Matthews to leave Emap after 25 years

women's weekly First, and sat on the Emap Consumer Media board.

First has been struggling to meet its sales targets, with recent
suggestions that it would fall well short of its projected
150,000-200,000 sales on its first birthday at the end of this month.
However, Emap denied her departure was linked to the magazine's fate,
adding that no ad deals had been based on it meeting its sales
targets.

After Dawn Bebe, managing director of Emap Elan, and David Pullan,
strategic marketing and brand development director, Matthews is the
third senior manager to leave Emap in the past six months during a
company restructure involving 175 redundancies.

She is also the second high-profile women's magazines publisher to stand
down in recent weeks, after Julie Harris, who previously worked under
her at Emap, left her role as general manager of women's magazines at
Hachette Filipacchi.