PRESS RELEASE: Nick Owen Publishing Addresses Ongoing Website “Leakage Issue”

Nottingham, UK; 2 December 2025

Nick Owen Publishing (NOP) today issued an update regarding the recent and unexpected appearance of internal meeting minutes, confidential memos and unvarnished staff commentary across various public pages of its website. These documents, which include highly candid discussions about biscuits, printer failures, and whether Julian should be allowed unsupervised access to the CMS, were unintentionally made available to the public following a series of technical “incidents”.

While early reports suggested another external hack, a preliminary review has now clarified that the root cause was “a complex interplay of outdated plugins, faulty permissions, and one employee who clicked something they absolutely should not have clicked.”

What Happened?

Over the past several weeks, the NOP website began sporadically attaching confidential materials to the bottom of blog posts, book pages, and on one memorable occasion, the author biography for a children’s title.

These included, but were not limited to:

• Minutes from the “Is the Printer Sentient?” staff meeting
• A draft disciplinary letter to the person who accidentally emailed a baguette
• Three pages of Maja’s doodles
• A detailed argument about whose fault the website hack really was
• A 1,600-word monologue from Paul Warren titled “Typography Crimes I Will Not Forgive”
• Eleanor’s annotated list of “People I’m Hiding the Passwords From”

NOP apologises for any confusion caused to readers, reviewers, international partners, and the three unsuspecting school libraries who thought these were “bonus materials”.

What Happens Next?

To restore order, NOP is implementing the following corrective measures:

1. Full rebuild of the website, led by an external team whose key qualification is “not emotionally involved in any of this.”
2. Immediate revocation of back-end access from all staff except Eleanor, who has been deemed “least likely to press something shiny”.
3. A compulsory CMS training session, which Julian will attend twice.
4. Installation of a permissions system in which no file can be made public without at least two editors confirming it is not (a) minutes, (b) gossip, or (c) a shopping list.
5. A new rule: If a file is titled “DO NOT UPLOAD”, it may not, under any circumstances, be uploaded.

Reassurance to the Public

Alex Moore, Managing Director, said:

“We want to assure everyone—customers, partners, international publishers, and the unfortunate members of the public who now know far too much about our internal biscuit budget—that the website is being stabilised. Nick Owen Publishing remains committed to transparency.

NOP stresses that there is no ongoing security risk, no personal data was exposed, and that the accidental publication of confidential documents was annoying and embarrassing.

The company expects normal service to resume shortly, with a new and improved website experience, fewer unexpected attachments, and significantly less shouting from Eleanor.

For more information (but preferably not for screenshots), please contact:

press@nickowenpublishing.com