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Advertiser gets a facelift

The Evening Advertiser in Swindon has been been given a facelift in a bid to make it more appealing and modern for its readers.

Under the slogan ‘Brighter, Bolder, Better’ the Newsquest title has introduced a number of design and content changes, backed by a concerted editorial, promotional and marketing campaign.

These include fresher, cleaner designs for all the platform pages in the main paper – such as the world news page, letters page, business and what’s on, and a tweaked masthead, with the “Evening” reduced in size and sitting on top of a bigger “Advertiser”.

New sections and supplements have also been introduced, including The Red, an eight-page sports pullout dedicated to Swindon Town, Life, a four-page lifestyle section mainly aimed at women, and All About U, a 12-page supplement covering all the neighbourhood news.

Existing platforms The Box and Out, which cover TV and entertainment, have also been given an overhaul, and a daily nostalgia page called Remember When, looking at the 70s, 80s and 90s as well as the “olden days”, has also been introduced.

Editor Mark Waldron, who joined the paper in the spring, said he simply wanted to refresh the content and design of the paper.

He said: “It was more of a facelift than major surgery.

“Brighter, bolder, better is not dreamt up as just a catchy slogan – it’s something I am trying to instil in everything we do.

“Readers won’t be fooled by froth over substance. It’s just as much about what stories we write and the way we write them, the pictures we take, the pages we design and the headlines we come up with.”

And so far the changes appear to have been welcomed by readers, with an average sales increase of 2.6 per cent against the previous three weeks.

Mark said: “Nobody expected these changes to bring an immediate lift in sales. We are looking at the longer term – the town and our readers are changing and we need to change with it.

“However the initial sales have been extremely encouraging and a welcome reward for the hard work that so many people have put in.”

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