Informa
multinational publishing and conference company
Informa plc, sometimes styled informa, is a British publishing, business intelligence, and exhibitions group with headquarters in London, England. Informa is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. With offices in 42 countries, the company has around 14,000 employees. Informa owns numerous brands, including Fan Expo, VidCon, Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, CRC Press, Routledge, and Taylor & Francis.
History
1998 to 2013
Informa itself was created in 1998 by the merger of IBC Group plc (formerly International Business Communications) and LLP Group plc (publisher of Lloyd's List).
In 2004, Informa merged with academic publisher Taylor & Francis, followed in 2005 with the acquisition of IIR Holdings.
In October 2006, the company was approached by Springer Science and Business Media in a takeover bid, but in early November the Informa board rejected the offer.
In early 2007, chairman Richard Hooper announced his retirement in May and, after consulting with major shareholders, the company moved chief executive Peter Rigby to chairman, and managing director David Gilbertson to Rigby's former post.
On 8 June 2008, The Sunday Telegraph revealed that United Business Media (UBM) had proposed a merger with Informa. The talks were confirmed by Informa in a press release that same day, but described as "preliminary".
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Informa” is multinational publishing and conference company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Informa, multinational and publishing, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “multinational publishing and conference company” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q680946. VIAF identifies the subject as 136471070. The Library of Congress control number is nr00013120. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1998, 2013, 2004 and 2005.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Informa”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Informa primary sources, Informa archive and Informa research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Informa”?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Informa” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.