Christopher Loudon to be editor of Hello!

Christopher Loudon, Vice-President and Editor-in-Chief of Inside Entertainment magazine (Kontent Publishing) is joining Rogers Consumer Publishing to be the first editor of the forthcoming Canadian edition of the celebrity title Hello!. (This was previewed here February 15.)

Earlier this month, Shelley Middlebrook was appointed Publisher of Hello!. The Canadian edition of the British version of the Spanish original Hola! will launch in August 2006.

Loudon was founding editor of Inside Entertainment. Before that, he was Editor of TV Guide and worked for Where magazines, Comac Communications Limited and Reader's Digest.

Launched in the UK in 1988, Hello! is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Spanish magazine Hola!, which first debuted in 1944. In the UK, Hello!'s current circulation stands at 392,481 weekly, with over 2.2 million readers each week.

UPDATE: Here is Masthead's take on the story, with pictures and the news of Loudon's successor at Inside Entertainment, Kendon Polak.

UPDATE: Antonia Zerbisias's blog at The Toronto Star put us onto an interesting, bitchy article in the Economist about the plethora of celebrity titles. It suggests that the "appetite for nothing" may have been sated and predicts that the number of celebrity titles may soon outnumber the plastinated celebrities they cover.