Roger Kean
CRASH, from Ludlow
Editor of CRASH and a founder of Newsfield — the publishing operation that built a national Spectrum magazine from a Shropshire market town, with Oliver Frey painting the covers.
Roger Kean edited CRASH and helped found Newsfield, the publisher behind CRASH, ZZAP!64, Amtix and The Games Machine. He is on 13 CRASH mastheads as Editor in this library, from 1984 to 1988, and appears again on ZZAP!’s.
Fast facts
- Editor, CRASH; a founder of Newsfield.
- On the masthead alongside: Oliver Frey as Art Editor (19 appearances, 1984–1990), Franco Frey as Technical Editor, Graeme Kidd, Jeremy Spencer as Software Editor, Lloyd Mangram as Staff Writer, Roger Bennett selling advertising.
- Based: Ludlow, Shropshire — “1-2 King Street, Ludlow”, printed in every issue.
A national magazine from a market town
CRASH was published from Ludlow, a Shropshire town of about ten thousand people, roughly as far from London’s magazine industry as it is possible to get in England.
That is not a colourful detail; it shaped the product. Newsfield was not staffed by career journalists rotating in from other titles, so it hired locally and young — readers, in effect — and the magazine reads like it. Its writers are enthusiasts with strong opinions, not professionals with a house style, and its relationship with readers is closer to correspondence than to broadcast.
The distance also made independence cheaper. A publisher outside London is harder for a software house to drop in on, and CRASH’s willingness to give a bad score to a big advertiser is part of why readers trusted it.
The Freys
The masthead’s other constant is a pair of brothers. Oliver Frey painted the covers — the airbrushed science-fiction and horror illustrations that are, for a great many people, what the whole era looks like — and Franco Frey ran the technical pages.
An art editor who is also the illustrator is unusual and it shows: CRASH’s covers are not stock art or screenshots but original paintings, month after month, and they did more to establish the magazine’s identity than any editorial decision. Kean and the Freys are effectively one creative unit, and the mastheads record them side by side for six years.
Lloyd Mangram
One masthead name is not a person. Lloyd Mangram appears as Staff Writer nine times and bylines the Forum, features and regulars across the run, and was a Newsfield house pseudonym — a shared name written under by several staff and contributors, confirmed since by the people who used it.
⚠ Nothing inside this library shows that. The magazines print Mangram exactly as they print a real staff writer, mastheads included. Only testimony from outside the corpus settles it — which is a useful warning about how far mastheads can be trusted, and it has its own entry.
Why he matters
Kean is the publisher as an author of the era’s memory. The British 8-bit years are recalled largely through the magazines, and the magazines were made by a small number of people making choices about tone, coverage and honesty.
That so much of it came out of Ludlow, not out of the industry it covered, is not incidental to how it reads.