Dennis Hackett’s journalism ranged widely across newspapers and magazines, but it is for his work on Nova, the “new kind of magazine for a new kind of woman”, as it described itself, that he is best remembered, even though he edited it for only four years of the 10 it survived.
Hackett, who has died aged 87, was recruited in 1965 from Queen magazine, which he edited, to rescue Nova, the International Publishing Company’s floundering glossy monthly. Together with the art director Harri Peccinotti, he swiftly established Nova as an influential must-read for the movers and shakers of “swinging London”, with men as well as the original target audience becoming devotees of its heady mixture of social issues and cutting edge fashion and modern lifestyle features.
“My ideas I would run past Harri, usually in the pub,” Hackett recalled. In 1966 a pub discussion produced a cover showing a small image of a young black girl on a white background and the headline: “You may think I look cute but would you live next door to my mummy and daddy?” “It became quite famous at the time,” Hackett wrote later, “although not in South Africa, where they tore the cover from the issue.”
In 1969 he was appointed director of publicity for the Mirror newspapers by the IPC chairman, Hugh Cudlipp, and given the additional responsibility of overseeing the launch of a weekly colour magazine for the Daily Mirror. Distributed free with the newspaper every Wednesday, and infused with many ideas similar to those that had boosted Nova’s fortunes, it failed to attract sufficient advertising and was closed, prematurely many thought, within a year. Hackett, not dissimilar in drive and personality to the mercurial Cudlipp, paid the price of its failure and departed.
Son of Sarah (nee Bedford) and James, a postman, he was born in Sheffield and educated there at De La Salle college. Hackett started his journalistic career at the Sheffield Telegraph before national service in the Royal Navy. Having rejoined the paper on demobilisation, he moved to the Daily Herald in 1954, before embarking on an series of eclectic job-hops that led to him working for Illustrated magazine, where he became deputy editor; the Daily Express, writing caption-story material for the groundbreaking Photonews; the Daily Mail and the Observer, where he was art editor (1961-62).
At Queen he was able to withstand the eccentricity of his proprietor, Jocelyn Stevens (whose management style, he remembered dispassionately, included a hectoring manner and the tendency to throw typewriters through windows), to become editor and tap into the zeitgeist of the 1960s. There, and at Nova, Hackett assembled a network of talent that included the sportswriter and screenwriter Arthur Hopcraft, painter Molly Parkin (as fashion editor), flamboyant astrologer Patric Walker and the American writer Irma Kurtz, who became an agony aunt.
At the ill-fated Mirror magazine he supervised a largely young staff. Among them was the future national newspaper editor Eve Pollard, then in her early 20s, who arrived after allegedly being hired amid confusion when, at her interview, Hackett and the magazine’s editor, Mike Molloy, exchanged appreciative nods, with each assuming the other’s was a definite “Yes” rather than a definite “Maybe”. Hackett also drafted in the undisciplined contributor Jeffrey Bernard, later to achieve notoriety as the subject of a play by the equally boisterous Keith Waterhouse, whose soon-to-be-famous column began in the magazine.
After his Mirror Group disappointment Hackett resumed his varied career with verve, returning to the Express as associate editor, writing television criticism for the Times and then the Tablet (his Catholicism was important to him), and becoming consultant editor of the Mail on Sunday’s You magazine before moving to the recently launched but rudderless Today newspaper, where he was executive editor and then editor-in-chief until the title was bought by News International. Periods editing M, the Observer’s colour magazine, and Management Today followed.
Along the way he was publisher of the erudite Twentieth Century Magazine (1965-72), edited the RAC Club members’ magazine and wrote two books, The History of the Future: Bemrose Corporation 1826-1976 (1976) and The Big Idea: The Story of Ford in Europe (1978), while continuing to display the Yorkshire characteristics of can-do confidence bordering on egotism and fierce loyalty to friends.
Hackett is survived by his wife, Jacquie (nee Totterdell), and their daughter; by a daughter and son from his marriage to Agnes (nee Collins), which ended in divorce; and by six grandchildren. A son predeceased him.
• Dennis William Hackett, journalist and author, born 5 February 1929; died 23 August 2016
