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Johnston Press focuses on 10 cities with revamp of entertainment site

Regional publisher Johnston Press has relaunched its nationwide entertainments and listings website with a network of ‘city editors’ in 10 cities to provide local content.

The WOW247 site has been revamped with a new look and visitors to the site can choose their local city or look at the nationwide version.

The site, which was launched in 2012, is now fully-responsive and is aimed at a young, urbanite audience, who want to be informed about what is happening in their city.

And the bloggers recruited for each city will provide content to give users a guide to what is going on locally, including films, food and drink, music, gaming and the arts.

WOW247

The cities which have their own section on the website are London, Edinburgh, Belfast, Manchester, Cardiff, Newcastle, Leeds, Sheffield, Glasgow and Bristol.

Steven Thomas, general manager of WOW247, said: “The new platform and brand have been created to engage with a younger, mobile and social audience.

“The new WOW247 is a massive leap forward, offering us a dynamic, well-designed platform to make the most of our great content.

“As well as showcasing the work of our ever-growing team of contributors, it offers a compelling opportunity to commercial clients and partners, and we have ambitious plans to grow the audience significantly over the next year.”

The site is fully responsive to display better across all screen sizes and the new platform has been made quicker to load, with a new logo and branding.

Added Steven: “Having carried out extensive audience insight and research work, we realised we needed to shift the WOW proposition to meet the expectations of an urbanite audience.

“Not only did we need to update the product, but the WOW247 branding also needed to go through some changes, and through the new logo and branding, we are now representing WOW247’s youthfulness and confidence.”

14 comments

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  • May 27, 2015 at 4:18 pm
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    City Editor = someone sat in their bedroom with a picture of Joey Essex on their wall.

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  • May 27, 2015 at 5:44 pm
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    Smile Jeff…. Sounds as though you got a KB for the city editor role!

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  • May 27, 2015 at 6:50 pm
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    Become a blogger… write for JP for free! I can’t see ‘urbanites’ falling for that one.

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  • May 27, 2015 at 8:20 pm
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    Can’t help (almost) admiring JP for trying it on. But when the truth dawns it will be too late to salvage anything much from the wreckage, I fear.

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  • May 27, 2015 at 9:00 pm
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    Great work by Steve and the team. Don’t be bitter Jeff Jones, it was you once, just a picture of a Lamborghini Diablo rather than Joey.

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  • May 27, 2015 at 10:58 pm
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    Absolutely staggered that JP has done this with WOW247 and gone for Newcastle as a centre and not Sunderland – when the company has zero newspapers in Newcastle but owns the Sunderland Echo in Sunderland.
    How does that work?
    Heaven know what Sunderland people would make of this. If they cared.

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  • May 28, 2015 at 5:46 am
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    Please use proper grammar Jeff Jones. It should be ‘someone sitting’ not ‘someone sat’

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  • May 28, 2015 at 9:26 am
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    Argus, what are you talking about. So, in your mind, a vertical entertainment platform has to follow a company’s traditional newspaper footprint. It’s precisely that sort of thinking that’s held this industry back for far to long.

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  • May 28, 2015 at 1:17 pm
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    Awful look to the new site: text is too bold, and therefore not easy on the eye. You wouldn’t think JP had a Chief Creative Officer.

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  • May 28, 2015 at 1:25 pm
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    What’s a vertical entertainment platform? And can I buy them in a sex shop?

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  • May 28, 2015 at 3:27 pm
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    JP Cost Cut Victim, not that you’re bitter. Jeff Jones, legend has it you’re running one?

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  • May 28, 2015 at 4:56 pm
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    New I could rely on getting a constructive reply from ‘Bob’. I merely gave my thoughts on what I have seen.

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  • May 29, 2015 at 10:37 am
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    Sorry – of course I know it should have read ‘knew’!

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  • June 2, 2015 at 6:19 pm
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    How exactly is ‘gaming’ something going on in a specific city? I thought the whole point of it was being sat, or sitting if you will, alone in your bedroom beneath your poster of Joey, or possibly David, Essex interacting with your fellow urbanites, if at all, in a virtual (and therefore vastly more attractive and stimulating) world than the one you actually live in. Or is it just that they think they’ll be able to find lots of nerds who want to write about gaming, and the tail is therefore wagging the dog?

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