Pearson lures Fallon for head comms job

Media group Pearson has appointed its first communications

director, poaching PowerGen’s director of communications John Fallon to

take the post.

The appointment, together with that of a director of financial

operations and a group legal director, represent Pearson chief executive

Marjorie Scardino’s attempt to strengthen the senior management of the

firm which owns publishing and entertainment brands as diverse as the

Financial Times and Madame Tussaud’s.

Fallon, who moves to Pearson at the end of October has been with

PowerGen since1993 and has also worked as a policy and communications

adviser to John Prescott.

It has not yet decided if someone else will be brought in to replace

him. Fallon told PR Week that he and PowerGen’s chairman Ed Wallace

would ’work through the succession issues’.

Pearson has been undergoing a period of investment over the past two

years with the purchases of TV company Grundy Worldwide, producer of

Neighbours, and the launch of Channel Five, of which Pearson is a

shareholder.

It is also boosting its support of the Financial Times by launching a US

edition of the paper, which hit the newsstands two weeks ago.

It intends to sell The Tussaud’s Group, including London wax museum

Madame Tussaud’s.

More pertinently for Fallon, the company has recently had to field a lot

of bad publicity over its key publishing division Penguin, where the

discovery of accounting fraud in the US cost the firm dollars 169

million (pounds 106 million).