Ed Charles Email & Phone Number

City Of Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

Melbourne

The Melbourne Fringe food Festival is a grass roots movement run by social media to promote local food events. Already we are planning curated dinners, the MeatDrink Blog events and will be supporting a whole month of activities during March 2012.

Melbourne, Australia

Collingwood, Melbourne

Tomato Media offers practical help in navigating the social media minefield and in developing websites. This includes helping plans that will quickly build followers and attract the attention of potential customers as well as assisting in helping control potentially damaging chatter.Our service involves:- Development of content from words to multimedia including anchor posts which attract large numbers of links and traffic.- Developing plans to gain high quality links from important and relevant sites to drive higher quality traffic to websites than that provided by Google search.- We can also help specify websites and save companies from making expensive, time wasting mistakes.- Email newsletter development and integration.

Tomato was a magazine I launched because I felt there was a gap in the food magazine marketing that could serve people who found some of the titles too glossy and a bit pretentious. The idea to was to distribute free, like a street magazine, through high quality food venues, cafes, restaurants and bars. We had terrific response to the editorial but were under funded.

My journalism is split between business and food. I regularly write for the Wealth and Entrepreneur sections of The Australian. I have a weekly column on restaurant gossip in the Herald Sun’s extrafood section. I also regularly write for In The Black, which is distributed to over 100,000 CPAs. Other titles include CFO, Mercedes Magazine and Henry Magazine. I have been restaurant reviewing for the Gourmet Traveller Restaurant Guide, the Age Good Food Guide and the Telstra Countrywide Golden Plate Awards.

Yaffa created this position to keep me in the company after I moved to Melbourne for family reasons. I was responsible for setting the template for Yaffa’s online strategy and what is now the current Ad News website. I was also to launch two magazines, an online marketing title and a lifestyle title. I was made redundant after the DotCom crash.

I relaunched and revamped the title, resulting in a 45 per cent increase in paid circulation while the market share of its main competitor B&T fell. This set the template for where the magazine is today. I devised and implemented editorial systems to improve the rigour of its reporting and introduce better writing, subbing and design. I introduced strict sub editing guidelines and a style sheet to, what had previously been, an unstructured operation. I managed a team of seven plus contributors. I also raised the profile of the title writing articles for newspapers and regularly was interviews on radio and TV.

I worked with the art director and designer on the redesign and relaunch of the title. I launched and edited a lifestyle section, in addition to contributing business feature stories to the magazine. I was a member of the team researching, compiling and writing the Rich 500 report. I was short-listed as feature writer of the year by the Press Gazette. I resigned to move to Australia.

PR Week was a route back into journalism after four years in public relations. I was promoted from features editor to associate editor, becoming responsible for all sections outside news. I edited copy and worked closely on production with the subs desk and art director. I worked on multiple projects including a series of events and debates designed to raise the profile of the title. I edited all the magazine’s special reports, including the highly detailed Top 150 PR Agencies and awards editions. My work on conferences for the magazine also led to signing high profile columnists for the organisation as a whole, such as Raymond Snoddy on Marketing.

Bsc Hons, Mathematical Physics

Activities and Societies: Sports editor, Guild & City Gazette Spent several months calculating whether or not the universe was expanding.

Postgraduate Diploma, Finance

Part time study