ at Boxing News.
When Claude Abrams departed Boxing News at the end of 2009, I had a few of my own ideas, and had come up with something of a mandate about how to put my own stamp on things.
Before I knew it, we were being tasked with a mandatory redesign, bringing out new publications and God knows what else – while embracing the advent of social media, YouTube and podcasts etc. – with a staff the same size as when the only concern had been a weekly print issue.
I digress.
Claude would occasionally share sales figures with me, and you could see the spikes when a Ricky Hatton or a Joe Calzaghe was on the front. They were considerable, in the region of 10-15 per cent per issue.
But times were changing and print media was starting to toil.
And with Hatton and Calzaghe gone, I was looking closely to see how we could match or surpass those spikes, and three fighters came to mind: Amir Khan, David Haye and Carl Froch.
Haye and Froch have been good friends since the amateurs, and Khan was not the divisive figure he apparently became, and at different points I tried different things with them.
Anyway, I remember putting Khan on the cover before his US debut fight with Paulie Malignaggi.
The fact it was Khan, fighting in New York against a recognisable name, I thought made it a banker. But it fell jarringly short and made me realise that Amir, as good as he was with the media, was not the next guy.
Froch, meanwhile, toiled on ITV4 or Primetime and had not broken through or across the divide from the hardcore. He also wasn’t the outspoken beast that he’d later become!
I felt I really pushed Froch through the mag, not because I liked him – although I did – but because he deserved it.
