Quest for success

RRN Chief Executive Jim Brown, who was the Bolton-based Chief Executive of Reed Northern Newspapers for three years until March,1990, acted quickly as the catalyst for a management buy-out bid. His team fought stiff industry opposition and eventually triumphed - with the backing of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, a renowned New York investment institution making its first venture into Europe.

The new company, which has a ready-made stable of evening, paid-for weekly and free newspapers, is poised to become a major player in the industry.

It intends to grow the business organically and through acquisitions.

Mr Brown is now Chairman and Chief Executive of a company with a national workforce of about 2,700. There are five other ex-RRN members of the board - Paul Davidson, Deputy Chief Executive, John Pfeil, Finance Director, Iain Aiken and Phil Radburn, Regional Managing Directors and Commercial Director David Christie, who also used to work in Bolton. It is completed by representatives of KKR.

Liverpool-born Mr Aiken, who is based at the Lancashire Evening Telegraph office in Blackburn, is responsible for Newsquest's Lancashire and Cheshire divisions.

"This is a major new British media group," Mr Aiken said this week. "It is going to be an exciting time from now on."

He added: "Whilst the future of our business will continue to be mainly in the printed word, we will be looking at other, electronic forms of delivery as well." The company is already assessing future prospects with the provision of Bolton Evening News and Lancashire Evening Telegraph stories for the Internet, the world-wide computer system which is rapidly growing in global significance.

But he stressed they remained fully committed to the Bolton Evening News and the Bolton Journal.

He said investment over the last two years had provided "the most modern pre-press technology in Europe" and the Evening News was one of the company's major titles.

It is a far cry from his days at Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool, where John Lennon was a "character" three or four years ahead of him. After gaining an English degree at Cambridge, Mr Aiken taught in Norway for a year before joining the staff at Bolton School.

While he was there, living in Chorley New Road and then in Egerton, he coached the under-15 football team and ran the Literary and Debating Society.

He started keeping goal for the Old Boltonians soccer club round about that time and continued until he was 45.

In 1971, although he felt he had been successful as a teacher, he decided on a career switch. He joined the advertising department at the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo, which was looking for people who could be trained for management positions. Four years later he was Display Advertising Manager.

In October, 1978, he and four others launched the Citizen group of free newspapers in Blackburn.

When the business was sold to Reed in 1988 he was Group Managing Director of an operation which had six main papers in 14 editions.

After 10 months in the same job under the new owners, he moved to Cheshire to take charge of the newly-acquired Reed newspaper group previously owned by entrepreneur Eddie Shah. Mr Aiken then took over as the regional managing director of Reed Regional Newspapers' Lancashire operation in October, 1992.

He and his wife Sheila, who is a teacher in Blackburn, have a 23-year-old son Gavin, a member of the new company's computer systems team, and an 18-year-old daughter Miranda, who is at Cambridge University reading veterinary science.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.