News that the Times Educational Supplement has appointed a former editor of The Grocer as its new editor is likely to raise as many eyebrows throughout the sector as it has among its own staff.
Karen Dempsey has taken over at the helm of publisher TSL Education's 97-year-old flagship title, instead of its acting editor, Wendy Berliner.
This will be Ms Dempsey's first job in education journalism and indeed the first time in the paper's history that it has an editor without education experience.
In the past, the TES was the teachers' bible and almost as important a fixture in school staffrooms as the kettle, even if most people read it for the job ads.
But teachers have already grumbled about the paper "dumbing down" since it was redesigned almost a year ago under its previous owners, venture capital firm Exponent. How will they react to features about the price of apples and pears in the classroom?
The appointment gives the clearest indication yet of the direction the paper is taking since Rupert Murdoch first sold it - as well as its sister titles the Times Higher Education Supplement and Nursery World - for £240m two years ago.
Nursery World has since been sold off, but staff at the TES and the THES have seen successive owners make moves to turn them into less costly business-to-business titles with fewer staff.
The TES purged about 50 staff through voluntary redundancies before it was revamped. Unsettled times at the THES have led to 10 editorial staff leaving in a year and now redundancies are planned.
Ms Dempsey's experience of editing trade magazines, most recently Personnel Today, confirms the desire of the latest owners - private equity group Charterhouse, which bought the publications in May - to turn the TES into a "professional" publication.
This in turn hints at the direction Charterhouse will want to take the THES in when it is relaunched next month (that is, just as soon as its publisher returns from a training course).
It won't be the "ideas" magazine the editorial team were pushing for, but rather a higher-education trade mag. Does it matter? It should.
