Tag Archives: Trinity Mirror

Trinity Mirror schedules Ayrshire Post and Paisley Daily Express for revamp

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The Ayrshire Post and Paisley Daily Express will be the next titles from Trinity Mirror’s Scottish division to be relaunched as standalone websites.

The new sites are part of plans to create individual websites outside of the ic umbrella sites for all of Scottish and Universal Newspapers’ (S&UN) 17 local newspaper titles.

The Hamilton Advertiser was the first title to go it alone in March and recorded 20,000 unique users in its first month of operation.

To run the new sites a new team of digital journalists has been recruited by the newspaper group led by S&UN head of digital Craig Brown and online editor John Hutcheson.

The remaining websites will be phased in over the summer, a press release from the company said.

Associated Newspapers claim monthly reach of 22 million

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Associated Newspapers websites and print editions claim to reach a combined audience of 22 million adults a month – 45 per cent of all adults in Great Britain, according to figures released by the group’s digital division today.

The survey of 60,000 readers, which was conducted across Associated Northcliffe Digital’s (AND) network of 38 websites, used a questionnaire to profile the age, online behaviour and print reading habits of respondents.

Those polled were also questioned about specific subject areas of the larger sites to investigate how users differ between these sections.

The information gathered will be used to create advertising campaigns relevant to several sites or areas, a press release from the company said.

The final figures were produced by Survey Interactive, which is also involved in developing a new audience measurement tool for Trinity Mirror’s websites.

Speaking to Journalism.co.uk last month, Guy Lipscombe, managing director of Survey Interactive, said the polling technology can give figures on the ‘unduplicated reach’ of a title – the number of unique users to a site who do not also read a print edition.

The system, he said, is based on ‘measuring the people not computers’ who view a site, preventing duplicate records as a person accesses a site across a range of devices.

However, it is unclear as to how information would be gathered to disregard users that read both the print and online versions. Wouldn’t it be more interesting to see these ‘unduplicated’ stats?

Press Gazette: Trinity Mirror looks to cut £7m after announcing falling profits

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Trinity Mirror, publisher of over 340 newspapers and websites in the UK, has announced that it will look to cut costs by £7m, after the company announced flat revenues and falling profits in its regional newspaper division.

The Press Gazette says Trinity achieved 13m in cost savings in 2007 and said it hoped to increase this to £20m by the end of this year after announcing a below-inflation increase in overall like-for-like revenues – up 1.6 per cent to £932.3m. Operating profit rose 3.6 per cent to £186.1m.

Birmingham Mail looking at developing community-based sites

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In addition to the launch of a new website, The Birmingham Mail is looking at developing and hosting a series of community-based education websites.

In interview with Journalism.co.uk, editor Steve Dyson said the newspaper was looking at a range of options for local community sites.

One of the options, he said, was to host sites for local educational institutions, where students would write the content.

“What we are planning further down the line is local community websites, again hosted by the Birmingham Mail, but they may well be sites in their own right,” he told Journalism.co.uk.

“We are looking at a variety of community sites, mainly around schools and media courses in schools, where they have asked if they can fill a local community website for us.

“We are talking to educational groups about it. There are about 15 schools around Birmingham that are developing media courses and as part of the courses they have to have websites which have to be updated daily by students. What we are talking to them about is hosting it for them.”

Dyson stressed that these sites were very much in the early planning stage but were being considered along the same lines as the series of community sites launched last year by the Teesside Gazette, another Trinity Mirror paper.

NUJ report gets a hold on new media

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The NUJ has finally published its Shaping the Future report looking at the effect of cross-media conversion and the adoption of internet publishing on its journalist members.

The report is intended largely to raise concerns that newspaper groups are committing to newsroom conversion by increasing the workload of journalists, asking them to work harder and longer without any great recompense, all the while continuing to reduce the size of the staff.

However, the report balances this through its recognition that the industry was in a ‘transitional period in which many employers are still undecided on the level of investment they are prepared to put into new media…in the long run staffing should stabilise with proper job allocation and training’.

It also highlighted that many national and some of the leading regional publishers – particularly Johnston Press and Trinity Mirror – were already engaged in planning ‘seriously for better resourced “web first” operations’.

The final section of the report, entitled The Future offers an informed look – somewhat away from the tendency toward doom and gloom of the questionnaire findings – at the development of the industry against a backdrop of Web 2.0 developments, suggesting that the industry has to grow into a word of social networking, widget technology, greater personalisation, mobility and communication.

Despite these allowances, the report raises a worrying set of issues, highlighting often how professional standards are compromised in the name of cross-media production. How corners are cut and publications are often seem as product, to be filed at a lower editorial standard, rather than focusing fully on more established news values.

“Instead of seizing the opportunity to enhance journalistic content and build and maintain quality media, many simply seized the opportunity to reduce costs and boost profits, viewing the erosion of quality journalism as a necessary sacrifice,” Jeremy Dear, NUJ general secretary wrote today.

The report singled out what it saw as examples of poor practise, with the Telegraph coming in for stern criticism:

“It panicked and tried to transform their news operations overnight, imposing large-scale redundancies in the move to a 24/7 multimedia operation,” the report stated.

It quoted – anonymously – journalists working on the integrated newspaper:

“We are regularly expected to file for the internet after [an event]. This sometimes means missing out on vital parts of the story or important interviews just so we can file a substandard version for the web.”

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New look for Birmingham Post website

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Trinity Mirror are to revamp the Birmingham Post’s website, according to reporter on the paper Joanna Geary – who is part of the development team for the new site.

Geary opened up the floor to readers of her blog to suggest features for the redeveloped website, taking their ideas to a meeting yesterday with management staff working on the project.

In an updated blog post, Geary wrote the following on some initial thoughts on the relaunch: “We’ve got a nice head start in that we will be using a similar template to other papers in the group such as the Liverpool Post, Liverpool Echo, Daily Post (Wales) and Daily Record (Scotland). Ours, however, will have a very distinct Birmingham Post feel.”