What should the new Birmingham Post site look like?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 26 November 2007 at 10:56
Tags: Birmingham Post, Trinity Mirror

Joanna Geary is one of the journalists working on the redesign of the Birmingham Post web site. Over on her personal blog, she is seeking readers’ advice on what the new site should include ahead of a meeting scheduled for today.

Being a Trinity Mirror-owned publication, the Post team will have a great starting point to work with. The group has this year been supplementing its (strangely-named and often strangely-organised) “ic” Network of regional portal sites with a very nicely-designed new for its regional newspaper sites.

The new sites are in use in places like Teesside, Liverpool, Newcastle, north Wales, south Wales and Scotland’s Daily Record.

Trinity Mirror Northeast sites relaunch

Posted by Martin Stabe on 8 August 2007 at 18:15
Tags: Trinity Mirror

GazettteLive, the web site of the Evening Gazette in Teeside, has been relaunched as part of Trinity Mirror’s ongoing programme of relaunching its regional newspaper web sites.

The new site will include new blogs by the papers columnists, such as Anthony Vickers, who covers Middlesbrough FC.

GazetteLive won the regional website of the year award at this year’s Press Gazette Regional Press Awards. It has pioneering hyperlocal web sites for each post code area in Teesside.

The paper this week it announced plans to begin reverse-publishing some of the user-contributed content from the hyperlocal sites into a print publication.

Trinity Mirror has also relaunched NEBusiness.co.uk, a regional business site run jointly by the Gazette and The Journal of Newcastle.

The site will feature regional businss news and interviews with area business leaders, as well as a “Who’s Who” guide to North East businesspeople.

Promotion for Trinity Mirror regionals digital boss

Posted by Martin Stabe on 2 July 2007 at 11:27
Tags: Trinity Mirror

David Black has been appointed Trinity Mirror’s Group Director of Digital Publishing.

In the new role, Black will lead the strategic development of commercial digital activities across the Trinity Mirror’s national, regional and Scottish divisions, and will seek cooperation and joint initiatives across the businesses’ digital activities.

Black, who was previously director of digital media of Trinity Mirror’s regionals division, takes up the new role with immediate effect. He has been with the company since 1999.

Trinity Mirror’s new local site is… a blog.

Posted by Martin Stabe on 30 March 2007 at 13:29
Tags: Buckinghamshire Advertiser, Moveable Type, Trinity Mirror

Trinity Mirror’s Buckinghamshire Advertiser has relaunched its web site.

It’s very cleanly designed. But there’s something significant that is unusual about it — it’s a blog. The front page is three recent stories presented in reverse-chronological order, with each one allowing comments. There’s a list of categories, RSS feeds, and even a tag cloud. Each new upload of a story pings Technorati.

Of course, blogs are defined by their conversational nature rather than their technical capabilities. So more precisely, the Buckinghamshire Advertiser is a newspaper site powered by blog software.

A quick examination of the source code for the site reveals that the content management system powering it is Movable Type, the software produced by Six Apart that also powers the Guardian’s many blogs, not to mentioned thousands of individual bloggers’.

Trinity Mirror has clearly realised that properly customised blogging tools can do everything that a much more expensive content management system would be able to. The web developers and software houses that produce complex, expensive CMSs should take note.

Civil war on Trinity editors’ blogs

Posted by Martin Stabe on 19 March 2007 at 16:35
Tags: Croydon Advertiser, Harrow Observer, Harrow Times, Newsquest, Reading Chronicle, Trinity Mirror, Uxbridge Gazette

Normally it’s newspaper editors who worry about the trolls who lower the tone in the comments sections of their blogs. At Trinity Mirror’s newspapers in southern England, however, something unusual is happening: the editors are too busy trolling each others’ sites to worry about insults from outsiders.

Trinity Mirror Southern’s editors have all been blogging for a few months now, but recently seem to have specialised in posting their Schadenfreude over their stablemates’ travails.

Adrian Seal of the Uxbridge Gazette, for example, blogged his amusement over by a post by Simon Jones of the Reading Chronicle, who has lost a recent recruit from Down Under just months after “making a great song and dance” about how the Australian reporter had allegedly chosen to join paper rather than the award-winning Croydon Advertiser.

The Advertiser’s editor, Ian Carter, is also amused by this turn of events and describes Jones’ claims that the antipodean hack had picked the Chronicle over his own paper as “a gross distortion of the truth”.

Carter also notes that Lindsay Coulson of the Harrow Observer “is gleefully ignoring the unwritten rule that exists between most local papers by routinely rubbishing her rival’s front pages and sticking the boot into all and sundry”. On her own blog in Harrow, Coulson replies to her critics’s criticism of her criticism of the (thankfully, Newsquest-owned) Harrow Times.

