A Letter from BJP's editor and Apptitude Media's editorial director:

Hello,

I wanted to share some news with you that is quite a big deal for us working on British Journal of Photography, but outwardly shouldn't have any immediate effect on the magazine.

As of today, we are under new ownership. Thankfully, we know our new owner very well. Marc Hartog has been our publishing director for the past two-and-a-half years, and under his leadership we've flourished, launching our award-winning app, and reaching out to new and bigger audiences globally. He has now led a management buyout of BJP, acquiring it from Incisive Media along with all its staff in editorial, app development, design, marketing and sales.

The new company is named Apptitude Media, and as the name suggests, we'll be pursuing new ventures in digital publishing, alongside our print and various app editions of BJP.

Behind the scenes, we're celebrating this chance to gather all our ideas together and run with them, focusing on what we do well, and heading in new directions as an independent company, free to pursue the opportunities we see in digital publishing. But you shouldn't see any immediate changes to BJP; it's very much business as usual until we get some time to tweak the look of the printed magazine and app. We'll also be considering what we do online, increasing the frequency of our iPad edition, and putting some attention into what we do for the iPhone.

It's been nearly three years since we had a major rethink about everything we do, relaunching as a monthly and focusing on the creative end of photography. We've never looked back, introducing our acclaimed app 18 months later, and picking up the award for Best Photography Magazine at the Lucies in L.A. last December. During that time we've grown our community of readers and been able to reach out to many more people around the world.

Our small team has grown a little too, encompassing app production and design. So, in addition to producing BJP, we have partnered on a digital edition of 125 magazine, and we put out a local iPad edition of Popular Science, one of the most read magazines on the planet. There are further projects in the pipeline, including Fade to Black, our new iPad magazine focused on filmmaking, photography and multimedia. And there are many more being worked out and planned, which if they succeed will mean our small team will start growing.

I would like to thank everyone at Incisive Media, our previous owner, for their help and support over the past dozen years, and for keeping the faith during some tough times for both the photography industry and publishing more widely. Indeed, Incisive is a significant investor in Apptitude Media, and we will continue to work closely together over the next few months. In fact, we're not even leaving the building for now, moving up to the fifth floor of our offices at Broadwick Street where we'll be for the next several months while we set up and begin looking for offices of our own.

But in all other respects, we are now independent, and greatly looking forward to being a smaller, leaner company able to pursue its own best interests with a new sense of purpose and creativity. As Marc likes to say, "This is a startup, with a 160-year-old brand at its heart."

Simon Bainbridge