What Esquire thinks of his editorial is irrelevant, but it is much more worrying for the curly-haired boy wonder that the prevailing rumour is that this approach has annoyed his mentor, Newhouse.The April issue of GQ carried former Brookside actress Anna Friel on the cover alongside the cover-line: “What’s a nice girl like me doing in a magazine like this?” The diminutive, 70-year-old Newhouse is rumoured to have turned a nasty shade of puce on reading these lines. To him, GQ is a global brand with heritage and class – “What is a little-known former soap actress doing on the cover of my magazine?” is much more likely to have been his response, according to informed sources.For all this, losing Brown would be such an embarrassment to Conde Nast that it is unlikely in the near future. If they estimate that it sells better than it really does, the over-estimate comes out of the next period’s average. GQ is rumoured to have some sales to “pay back” from the last period. In contrast, its rival Esquire is thought to have under-estimated its final issue’s sale last time, so will get to add some on to its January-to-June period this year.Esquire is also putting pressure on GQ by picking up some fashion advertisers, such as Hermes and Cerrutti, who have been using the magazine since it launched and have never before entertained Esquire.Esquire believes the reason they have switched is to do with the environment that Brown has created at GQ – much more sex and general laddishness, despite denials when he joined that he was planning to turn GQ into Loaded.

Judy is the viewers’ champion, you see – caring big sister to Anne Robinson’s nagging aunt. Her mission? To show the upside as well as the downside of being a consumer.”It’s broad-brush consumer journalism with a light touch – not aggressive or hectoring,” explains Helen Scott, the show’s executive producer. Monthly magazines’ sales figures are totted up every six months and they must estimate the final sale of the last magazine in the period. If the magazine does manage 140,000 sales, that would still be less than McKinnon’s best figure, 148,000, and would be the first time in the UK version’s history that it has registered a year-on-year drop in sales.To make matters worse, the magazine’s sales figures are due to be squeezed anyway because of a over-declaration in its final figures last time around. This should be a perfectly healthy figure for a magazine that hasn’t heaped itself with free books and give-aways, but unfortunately it would be less than the sales of the unfortunate Mr McKinnon – who, remember, was pushed out for poor sales growth. Subscriptions, overseas sales and bulk sales to retailers or airlines may push this up to around 140,000 by August. Audited figures for his second six months at the helm will not be released until August, but industry rumour puts full-price news-stand sales of the magazine at just 80,000.

Newhouse reportedly felt that not only had the previous editor, Angus McKinnon, failed to increase sales fast enough, but that he was not colourful enough. He felt that the magazine needed another editor like Michael VerMeulen, McKinnon’s predecessor, who had died of a cocaine overdose.
However, the sales magic Mr Brown showed at Loaded is yet to materialise at GQ. It is rumoured that it was not Conde Nast’s managing director, Nicholas Coleridge, who was keen on Brown, but no less a figure than Si Newhouse, Conde Nast’s patriarch and principal shareholder. Mr Brown is now at GQ, where he was lured with a large salary explicitly to grow the title’s circulation. The irony of Loaded’s happy 50th-issue celebrations last week was not lost in magazine circles, where rumours about the fate of the magazine’s mad-genius creator, James Brown, abound. Instead, says Jacob Weisberg, a former New Republic writer, it is the timeless tale of the ambitious cutting corners to get ahead.Washington journalism circles still haven’t forgotten or forgiven the Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for a made-up story. Cooke’s admission that she had made up a an eight- year-old heroin addict called Jimmy took some of the shine off of the Post’s post-Watergate glory and the newspaper handed the Pulitzer back.Most likely is that Glass suffered, like all jobbing journalists, from the freelancer’s fear: the work running out.

Ms Salzman says she alerted clients to the Seventies’ revival years before it happened, and BT’s Ian Pearson said that a wristwatch phone was inevitable – Swatch recently unveiled just such a product which should be in the shops early next year.. “Maybe it was ahead of its time, but it was all very vague and clients weren’t convinced,” said a spokesman.Meanwhile, the futurologists remain confident as some of their predictions have already been proved correct. One chairman of an agency which no longer employs a futurologist says: “At the end of the day it is very expensive and I’m not sure how helpful it really is to clients because it’s so full of ifs and maybes and intangibles.”HHCL & Partners, which attracted plenty of industry derision in 1989 when it first appointed a futurologist, says it was an experiment that failed. What we do is help clients come to a decision about how to make the future work for them and their brands.”While some ad agencies are investing in future departments others are less convinced. We don’t rule out trends but we are dealing with reality.”And Mike Wallis, managing director of BBH Futures, adds: “I’m not Mystic Mike with his crystal ball. BBH, Ammirati Puris Lintas, Leo Burnett and, most recently, Ogilvy & Mather have all established departments to identify possible future trends but some are at pains to disassociate themselves from the more fanciful realms of futurology.Mike Ainsworth, head of Future Focus at Leo Burnett, says: “There is a futures epidemic out there. The companies which come to us, such as Nike, tend to be pretty forward thinking and take a long-term view.”It’s a gap in the market that a growing number of ad agencies have spotted.