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Times enters North West business news battle

The battle for the North-West business news market is set to hot up again with the intervention of a new contender – The Times.

The Rupert Murdoch-owned national daily has launched a new bi-monthly Northern edition of its Business Insight magazine, following the successful launch of a Scottish edition.

It joins an increasingly overcrowded market place which includes the Manchester Evening News with its 40-page weekly publication Business Week, and North West Business Insider, the specialist magazine edited by former Chorley and Leyland Guardian boss Chris Maguire.

Other competitors include online operator The Business Desk.com, run by former MEN business editor Chris Barry, and Manchester Matters, an online and print-on-demand publication run by former MEN transport correspondent Alan Salter.

Business Insight was trialled last year and appeared as a supplement in The Times earlier this week.

A digital edition can be viewed at http://www.timesnorth.co.uk/

The paper is hailing the magazine as “the first dedicated North of England business supplement to be published by a serious national newspaper.”

It said the publication would present “a formidable challenge to both the Manchester Evening News and Insider magazine” and claims to have received “a very enthusiastic welcome from the business community.”

The battle for readers and advertisers in the region’s lucrative business sector has already seen one casualty in Crain’s Manchester Business, which closed in June 2010.

Former Crain’s publisher Arthur Porter later sought funding for another magazine, putatively entitled Atlantic Gateway Business Journal, but this failed to get off the ground.