Founder Stephen Saunders Rejoins Light Reading

--Telecom industry's leading online community gets its founder, and its mojo, back

NEW YORK, April 18, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Light Reading (www.lightreading.com), the premier source for telecom industry analysis, which leads its sector in terms of traffic, content, and reputation, is pleased to announce the return of founding CEO Stephen Saunders to the team as it undergoes a significant makeover.

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Light Reading, one of a number of market-leading online communities owned and operated by global media business UBM, plans to relaunch in June under the guidance of Saunders, the Managing Director of DeusM, UBM's integrated marketing services division. Saunders, who founded Light Reading in 2000 with Peter Heywood, has rejoined in an advisory capacity to oversee a relaunch strategy that includes a site redesign, the introduction of new marketing services offerings, and a focus on audience engagement and growth.

"Now is a pivotal point in the telecom industry, with the advent of 4G mobile broadband, 100 Gbit/s transport, and the disruption being caused by software-defined networking. And just as the industry is changing, so is the way in which the sector's professionals want to consume and share information. Increasingly those professionals need a destination where they can exchange knowledge directly with colleagues, peers, and even competitors," stated Saunders, who is back with Light Reading after a seven-year hiatus. "I'm very excited to be back and helping Light Reading to achieve its full potential."

The relaunch will be Light Reading's most dramatic overhaul for a decade, adding multimedia content, compelling and interactive new features, and a contemporary design that will give users a much greater opportunity to engage with their peers and ensure that Light Reading continues to be the world's most authoritative, highly engaged, and highly qualified telecom site.

Saunders will work closely with Light Reading's management team, including Chief Sales Officer Martha Schwartz and recently appointed Editor in Chief Ray Le Maistre. 

"The newly invigorated Light Reading site will create an unrivaled community experience that fosters meaningful participation amongst telecom professionals. The end result will provide an invaluable environment for telecom marketers to access and engage with target audiences, while generating brand and product interest," said Schwartz. "I look forward to sharing exciting new Light Reading marketing solutions and services with our clients in the coming weeks."

Light Reading's relaunch will employ DeusM's content management system and proven operational strategies. DeusM builds and operates highly engaged communities of qualified users within specialist B2B markets using a strategy of best-practices focused on content and technology. DeusM's proprietary B2B publishing platform technology, n-server, is designed to support very large specialist communities as well as all types of digital media. DeusM was founded by Stephen Saunders.

For more information on Saunders's role in the Light Reading relaunch please visit: http://www.lightreading.com/appointments/the-return-of-the-prodigal-saunders/240153143

For more information on Light Reading's relaunch please contact:  

Ray Le Maistre
Editor in Chief, Light Reading
ray.lemaistre@ubm.com

Contact:
Amy Averbook
Sr. Director of Marketing, UBM DeusM
+1-917-743-2693
averbook@deusm.com

About Light Reading
Light Reading (www.lightreading.com) combines its research-led online communities and targeted events portfolio to help those in the global communications industry make informed decisions. Lightreading.com is the ultimate source for telecom analysis for more than 300,000 subscribers each month, leading the media sector in terms of traffic, content. and reputation. Light Reading produces targeted communications events and focused one-day conferences each year for cable, mobile, and wireline executives across five continents.

About UBM DeusM
UBM DeusM (www.deusm.com) is an integrated marketing services company owned by UBM plc, targeting the fastest growing segment of the online publishing industry: business social media. The company is led by Managing Director Stephen Saunders, Min's Marketer of the Year 2010. He and the other UBM DeusM principals have built and delivered more than 45 successful sites and online communities over the last two years. UBM DeusM's service is based on a unique platform, called Community in a Box (CiaB), which employs a structured system of proven B2B Web publishing best-practices, combined with a breakthrough integrated multimedia publishing platform ("n-Server") to enable marketers to quickly and profitably set up specialized communities for their target customers.

About UBM plc
UBM plc is a leading global business media company. We inform markets and bring the world's buyers and sellers together at events, online, in print and provide them with the information they need to do business successfully. We focus on serving professional commercial communities, from doctors to game developers, from journalists to jewelry traders, from farmers to pharmacists around the world. Our 6,000 staff in more than 30 countries are organized into specialist teams that serve these communities, helping them to do business and their markets to work effectively and efficiently. For more information, go to www.ubm.com