The battle for readers in a South West city is hotting up after a regional daily upped its presence there.
The Western Morning News is re-establishing a permanent home for two reporters in Exeter, to be based at the offices of sister Northcliffe title the Express and Echo.
The move comes after former Express and Echo editor Marc Astley launched his new website The Exeter Daily earlier this month, with the aim of providing what he called a “proper daily news service” for the city.
The Express and Echo moved to weekly publication in September last year after 106 years as a daily title and Marc left the paper three months later.
The move by the WMN just weeks later will see reporters Phil Goodwin and Adam Walmsley based at the offices, at Sowton Industrial Estate, as the paper aims to increase its focus on the East Devon area.
Editor Bill Martin said: “It is really important that we have an office in a city that is going places.
“Exeter and Devon have always been integral to the Western Morning News, but we hope the re-establishment of the newspaper’s permanent presence in the city will bring additional benefits for our readers.”
Phil Goodwin added: “We want readers to know that we are actively looking to cover the county, the city and the east coast.”
When Marc launched The Exeter Daily, he said he aimed to create an “army of citizen journalists” across the patch and said it would fill a gap for daily news in Exeter.
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Bizarre.
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IMO, neither the WMN or the Echo have too much to worry about if what we’ve seen from The Exeter Daily thus far is representative of what we can expect over the coming months.
If Marc genuinely believes his website is providing ‘a proper daily news service’ – as opposed to simply regurgitating second-hand copy that’s already accessible elsewhere – then, as I see it, he’s living in cloud-cuckoo land.
Take a look for yourself and see what you think!
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So the Western Morning Snooze isn’t a big sell in Isca and beyond and the bright idea is parachute additional troops into the area.
Still, basing two blunts in Sowton Industrial Estate – three miles from the city centre and where the Laners and good citizens of Riffraff Road don’t travel to (no ones goes to Sowton by choice) is bound to have the desired effect……not.
Ah well, at least the WMN2 can pilfer any East Devon exclusives for next day use before the weekly Echo can use them.
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Out of interest I did take a look, Zapp, and whatever you might think of the content, the Exeter Daily website looks a hell of a lot better than the train wreck that is Thisisexeter: clean, spacious and refreshingly free of those wretched ads for ‘1 SHOCKING Tip To Cut Belly Fat’ and the beauty secrets of 96-year-old housewives who look 11 that grow like fungus in the tunnels of the Thisis sites. For a minute there I thought perhaps someone who could actually design a website might have been involved, until I tried googling ‘Exeter news’, the most obvious search term I could think of, and the Daily didn’t even come up on the first page. Don’t give up the day job – oh, you have. Ah.
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