Teresa Maughan
Editor, Your Sinclair
Edited Your Sinclair through the years that gave it its voice — and appears on more mastheads than any other person in this library's British magazines.
Teresa Maughan edited Your Sinclair. Across the magazines held in this library she appears on 48 mastheads as Editor and a further 11 as Deputy Editor — more than any other individual, in any role, at any magazine here.
Fast facts
- Editor, Your Sinclair, having come up through the deputy’s chair.
- 48 masthead appearances as Editor, 11 as Deputy Editor.
- Colleagues on the same mastheads: Matt Bielby, Kevin Cox, Andy Ide, James Leach, Marcus Berkmann, Mike Gerrard on adventures, Andy Ounsted and Sal Meddings on art.
What Your Sinclair was
Your Sinclair is remembered for a tone — jokey, self-deprecating, fond of its readers and unimpressed by the industry — that is unusual enough to have outlived the magazine, the machine and the format.
A tone is an editorial product. It comes from who gets hired, what gets sent back, which jokes survive the sub, and whether the person in charge protects a voice when an advertiser or a publisher would prefer something blander. That work leaves almost no trace in the pages themselves, which is why editors are the least-recorded people in a well-recorded industry.
The masthead is the trace. Maughan is on it, as Editor, more times than anyone else in this library — and the years she is on it are the years the magazine sounds most like itself.
The women the mastheads name
Maughan is also the entry point to something the development record hides completely.
The Vault’s entire structured credit layer — 1,200 credits, every magazine — names one woman: Alison Jeftha, a graphic artist, once. Read the mastheads instead and Your Sinclair alone gives Maughan as Editor, Jackie Ryan as Deputy Editor, Linda Barker as Staff Writer, Sara Biggs as Production Editor, Judith Middleton and Sonia Hunt as Production Managers, Melissa Parkinson as Production Coordinator, and Catherine Higgs and Sal Meddings as Art Editors. ZZAP!64 adds Glenys Powell as Editorial Assistant.
Two conclusions follow, and only one of them is about the past. Women were plainly present in senior and production roles in the games press. And the development record’s near-silence is at least partly a recording failure, and not a straightforward account of who was there — the credit boxes that would have named developers were the same boxes that, as the Ivan Horn entry sets out, could not name an artist at all.
Why she matters
Maughan is editing as authorship — and the most-attested person in this whole corpus of British computing magazines is an editor whom no history of the era mentions.