Tabloid editor kept focus on celebrities

Bridget Rowe, who has died from COVID-19 aged 70, was an award-winning tabloid editor whose reigns in the 1990s at the Sunday Mirror, its Mirror Group Sunday stablemate The People, and then the Sunday Mirror again, earned her the nickname “Death Rowe” among some staff.

The key to success for a woman in a man's world, she once wrote, was having “a good hairdresser, a good gynecologist and a freezer.” In her case it also involved a degree of ruthlessness and a keen instinct for what her readers wanted.

“A lot of us journalists think we should tell the public what we want them to want,” she once observed. Instead, she provided readers with what those who presented The People with two top Newspaper Focus awards in 1996 described as a “well-targeted diet of celebrity news and features.”

Under her editorship (1992-96), The People earned the nickname “Pam Sunday” with near-weekly stories about Canadian actress Pamela Anderson, though in January 1997 its first three pages were devoted to claims that “Pammy” had joined a cult and had stopped wearing makeup (“Baywatch to dogwatch”).

Rowe was also proud of the paper's front page splash of Divine Brown, the prostitute who made news after an encounter with Hugh Grant.

“My ideal story for the front is a famous person doing extraordinary things, hopefully in the back of a taxi,” she told an interviewer.

Some complained that in her embrace of the populist zeitgeist Rowe had pulled the papers she edited down-market. But she was unrepentant. At a time of plummeting circulation figures for mass-market Sundays, she said, “(newspapers) have to be entertaining and different. We can no longer just report the news.” Under her editorship, The People's circulation figures held steady at over two million.

As assistant editor of The Sun in 1981-82 she impressed Rupert Murdoch, who appointed her to edit Sunday, the first tabloid colour magazine, for The News of the World before returning to the world of magazines.

She arrived at the Sunday Mirror in 1991 shortly before the death of its proprietor, Robert Maxwell, and the following year was appointed editor.

She was managing director of both the Sunday Mirror and The People from 1996 to 1998, also returning to edit the Sunday Mirror in 1997.

Rowe was separated from her husband James Nolan and is survived by their son.

Bridget Rowe