A newspaper explicitly aimed at ‘clever people’ has been launched in a North West town in a new reverse-publishing venture.
Macclesfield Today is a new fortnightly title that will be distributed free to around 12,000 homes in the Cheshire town and copies will also be available for sale in the town centre, priced £1 each.
The new title is the first print spin-off from the website Cheshire Today, which claims more than 200,000 unique users a month.
Publisher Martin Regan said in a recent interview that the title would be “a paper for clever people” and that there would be “no cats up f****** trees” in it.
Macclesfield Today publisher Martin Regan with a copy of his newly-launched paper
Although the full-colour, 48-page paper will be fortnightly to begin with, Martin is planning to take it weekly in January.
It is being printed on heavier paper than is customary in the regional press and is unashamedly aimed at people with interests in art, literature, fashion, politics and sport.
Martin told the media website Prolific North: “We are creating a paper for ‘clever’ people. There will be no cats up f*****g trees coverage in our titles.
“Our arts and fashion coverage will exceed that of the best that the regional press currently produces.”
In the interview, Martin acknowledged that some will question his belief in print, but added: “The death of print publishing is, to paraphrase Mark Twain, greatly exaggerated.”
If the paper succeeds, it could herald further launches with Wilmslow Today and Knutsford Today in the pipeline for 2014.
The new title will be up against Trinity Mirror-owned paid-for weekly the Macclesfield Express, which has an audited circulation of just over 10,000.
It currently has eight full-time members of staff and several more working part-time.
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Most readers are clever – they prefer to read their news for free online, I know I do. Good luck mate!
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And what’s wrong with stories about cats stuck up trees?
Believe me, readers are far more interested in that sort of story than you might imagine.
I once worked on a very big evening paper and remember the phones going into meltdown when we asked readers to ring in with their complaints over fireworks.
All sorts of other stories – such as a big employer effectively shutting down or five murders in a single weekend – got little reaction.
But the fireworks one was nuts.
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You shouldn’t put place names in headlines.
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Never done a story about a cat stuck in a tree, but once did a small story about a cow stuck in a drainage ditch. And that got a huge number of hits on our website.
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I don’t particularly find a story about the loss of greenbelt to be one for ‘clever’ people. It is what it is, some people find that kind of thing interesting, others may not. Just like cats up trees. It all sounds a bit patronising.
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The newspaper is so intelligent the back page headline says… ‘Rooney camp fear Fergie blast’.
Did anyone tell the sports editor about the plan?
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Pride comes before a fall.
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The most popular stories in my experience are always the ones that directly affect people’s lives – bin collections, parking, yellow lines… that’s the kind of thing people find out from their local papers that they can’t get elsewhere. I suspect that includes cats up trees, if they cause enough of a fuss.
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Place name in a headline … On the FRONT!! Definitely not clever
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Reckon Mr Regan needs to chill out a bit, nowt wrong with a good animal story.
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The title may have eight full-time staff, but I guess they’re still looking for a chief sub, seeing the pedestrian ‘Macclesfield loses a huge slice of greenbelt’ on p1.
Still, good to see someone investing in a new print product.
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Any evidence to back up claims of 200,000 unique users a month? That’s equivalent to many city daily papers’ ABC stats. However, unlike big city papers. this publication has just 100 fans on Facebook, 500 Twitter followers and I can’t see a single reader comment on the last few dozen stories I scrolled through. Do they mean 200,000 page impressions?
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Macclesfield Today… fortnightly, brilliant
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It would be nice if Macclesfield Today could give some coverage to its local football team on the back page rather than tittle-tattle about a Premier League behemoth that could be read in any national paper.
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How about giving your readers what they want, Mr Reagan, rather than what you say they will have? The decline of the regional press over the last twenty years is littered with tales of white middle aged middle class university educated editors wholly failing to connect with the community they claim to serve.
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What if it’s a tiger?
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