A regional daily has launched a weekly sport archives supplement as part of a major upgrade to its Saturday edition.
The Grimsby Telegraph has introduced the Sporting Bygones supplement, pictured below, meaning the newspaper now contains more than twice the number of pages in its Saturday edition than it did less than two years ago.
It comes after the Telegraph began printing a weekend guide each Saturday to bolster its Saturday page count.
The Telegraph has a staff of just more than 20, and so turned to sister title the Hull Daily Mail to source some of the content for the guide.
Telegraph editor Michelle Lalor said: ““We saw that Hull’s Weekend Guide was designed well and contained a lot of content that we could take.
“So we took their colour scheme and templates to lift over relevant material while adding to it with our own hyper-local content.
“It is that kind of sharing that has enabled us to create a Weekend Guide, which has been very well received.”
The new eight page Sporting Bygones section means the paper now contains 76 pages on Saturdays, compared to the 36 it had previously.
It features picture galleries from the Telegraph’s archives and appeals for information on those in it.
Commenting on the supplement, Michelle added: “Grimsby Town are North East Lincolnshire’s only professional sporting club and the main content focus for the team is normally Friday, ahead of their Saturday game.
“That left Saturday – a traditional day for sport – a little bit in the wilderness when it came to coverage or a reason to buy if you were a local sports fan.
“[Sporting Bygones] proved popular before it was even launched, with readers seeing the promotional plugs we carried and calling our sports team with their memories and pictures.
“It is a great platform, which will continue to grow.
“After week one, the sports team reported a very good response, with emails and letters coming in containing more memories.”
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Brilliant innovation! Stick some old pictures in. Do not need a snapper for nostalgia. Just a small annoucement : “Our accountants would love it if you would send in lots of free pictures so we are spared the cost of taking new pictures”. Oh Lord, it’s all so desperate…
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So when newspapers are facing a battle to compete with the web to publish up to date news the Grimsby Telegraph decides to drag out even older ‘news’ to fill its pages! Can’t quite see the logic of that – except to appeal to an even older age group. Hardly likely likely to put on sales going down this route.
By the way the story says that the Bygones supplement is a weekly publication when the Bygones image above says it is now MONTHLY. Or is that a different publication? In which case they’re milking the archives for even more out of date content.
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Wake up above. The pressures on newsrooms now are immense so use of one of the best assets a newspaper has – the library – is an intelligent step forward to provide interesting content for the readership. Such substance ensures a further reason-to-buy, which keeps the budgets in place for the hard news at the front, and on the web.
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A staff of just more than 20? So sad…
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Meggie. You don’t really believe that, surely? It is just cheap and desperate space filling. Sure, one or two old codgers will love it , but most readers. Especially non elderly ones, will just sigh and ask “where’s the news?”
Some papers don’t even have original negs so they copy the original pages, with inevitable results!
It’s a mad world in the media!!
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I enjoyed reading it. Nuff said, really
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I certainly do. There is plenty of interest in archive material, be it sport, pictures of clubbers or old front pages. Doesn’t have to be that long ago either. Great thing now is that we can gauge interest immediately via the website, so we have a very good feel for our readers’ preferences.
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Meggie. People don’t want same thing on web as paper. Web comments unreliable when it comes to newspaper content. Fill up web with crap by all means. Put news in the newspaper.
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