How Crash's publisher Newsfield died in its second incarnation

[PeteProdge]

"The financial director had embezzled half a million pounds out of the company" is the TL;DR answer. Or more like TL;DL (L for listen) because this is in audio format.

Newsfield - the publisher of 8-bit magazines Crash, Zzap and Amtix - breathed its last breath in late 1991, but it made a comeback of sorts, as Europress Impact bought up what was left, including their fairly-recently launched 16-bit computer/console mags, so it was meant to have a future, and it did for a while, lasting into 1994.

Of all places to find this story, it's on this podcast about old editions of Top Of The Pops. The main presenter (Al Needham) used to write for a Sega mag Mean Machines, and while reminiscing about Rage Against The Machine, he brought up his time in Ludlow working on a console magazine. Instantly I knew it had to be Newsfield-related. Anyway, there's a small bit about the ZX Spectrum side of things, so Crash gets a mention, although Al conflates the Speccy with the ZX81. The stuff about partying with the Freys is quite amusing, and then it hits the sad part where the financial director just killed a company through embezzlement and that stuck loads of people on the dole queue.

Skip to 19m51s on Part Four of this episode to hear it: https://chartmusiccouk.wordpress.com/20 ... rank-bald/

Of course I went down a massive rabbit hole, downloading PDFs of Mega Machines and finding out from the flannel panel who the financial director was at Europress Impact. And I found something astonishing. Since wiping out Europress, he committed financial fraud yet again, landing him with serious jail time and he tried to avoid it by breaking the law!: https://www.shropshirestar.com/news/201 ... from-firm/

(Of course, by 1992, Crash was very very very loosely a part of Sinclair User, and practically non-existent there. So really, this scandal didn't really have much impact - excuse the pun - on the Speccy mags around then.)

[PeteProdge]

^^ Tch, Mega Machines, not Mean Machines.

(Mean Machines was some EMAP thing for consoles.)

[5MinuteRetro]

Skip to 19m51s on Part Four of this episode to hear it: https://chartmusiccouk.wordpress.com/20 ... rank-bald/

I love throwaway anecdotes like the one aired here: they bring to life what as a (much) younger person I fantasised it'd be like working for the likes of Newsfield. How I'd have loved to have been part of that company, at that time (well, perhaps four or five years before). Who here wouldn't? I suspect I'm still in a little in denial that it all ended 30+ years ago! Anyway, thanks for that -- nice find.