After strong doubts about its viability and existence, the London Weekly did launch as the capital’s latest freesheet. Initial public reaction hasn’t been good. But despite a poor quality print and online product, and its producers’ elusiveness, the title has seemingly managed to attract advertisers. The Help Me Investigate group I set up last week has done some dogged online digging and for the latest task, user JWarren created a list of all the advertisers in the print product: Ticketmaster/Wicked Musical; Big Snow Festival; Seafrance; Southern Comfort; Aloud/Kerrang; Lyric Theatre; Celtic Blue Rock Festival; Zuricom; Envisage Recruitment; and Chisholm and Moore. Why are they backing the project and what do they know about Invincible Media? To join the Help Me Investigate group, email me for an invite or request an invite here.
Blogger James Ball feels that the London Weekly and Invincible Group, with which it is associated, have some questions to answer. He has sent an email to the editorial and commercial teams of the newspaper and to Invincible Group asking these questions.
“Virtually all need answers if The London Weekly wants to win any credibility with its sceptics,” he writes. [Read James Ball’s full post at this link]
Here are a few of the questions raised in the letter:
- What is the precise nature of the relationship between The London Weekly and the Invincible Group? There is no mention of Invincible on thelondonweekly.co.uk, but the two businesses are run from the same office in Hackney, and share many staff (and web hosting) in common.
- Who are the Global Publishing Group? Why is it not registered at Companies House? Has it ever made any previous investments – and why haven’t they received any coverage?
- Why has The London Weekly not been registered as a limited company?
- Does The London Weekly really have £10.5m backing? Can we speak to the backers?
- Ex-footballer Tony Woodcock – who has previously been involved with [Invincible Group founder] GJordan Kensington at awards ceremonies – appeared on ITN as a co-founder of the project. Given his other businesses are registered on Companies House, why isn’t GPG or TLW?
- The London Weekly was widely said to be very hard to get hold of on both Friday and Saturday [last week]. Was its print run 250,000? How many were distributed? Who was the printer?
- Why does Invincible claim to have offices on the 30th floor of 14 Wall Street – one of the most prestigious business addresses in the world – yet operate out of a monthly-rental office in Hackney? And why, given Wall Street’s location, is the US phone number given based in California?
- Where are Invincible Radio’s “millions of listeners”? The site redirects to a free streaming service with fewer than 20 followers.
- Is Invincible Magazine still published? Its forum is populated solely by spam and in many categories there have been fewer than five news stories in the last three months.