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‘Weird news’ platform is first casualty of Trinity Mirror takeover

Local World’s online platform for “weird news” has been closed by new owner Trinity Mirror just seven months after it launched.

Quirker, which took funny and weird stories from across LW’s stable of regional newspapers and repackaged them for a national audience, is the first LW title to close since November’s £220m takeover of the business.

It is understood the decision to shut the operation down was taken by those previously employed under Local World, rather than incoming Trinity Mirror bosses.

All traffic to Quirker’s website is now redirected to the ‘weird news’ section of the Daily Mirror website.

A screenshot from Quirker shortly after its launch in June 2015

A screenshot from Quirker shortly after its launch in June 2015

Of the four journalists working on the site, one had already handed in his notice when the closure was announced and one was a contractor.

The two remaining will now work on other projects for the group.

A Trinity Mirror spokeswoman said: “The decision has been made to close Quirker as we focus on the integration and digital development of the Local World and Trinity Mirror portfolios.”

Past examples of stories featuring on Quirker include a court story, originally published in the Hull Daily Mail, about a woman jailed for six and a half years for biting off part of a 53-year-old widow’s nose in a pub brawl.

On Quirker, it was run under the headline ‘This is one person you never want to get into a bar fight with’.

14 comments

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  • January 14, 2016 at 2:00 pm
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    Thank goodness someone with decency, sense and business acumen (she shall remain nameless) has taken the axe to this woefully misbegotten and atrociously delivered non-project that burnt through enough cash to have paid for decent bonuses to all the staff who made LW so successful. Someone’s nose bitten off in a pub brawl is weird or funny? No, it isn’t, though perhaps people who enjoyed sheltered middle-class upbringings, and have never seen the messy reality of such things, may think it is. Good riddance to bad rubbish!

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  • January 14, 2016 at 2:18 pm
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    Four journos running it, was the content not sourced from elsewhere?!

    Money is obviously not an issue as still seeing some taboola ads pointing to it today.

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  • January 14, 2016 at 3:21 pm
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    Shame, as TM tries to move to Digital, a unique website that pops up into multiple peoples Facebook feeds would appear to be a win win for TM, but I guess it doesn’t match the corporate image that Trinity Mirror is trying portray so it has to be killed off

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  • January 14, 2016 at 3:40 pm
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    Dreadful. I’m sure the victim of the pub attack thought it was hilarious.

    They’ll be at home laughing their prosthetic nose off at this news.

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  • January 14, 2016 at 5:43 pm
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    “….non-project that burnt through enough cash to have paid for decent bonuses to all the staff who made LW so successful…”

    I would have to check but I am sure someone used the PODO buzzword for this project – surely people were not talking out of their behinds?

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  • January 14, 2016 at 6:56 pm
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    Brought to you by the same people who suggested we should let web hits govern the stories we published in paper. THAT’S the most outrageous quirky story of all.

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  • January 15, 2016 at 12:20 am
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    Thank God for that – at least TM are starting to erode the reasons why you’d never go near a LW social media account. Hopefully their awful advertising on sites will be next for the chop.

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  • January 15, 2016 at 9:00 am
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    Dick minim.. You are really Blanche Sainsbury. I claim my five pounds!

    Wasn’t a great site but shame it’s gone as experiments seem a good idea in a world where no one has the answer. Least of all the Local World bean counters!

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  • January 15, 2016 at 9:25 am
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    Terry Jones: Experiments are only good ideas if they are good ideas, if you see what I mean. Fiver’s on the bar, sir.

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  • January 15, 2016 at 2:12 pm
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    Wot…Digital not the future after all ???
    Seriously though,have management run out of newspapers to close down and are now starting on their websites? There’ll be nothing left to run soon, just ‘virtual’ media corporations based in cyber space with a software programme endlessly shuffling UGC around.

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  • January 21, 2016 at 2:12 pm
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    Shame. Quirker was really an experimental model for bigger things to come – i.e. can local news sources build out national and international audiences without the likes of the Mail or CNN stealing their stories and monetising the hell out of them – with no benefit falling back to the source. And please, lighten up… not everyone needs to like everything – this was deliberately tasteless, irreverent content, not world political news. TM clearly bought LW for control of local media ad spend, not for new ideas. This was a fast, lean site that worked properly on mobile that their bigger brands could learn a lot from. No surprises in any of this, but a pity – contrary to earlier comments my understanding is that this was an INexpensive venture, run very lean. If you’ve ever seen how much fat there is in The Mirror’s setup, you’d understand the irony here!

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  • January 22, 2016 at 8:42 pm
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    Joe Watkins – Quirker was moronic and commercially suicidal, as a senior executive at TM quickly discerned. Don’t defend the indefensible by spouting adjectives like “irreverent” and “deliberately tasteless” as I’m sure there are plenty of porn websites to which you could more aptly apply those words. Still, as a digital musketeer (I’m guessing that’s your field from the diction and vocabulary you use), and a gritty young man of the people (hey, Joe, who knows, we may even be from the same tough S London council estate, albeit different generations), you make your point forcefully and with aplomb. Now come up with something better than the monumentally shabby Quirker.

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