A regional daily is set give more focus to entertainment in an upcoming relaunch in a bid to target “aspirational, confident and younger” readers.
The Birmingham Mail will put its revamped paper on sale for the first time on Monday, which will feature a new page two “guide to the city” offering 48-hour entertainment listings on a daily basis.
This will be coupled with the launch of a new ‘Wow Brum’ pull-out guide in each Thursday’s edition and a continuation of what its publisher calls the paper’s “celebratory and engaging” tone.
The relaunched paper will also feature a “more modern layout” and redesigned masthead.
A dummy version of the relaunched Mail
Mail publisher Trinity Mirror said in an announcement today:: “Readers and commercial clients of the Birmingham Mail will notice a brighter more modern layout and a continuation of the celebratory and engaging tone the newsbrand has adopted.
“There will be a full series of new daily platforms which mark a deliberate and specific move to provide interesting and relevant content for the aspirational, confident and younger audience that makes up Birmingham’s diverse and expanding middle market.”
Editor-in-chief Marc Reeves added: “Hundreds of thousands of Brummies come to the Mail every month to find what matters to them.
“Whether it’s the latest football news and fan gossip, the big news story of the day, or the inside track on the latest bars in town, people know the Mail is where you go first.
“But we do more than just report on our city – we’re also the number one champion for the city. Our Pride of Birmingham Awards celebrate the very best of what makes Birmingham great – its people – and we stand up for Brummies too.
“Our fearless reporting and campaigning on everything from extremism in schools to the injustice of the Birmingham pub bombings show we will not shirk from holding the powerful to account.”
The new-look paper will be supported by a city-wide canvassing initiative.
The initiative will see 2,500 homes a week receive free sample copies of the new-look Mail and a follow up canvassing call offering a 13 week discount home delivery deal.
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I like that new masthead.
The rest seems like it echoes the Echo revamp.
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Looks a bit like Smash Hits from the 80s.
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It looks like some free advertising leaflet that might be stuffed through your front door with a load of other junk mail.
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I like the masthead but the lead is dreadful.
What makes them think that their younger target audience, or anyone else, is interested in a vox pop on a railway station? You don’t even need to buy the paper to find out the story. It’s a page 18 feature at best.
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Circus layout. Continental newspapers have done it for yonks.Nothing modern about it.
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Ian Reeves, some of us remember when hundreds of thousands of readers turned to the Birmingham Evening Mail every DAY to find out what really did matter.
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Modern younger people apparently don’t like news in their newspaper then. Perhaps the mail should just launch a time out style mag guide and leave space in the paper for real reporting. Or relaunch to a mag wholesale and be done with it.
Personally, the masthead seems a bit uninspired and as soon as the presses have a bad day ‘Birmingham’ will be virtually unreadable. Why put Lenny Henry on there? To most young aspiration modern people, he’s the face of Premier Inn, which is hardly something to shout about.
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I suppose newspapers have to try to attract a younger audience.
Nevertheless I think the chances of success are pretty small.
For several years now I have been talking to groups of highly intelligent, highly motivated postgraduates – usually arund 15 or 16 in number.
I always asked at the start of the session, as an icebreaker, each individual to tell me how they accessed news.
It is years since anyone admitted to reading the print media.
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Regionals don’t have younger, aspirational readers. They have plenty of older, realistic readers who are thoroughly fed up of seeing their local rags transformed into galleries for bright (and not-so-bright) young things.
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I wonder how hard it is for regional press suits to realise that young people do not pick up local papers, paid for it free they’re an outdated method of news and info which is readily available abd updated instantly on line, soon as a paper is printed its out of date. That’s not hard to understand but fir some reason there’s this belief in some quarters that all youngsters need is a bright wow isn’t this great shouty yoof looking revamp and they’ll start picking up a local. They won’t and to be honest RP groups targeted young potentially new readers for years, long before the influx of digital and mobile news availability and couldn’t attract it then so there’s no chance now.
Maybe those making the decisions these days are so long in the tooth and out of toxin they really feel this thing is the answer.
If they what to get in front of an aspirational audience go upmarket with a hyper local glossy lifrstyle magazibe or develop a digital presence that young people might be interested in
Tired old tarted up locals isn’t the answer guys and is the quickest way to rack up costs whilst retaining little or no new and relevant ad revenue
Welcome to the 1990s
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Oh for the love of god. What have they done?
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I admire the conviction, but I think they’re missing the point.
We are not going to suddenly find out of date news attractive because the layout has been changed. That’s a bit silly and naive.
But, maybe we do want a bundle of news. One that has video, audio, live blog, updates, and doesn’t need to be thrown in the bin. A kind of newspaper, but in a more modern setting.
If only someone came up with a tablet-like device that could hold such a publication, and actually pushed it as the future of news, we’d probably buy it. So would advertisers, I imagine. Especially if they knew we’d read the things for about 30 mins a day.
Until that happens, I guess I’ll click from website to website, without paying anything, in the hope a newspaper fit for 2015 emerges.
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comic
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I worked on a big city daily for over 30 years, and that mantra – the need to attract a new young audience for the paper – was trotted out over and over again.
Fact is that young people were never and will never be interested in their local paper or its website. You have to have a long-standing investment in a community to care what happens in it.
More to the point, I’d love to know how many loyal older readers were lost because they felt alienated by the constant pursuit of younger readers.
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The more I read this story, the more I think this direction is the complete opposite of what a print product needs to be to eek out an existence over the next few years. In fact, as a managerial decision, it overlaps the shady borders between ‘insane’ and ‘suicidal’.
Anyone with a reasonable amount of experience in regional newspapers will know that you cannot attract a younger audience. Newspapers never have and never will appeal to that demographic.
The new design and reader profiling here almost make me suspect the people behind this are deliberately trying to hasten the demise of the Birmingham Mail.
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There’s too little real news or decent reporting in the Birmingham Mail these days – and none whatsoever if you live in areas it used to cover outside the city boundaries such as the Black Country, south Staffs, north Worcestershire or Solihull. How many reporters do they have these days – half a dozen? Seemed like fewer last time I read it.
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