The Moodie Davitt Report may bear the names of its Founder & Chairman Martin Moodie and long-time President (and since 2015 Co-Owner) Dermot Davitt, but there is a lot more to the company than its two leaders.
Our diverse and inclusive, multi-talented, multi-cultural 24-member team (including regular freelancers and consultants) is based across numerous locations, including Hong Kong, Hainan, Ireland, Rhodes (Greece), Wales, England and the Philippines.
They speak eight languages between them and collectively represent the leading travel retail B2B publisher and events company with distinction across administration & finance, editorial, events, film, research, sales and technology.
We are pleased to introduce the team in this regular column. Please meet our sports-loving Senior Business Editor Mark Lane.
Tell us a little about yourself
I was born in Stockton-on-Tees in Teesside, Northeast England. My father’s job as an accountant for engineering company Davy McKee, which was part of the project team that built the Thames Barrier, took the family to London in my early years.
His career later brought us to Sheffield, where I arrived as an eight-year-old with my younger sister Suzanne. My mum worked for many years behind the counter there in a local newsagent store.
Education never really interested me at King Ecgbert’s Comprehensive School (later to be attended by former England cricket captain Joe Root, one of my many sporting heroes) but I was bright enough and got by, eventually becoming one of only two boys in my form to make it as far as A Levels.
However, I loved the school environment generally and devoted myself to sports. In my final year there, my P.E. report stated I was “the outstanding games player in the school”, having captained the football and cricket teams for many years and also represented Sheffield Schools at badminton.
That was mission accomplished for me as far as early education was concerned, but I didn’t have the dedication to make a career in sport (something that same report also noted), though I did go on to play senior cricket at a good level for more than 30 seasons.
I built a love of and obsession with English football in my youth – which I retain to this day – as my dad (Ron) took us home and away to watch Grimsby Town (his team), Sheffield Wednesday (my team) and Sheffield United all over the north of England. Many of those Saturday afternoon and midweek nights were exceptionally cold, but they remain clearly as my favourite childhood memories.
Eventually I returned to Teesside to attend the Polytechnic (now a university) there, in Middlesbrough, which neighbours my place of birth.
When I emerged from the Poly with a Second Class degree in Public Administration four years later, it felt like a miracle, given my completely listless behaviour and poor attendance record during my time there. I had no career aspirations at the time and while unemployed post-degree I took a government-funded opportunity to earn a diploma in Business Administration.
I got nowhere near passing but found myself in a placement via this course with a business centre in Billingham, also in Stockton-on-Tees, where I was responsible for organising a schedule of business events. I wasn’t much good at it. However, it proved to be my break into journalism.
My duties included publishing a monthly four-page photocopied newsletter for members. Working as a one-man band, the publication developed into a 32-page monthly, full-colour business magazine named Enterprise, for which I wrote everything, designed it, sold the advertising and organised print and distribution to about 3,000 contacts. I remember licking every envelope to each of those readers month after month in that pre-digital age.
My work was noticed by the biggest regional business magazine publisher in the UK at the time, the Business Magazine Group (BMG). They hired me as Editor for their Northeast edition, more than doubled my salary and threw me in at the deep end. It was a responsibility way beyond my experience, but I pulled it off and became a well-known business journalist in the region.
It was a boom time for regional business magazines, then a very competitive but lucrative market, and I loved the experience, learning about business writing and presenting it from some brilliant (and not so brilliant) staff journalists across the country.
I also gained important insights from the advertising sales side (always the funniest people in the business, they often made me cry laughing), making many great friends there during that period.
Three years later I was poached by BMG’s biggest rival in the Northeast, Cameron Publishing – led by one of my mentors Colin Cameron, a former boxing journalist – which had numerous publishing contracts with the British and regional Chambers of Commerce. I was appointed to edit a Northeast business publication (and later national ones).
It proved to be a fruitful switch – I went on to work for the company in its various guises for 16 years as Managing Business Editor, including for eight years after it was taken over by a plc, Ten Alps, and Mr Cameron bagged his fortune.
When did you join The Moodie Davitt Report and what is your role?
I was mainly working as a freelancer in regional business journalism in 2016 when out of the blue a commission from Frontier (part of the DFNI publishing stable at the time) landed in my email inbox. It came from Colette Doyle, who was editing the publication. I had come into contact with her through my work as Editor of the British Chambers of Commerce’s Global Trader Guides, but it came as a surprise.
I will be forever grateful to Colette for breaking me into the travel retail publishing sector. She offered me several commissions which gave me an early interest in the channel; armed with zero knowledge, I remember researching and writing a few features about cruise, inflight and the Chinese consumer.
It led to me writing a lot of news material for DFNI, and even covering an airport commercial conference in Tel Aviv, but Colette departed the business and with her went the work.
Now with the travel retail industry bug, I sent LinkedIn connection requests to the bosses of DFNI’s two main rival publishers, with the idea that I would pitch them my services.
