Media Headliner: Price maintains talent is key for a bright Future.

Under Robert Price, Future UK is pursuing a strategy of organic growth, not aggressive acquisition, Alasdair Reid writes.

Let's face it, Bath is hardly one of the world's great media epicentres Yes, we know, we're often accused on Campaign of being shockingly prejudiced against the provinces. And we're occasionally forced to admit that there is probably life outside the handful of postcodes that make up London's West End. Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and even Glasgow: they all have their merits.

But be serious. Bath? In Bath, when they talk about going up to the big city, they mean Bristol. In advertising terms, Bath's main claim to fame is its starring role as the shape Sir Martin Sorrell evoked to describe a recession.

So it's little wonder that Future UK has sometimes struggled to make itself heard - despite the fact that its holding company boss is Stevie Spring, a former ad agency chief, and one of the industry's most accomplished networkers.

It doesn't help, obviously, that so many of its properties are ever so slightly obscure - PC titles, cycling magazines, and titles covering all sorts of arcane hobbies and craft pursuits. For example, Scrapbook Inspirations or Simply Knitting.

But the truth is that Future is one of the media sector's rather-more-than-modest recent success stories. Two years ago, it was financially troubled and was looking wobbly. Last year, after some drastic surgery and a retreat from France and Italy (although not the US), the group crept back into the black; and in the recent ABC figures, the UK operation turned in a creditable performance. It recorded a group-wide year-on-year cumulative circulation gain of 6.8 per cent.

And let's not forget, it's now the UK's sixth-largest consumer magazine publisher by circulation, below The National Magazine Company but above Conde Nast. And let's also begin to acknowledge that much of the credit for that is down to its UK chief executive, Robert Price, the company's Yin to Stevie Spring's Yang. While she's up in town schmoozing the City, he's usually to be found back in Bath looking after the shop.