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Book trade weekly Publishing News is to close, with the issue of 25th July to be its last. The 29-year-old magazine attributed the closure to advertisers moves to shift their spend to online and direct sales The closure has meant eight redundancies across the editorial team, with editor Liz Thomson, deputy editor Roger Tagholm, Rodney Burbeck and Ralph Baxter all set to lose their jobs PN founder and chairman Fred Newman said that all other activities of PN Ltd were unaffected by the closure of the magazine. The company will continue to run the British Book Awards, for which it has just signed a new two-year contract with sponsor Galaxy. He added that there was a possibility that PN would continue to have an online presence, based around the British Book Awards. PN will also continue with the Christmas Books Catalogue, a joint venture with the Booksellers Association Research agency BML, which PN Ltd bought in 2003, will continue and will still mount its usual Books and the Consumer Conference in March 2009. Newman said: “This has been a sad and difficult decision to make, but the nature of the book trade which today offers a multiplicity of ways for publishers to sell books both to booksellers and to consumers, has changed dramatically. For the biggest book publishers the trade press is now only one of many options for the promotion and sale of their titles”. Source: thebookseller.com