Regional publisher Trinity Mirror today confirmed that it is to launch a free sister paper to its weekly paid-for Birmingham Post.

As reported earlier this week, Birmingham Post Lite will be delivered free to around 18,000 homes in the upmarket Birmingham suburbs of Harborne and Moseley.

The same area is being targeted by newspaper entrepreneur Chris Bullivant whose new part-free, part paid-for weekly The Birmingham Press launches next Friday.

The two new titles will now go head-to-head in a life-or-death battle for the second city’s lucrative property advertising market.

Trinity Mirror said Post Lite will contain a selection of the Birmingham Post’s editorial content along with its Post Property magazine, bringing the magazine to a “new and desirable ABC1 audience.”

The new paper will not carry the paid-for Post’s specialised business and financial news, but will combine South Birmingham news with features and leisure content.

John Griffith, managing director of Trinity subsidiary BPM Media, said: “Birmingham Post Lite will deliver a quality title to a quality audience and we are confident it will prove hugely attractive to advertisers and build on the successful relaunch of the Post in 2009.

“The paid-for Birmingham Post is an indispensable product for its professional and business audience in Birmingham with up to 200 pages in total each week.

“Birmingham Post Lite will offer a quality audience a more general read of news and features but delivered by the same professional team and all to the same high standards.”

Paid-for sales of the Birmingham Post have increased by 25pc since its relaunch as a business-focused weekly title last November.

Comments

Sly dig (16/04/2010 11:13:58)
TM goes down a well-trodden route. They tried the same tactic when Chris Bullivant launched a Coventry Observer a few years ago. Putting poor Coventry Evening Telegraph stories into a free sheet. It didn’t work then and I suspect it won’t work now. When will they realise that the way to compete is with quality rather than just cobbling something together and hoping. But then again, it is TM and it appears to an outsider that the only investment they ever make is in the CE’s retirement fund.

Glad to be Out (16/04/2010 13:52:35)
This is classic 80’s management thinking. The manual back then said that if you are faced with a new competitor you should launch a sub standard spoiler and hope you have deeper pockets than your rival. The difference 20 years ago was that publishers were protecting a very lucrative classified advertising monopoly. Complacency, greed and an inability to work together as an industry has led to the loss of the dominant classified position already. Sly dig is absolutely right, the only hope TM have of dealing with this is to get fully behind their core product by investing in the talent, content and marketing needed to see off the new title. A spoiler will simply increase costs that the shareholders will then expect to see saved elsewhere. Sadly, with decisions like this being made the rate of decline can only accelerate.

Argusreader (16/04/2010 15:36:55)
Hope it has more luck than giveaways like the Argus Lite- another cobbled together under-staffed daytime freebie that was forced to go weekly.