A regional daily’s journalists pulled out all the stops to report on the death of a local footballing legend. including producing a 24-page supplement.
The Lancashire Evening Post published the special supplement yesterday following the death of Sir Tom Finney, one of England’s greatest footballers, who played for Preston North End throughout his career.
He died peacefully on Friday evening at the age of 91 and the paper was the first to break the news on its website, after finding out about his death at around 9.15pm.
A team of journalists at the Evening Post worked extra shifts throughout the weekend to cover Sir Tom’s death online and prepare the 24-page supplement for Monday’s edition, pictured below.
Associate editor Mike Hill said one of their reporters had found out about the death from a contact on Friday evening and the title managed to change a number of pages in Saturday’s paper to report on the news.
Extra journalists then went into work on Saturday to write online stories about it and a team of 10 people worked on Sunday to put together the supplement.
Mike said: “He was arguably England’s greatest footballer, a one-club man who lived and worked here his whole life.
“He was involved in civic life too. He was a magistrate and ran a plumbing business. He had an OBE, CBE and a knighthood. Everybody in Preston has a story about him.
“We had more people offering to come in to work than we needed. Most of the staff have met him and have their own memories of him.”
Along with the supplement, in Monday’s paper there were also around 10-12 news and sports pages about Sir Tom’s death.
The supplement included photographs, personal memories and stories of Sir Tom’s career and life after the game and the paper has plans for supplements about his death throughout the week on specific themes.
The death of Sir Tom Finney was on the paper's front page on Monday.
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Well done to everyone involved – clearly a great team effort. However, I can’t help wondering why this hadn’t been prepared years in advance. No so long ago, it would have been unthinkable for a regional daily to be so unprepared for the death of such a local hero. A symptom of the hand-to-mouth nature of newspaper journalism in these reduced times?
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RIP Sir Tom. A great tribute by the LEP. Well done to everyone there, including the photographer. I believe the front page image is his last for the LEP. This is what you’ll be missing JP. Wouldbt quite have the same gravitas with a grainy UGC pic, would it?
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Well said Northerner! A perfect example of why a newspaper needs photographers organised by a Picture Desk!
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Within a few years, perhaps sooner, this kind of event will be reduced to lifting selected ‘tributes’ left on a Facebook page -“RIP ee woz a dimond geezer” and “theirs an other star in hevan tonite”.
Pray that on Twittter Stephen Fry said ‘blah blah blah’ about them and hopefully a reader will send in a fuzzy iphone selfie shot with the floral tributes as a background. And don’t forget a front page appeal – “If you used to work for this newspaper and remember actually speaking to the late **** ****** and know where the obit is please call us – no, please call us!”
PS – great coverage LEP
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Good stuff LEP, but surely a day to chuck the anchor ad off the front and go for a proper p1 bomb out?
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In agreement about the ad. Perhaps a sentence on the lines of ‘Bold Street Beds has respectfully agreed to advertise inside today’s paper’ would have been better and would not have damaged, (may even have enhanced) the standing of the advertiser. Well done, all the same.
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“The paper was the first to break the news on its website, after finding out about his death at around 9.15pm”.
Nice try mate. The first reports of Sir Tom’s death were on Twitter and Wikipedia, hours ahead of the L(e)P’s report – still no harm in trying to claw back some credibility when the biggest story for Preston for years broke.
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Oh, and surely this puff piece is merely a case of a ‘newpaper just doing a job properly”, to coin a phrase 😉
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