But don’t think the readers aren’t taking part in all this heckling. When Seal (we’re back in Uxbridge, now) expressed his satisfaction with “another strong edition” of the Gazette, someone called A. Reader jumped right in:

“another strong edition” - such modesty! Perhaps you should leave it to your readers to be the judge of that. The thing I find irritating about the Gazette is the obvious details that seem to get missed out - e.g. the story on your site just now about the car dealer who assaulted a 74 year old. What was his sentence? It’s basic who, when. why, what, where stuff! And let’s not get started on all the typos (in headlines even) week in and week out!

And which paper do you edit, anonymous “reader”?

1 comment

More Northcliffe titles on the block?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 15 March 2006 at 12:39
Tags: Aberdeen Press & Journal, Archant, Johnston Press, Kent and Sussex Courier, Newsquest, Northcliffe, Trinity Mirror

Daily Mail and General Trust may be looking to sell more of its Northcliffe regional newspapers, the Daily Telegraph reports.

The Kent and Sussex Courier is reported to be on the block, with possible suitors including Trinity Mirror and Gannett the American parent of the Newsquest group.

After pulling the entire Northcliffe group off the market last month after attracting lower-than-expected bids, DMGT is also rumoured to be flogging the Press & Journal in Aberdeen, stoking the idea that it is looking to break up its regional newspaper group.

Johnston Press, Gannett, Trinity Mirror and Archant are all reported to be interested in the Scottish broadsheet.

Across the Northcliffe group, advertising revenue was down 7 per cent in the five months to February, according to a DMGT trading update released today.

Fifty years in Dorking

Posted by Martin Stabe on 10 March 2006 at 10:29
Tags: Dorking and Leatherhead Advertiser, Journalism, Northcliffe, Trinity Mirror

Greta Morley has been at the Dorking and Leatherhead Advertiser for half a century.

Morley, now a grandmother-of-five, started on the paper as a 17-year-old in 1954 under then-editor Bill Williams. She moved to Northcliffe newspapers on Fleet Street in 1957, but returned to Dorking two years later to edit a Woman’s Page. In the 1970s, she became features editor and in 1987 became the first woman to be editor of The Advertiser. She retired in 1996, but has continued to contribute to the paper, producing its Yesteryear section with another long-serving employee, Maureen Lewington.

Sportsman speculation roundup

Posted by Martin Stabe on 2 March 2006 at 11:56
Tags: Journalism, Mobile Phones, Online, Sportsman, Trinity Mirror

The hotly-anticipated official announcement of the launch date for the Sportsman is expected soon — “perhaps as early as today” — the Guardian says in its sports section.

The new national sports betting daily, headed by former Telegraph diarist Charlie Methven, will be a 80- to 128-page tabloid. The Guardian report includes some more detail about the Sportsman’s web operation which, as we reported last week, will be spearheaded by former News International digital director Mark Maydon:

In a model that other media owners might hope to replicate all journalists will work on both the newspaper and the added-value website, which launches in May. [Manging director Max] Aitken says: “We will not just be dumping the paper online. The reader will bounce between the two, while emails and text updates can provide information on changed overnight conditions or news from the paddock. We are a media company, with great betting content.” There will also be links to an on-line betting site.

According to Roy Greenslade in the Telegraph, the Sportsman may be receive a percentage from bets placed via its web site and also has some interesting ideas for delivering news to mobile phones:

Methven … says: “Look, we have journalists at race meetings who report on the condition of horses in the paddock. It’s a good service. But think what we could do by offering punters reports in real time, giving them information at the same moment as they are witnessing it themselves.”

Meanwhile, the Times City Diary yesterday reported that the Methven has already sought legal advice about an alleged advertising deal offered to a major bookmaker by the Sportsman’s established rival, Trinity Mirror’s Racing Post.

Update: The Sportsman will launch on 22 March.

Oakley would run Northcliffe for Candover and CVC

Posted by Sarah Lagan on 9 February 2006 at 12:15
Tags: Birmingham Evening Mail, Liverpool Echo, Northcliffe, Trinity Mirror, Yorkshire Post

Experienced newspaper executive Chris Oakley would run Northcliffe Newspapers should the bid between Candover and CVC succeed.

Oakley is former editor of the Liverpool Echo. He was editor in chief of the Birmingham Mail and put in a successful management buyout bid for £125 million and created Midlands Independent Newspapers (now the Birmingham Evening Mail).

MIN was eventually sold to Trinity Mirror. Oakley worked for TM as An executive before returning to regioanl newsdpapers when he bought out the Yorkshire Post and associated titles from United Provincial Newspapers and set up a new company Regional Independent Newspapers.

Venture capitalist group Providence is also in the running to buy Northcliffe.