—TalkTalk: Carphone Warehouse’s TalkTalk ISP—soon to spun out as a separately listed company—has named former Tesco and Sainsburys executive Dido Harding as its CEO. That means both sides of Carphone’s de-merged empire will be run by former supermarket managers: Best Buy Europe CEO Scott Wheway spent 20 years at Tesco.…

In the latest switch in its flip-flopping web strategy, Hearst’s National Magazine Company is ditching the GetLippy.com brand, replacing it with Company.co.uk, which doesn’t currently have its own site. NatMags took on GetLippy.com when it bought Handbag.com’s network of four women’s sites from Telegraph Media Group in 2006, and made…

—Esquire: The NatMags’ men’s title has launched its first editorial-focused UK website, a simple blog-based affair featuring lots of videos, lifestyle tips and top-five lists. Why has it taken Esquire so long to build a site? Editor Jeremy Langmead has a bullish answer: “For the past 18 months, we’ve focused…

—MEN Media: When GMG Regional Media said it was having trouble in the classified jobs market, it wasn’t joking. Despite the unit seeing year-on-yea decline in profits of 85 percent in 08/09, its MEN Media division in Manchester is now offering recruiters free job ads for the next six weeks…

NatMags, which was infamously slow to get enthusiastic about online, is now folding its Hearst Digital online division back in to the wider company, and making half a fifth of its staff redundant to boot, MediaWeek reports and we have confirmed. The restructure means the departure of Hearst Digital MD…

Whatever your views on how to keep the magazine business afloat, with UK sales shrinking by 95 million last year according to the PPA, it’s pretty clear something must be done. Sarah Clegg, MD of John Menzies Digital, thinks she has a solution - the digital replica editions her company…

For Hearst’s UK portfolio of consumer titles, this is the worst period of trading in two decades. That’s the approximation of CEO Duncan Edwards who had grim job of announcing almost 100 redundancies—about 15 percent of its workforce this morning. Edwards, also president and CEO of Hearst Magazines International, explains…

NatMags’ Hearst Digital - so often an online latecomer - is supposedly following IPC and Emap/Bauer by absorbing some of its magazines’ websites in to a single portal. Hearst will kill the sites for the Good Housekeeping, Country Living, House Beautiful and Coast mags, moving content to Allaboutyou.com, NMA says.…

Alicen Stenner, group digital marketing director and publisher at NatMags’ Handbag women’s site, is joining magazine publisher IPC Southbank as digital director. Time Warner-owned IPC created two similar new roles, one a digital director to the IPC Connect women’s mags unit and the other a digital advertising director for ad…

From the Sunday papers… - ITV: Private equity super-house Apax is interested in making another bid for ITV, anonymous “sources” tell the Financial Mail. Apax circled the broadcaster with big online ambitions back in 2005 as part of a bid mounted by Greg Dyke along with Time-Warner and Goldman. ITV’s…

Update: Nancy Cruickshank will become the CEO of VideoJug.com, an online video sharing site focussing on how-to and expert advice clips. She takes over from Dan Thompson, one of the founders of the company, who stays on as chairman. VideoJug has about 100 employees and is based in London and…

Update: Hearst has made an indicative offer of £700 million for the consumer division of Emap (LSE: EMA), reports the FT today (Monday, 8 October). It also reports that Phil Riley, ex-head of Chrysalis Radio, has put in a bid for the radio operations, and DLJ Merchant Banking Partners has…

NatMags will this autumn undergo a structural shakeup designed finally to execute a large-scale online strategy. The Hearst subsidiary will focus on two units - one to run its five online-only publications (including Handbag.com and GetLippy.com) and another to jointly manage print-online brands. CEO Duncan Edwards conceded: “We’re real newcomers…

As part of its redesign, women’s portal Handbag.com is adding MyHandbag, a personal news aggregator allowing readers to consume headlines from rival sites. Editorial director Debbie Djordjevic tells Press Gazette: “It’s basically like MyYahoo, in that people will be allowed to enter their own RSS feeds. They will be able…