Only one accepted my approach – Martin Moodie, who gave me a trial writing news for The Moodie Davitt Report in August 2018. It was an opportunity I was determined to grasp, having long since identified the company as the clear travel retail publishing market leader, and have been part of the team since.
My work mainly involves airport commercial business news reporting, including much of our travel food & beverage coverage, conference reporting, occasional feature writing and driving our substantial LinkedIn presence.
One (or more) highlight(s) of your time with The Moodie Davitt Report?
There are so many – most revolve around travelling to events or assignments and meeting great people, many of whom I had only previously had virtual contact with. Some of those that spring immediately to mind include Graeme Stewart (various travel retail businesses), Kate Boyer (Anatomie), Hoj Parmar (Bitmore), Dominik Prousek (Aïda), Ricky Sandhu (Urban Air Port), Thomas Kaneko Henningsen (Blueprint) and Richard Bye (iCoupon).
Finally getting to TFWA World in Cannes in 2022 was an ambition achieved having been denied probable earlier opportunities to go by the COVID years.
Similarly, reporting on recent Moodie Davitt FAB and Trinity Forum events were highlights, not least in Ontario, California for FAB this year. The team spirit on these occasions and the determination to execute an excellent event is great to be part of.
What is your approach to work, your business philosophy?
It’s important to me to have a good rapport with all my colleagues; I like to be seen as a team player and I’ll take on any task.
I have spent my entire journalism career in business-to-business publishing, and in this publishing segment in particular I think it’s important for journalists to not live in an ‘ivory tower’ and to understand the pressures and needs of the sales team, administrators, designers and others.
I take my lead as a still-developing travel retail journalist from Martin and Dermot Davitt, whose work ethic and the volume, consistency, attention to detail, quality and skill involved in what they produce astounds me pretty much every day.
Much the same can be said of my multi-talented colleague Hannah Tan, whose energy and prolific output I greatly admire. My other journalist colleagues Colleen Morgan, Ameesha Raizada, Camille Bersola and Lara Netherlands are also excellent and round out a very talented editorial team, which I feel privileged to be a part of.
Martin occasionally [not occasionally -Ed] tells us he wants The Moodie Davitt Report to be regarded as the best business-to-business publisher in the world and not just in the travel retail industry, where I think we are streets ahead of the competition and continue to widen the gap.
That is something I am onboard with and strive to produce a quality of work that fits with that lofty, and in my view attainable, ambition.
What is it that makes you tick? Your positive/negative traits?
As a journalist, it is producing good work and knowing that what I write reaches a substantial audience with a genuine interest in what we do as a publisher, getting good feedback and seeing positive reaction on social media. That’s brought a great new dynamic to business-to-business publishing in recent years.
I love engaging with people across social media platforms every day, where I now have nearly 100,000 personal followers, including approaching 25,000 on LinkedIn.
On Twitter, I run a popular page relating to the British comedy Blackadder (@pitchblacksteed), which has more than 57,000 followers. I feel like I have come to recognise the names of several thousand of those followers; I have a lot of banter with them, get a lot of repeat engagement and many thousands of notifications every month. It makes me laugh out loud every day.
My negative traits include being a bit intense at times and I can be selfish in that I avoid situations that bore me at all costs.
How important is leisure time and out of work interests?
The more I have got into travel retail, the less important they have become to me – I enjoy my work. But I try to have a break twice a day on weekdays to walk my Labrador Retriever Maddie (and we go to the beach every Saturday and Sunday). I also go to the local pub every Wednesday night without fail for a few pints, watch the football and do a quiz with some entertaining friends, which breaks up the week.
In the summer, my happy place is the cricket club I played at for 20 years, Normanby Hall CC in Middlesbrough. I follow our first team all over the region with a group of former players and supporters; there is nothing I enjoy more than a chat, a reminisce, a pint and, most importantly, a Normanby Hall win. Laughter is never far away on those days.
A must-have in duty free?
A sleeve of cigarettes for me, and chocolate or perfume for my wife Helen.
And a desert island choice of music and book – or something else?
I am a true crime writing fan and love reading the best sports autobiographies or biographies. Former Crystal Palace Chairman Simon Jordan’s Careful What You Wish For may never be beaten in the latter category in my view.
But if I had to covet one book, it has to be Michael Bilton’s Wicked Beyond Belief, the definitive work on the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, a mesmerising account of the calamitous police investigation into Britain’s most notorious serial killer. A jaw-dropping book covering the horrific tragedies and years of police despair and bad decisions in the pursuit of Peter Sutcliffe – shocking, haunting and revealing from cover to cover. ✈
Previously on Meet The Moodie Davitt team
Introducing Chief Administration Officer and ESG Manager Sinead Moodie
Introducing FAB and International Account Manager Maya Feeney
Introducing Administration and Events Support Manager Kristyn Branisel
Introducing Associate Director Events Vincci Chung
Introducing Associate Editor Camille Bersola
Introducing Development and Systems Operations Director Matt Willey
Introducing Reporter Ameesha Raizada
Introducing China Chief Representative Zhang Yimei
Introducing Vice President Sales Sarah Genest
