A regional daily has relaunched by promising more content aimed at an “aspirational and younger audience” along with a more modern typeface and layout.
The Manchester Evening News has adopted a new look, bringing it in line with two fellow big city Trinity Mirror dailies.
A new Travel section on Monday and Home supplement on Thursdays will now feature, which the company says marks a “deliberate and specific move to provide interesting and relevant content for the aspirational and younger audience”.
The new layout was revealed in today’s edition, front page pictured below.
Editor-in-chief Rob Irvine said: “The Manchester Evening News is booming thanks to our award-winning website – the biggest regional site in the UK – and we have a bigger audience than ever before, and it continues to grow.
“However, like Greater Manchester, the MEN doesn’t rest on its laurels and always strives to get better at what it does. We know the way readers consume media has changed dramatically so the MEN has to adapt to survive.
“That’s why we’ve created a great new look for our print edition, which reflects the success story that is Greater Manchester.”
The cover price has not risen as a result of the relaunch, having increased from 65p to 70p in November.
In October, Trinity Mirror title the Birmingham Mail relaunched in which it also promised to target “aspirational, confident and younger” readers, while Liverpool Echo editor Alastair Machray held a month-long consultation with readers prior to his own newspaper’s redesign in June.
The new look back page of today’s MEN
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Love the ‘young, aspirational’ denture ad on the front page.
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I applaud the sentiment, but I’m sorry, for the umpteenth time, trying to engage younger readers just doesn’t work. The younger end of the ‘market’ DOESN’T READ NEWSPAPERS. They’ve got their heads stuck in their I-phones. Just take a look out of the window and you’ll see what I mean. And what 18-year-old is going to engage with any newspaper which has an advert for dentures on its front page? Do behave.
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Ouch! Typo on p1… ‘say Van Gaal’
Like the rest of it though
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Soooo…. this isn’t anything to do with Manchester having aspirational people but just something that other TM papers are doing. Hmmm, I don’t want to be cynical but those young and aspirational people are the ones who are using the web, phones and tablets to access their news, aren’t they? And if they are aspirational, why would they be bothered with an inward-looking paper when they could buy a national? Isn’t news just news – stuff that’s happening that day? Can news really be slanted towards one audience or another?
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Good to see the front page ad is also targeting an “aspirational and younger audience”.
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It’s soul destroying reading of yet another ill conceived attempt to gain an audience that just isn’t there,listen ” young people do not read newspapers”
How hard is that to understand??
Years ago they’d trot out the old ‘our readers are dying so we need to launch papers that appeal to the young’ cliche
They didn’t manage it when folk were buying papers in their thousands so they’ve no chance of reaching then now that the markets on the wane.
I can’t even applaud the initiative as its never been a runner so why waste time effort resources and money on something as old hat and dead as this.
And it just highlights how desperate things are when rather than focusing on advertising aimed at the market they’re after they run a hideous advert for dentures!
Left hands and right hands
Heavens above, they just don’t get it do they
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One day an enlightened editor is going to declare … we don’t care about young readers, we’re irrelevant to them. Instead, we’re going to target middle aged and elderly people and when they die off we’ll sweep up those who were once younger but are now middle aged. Problem is, editors are so desperate to be cool and to show the world they are relevant in the digital world that we end up with this kind of hybrid which has a funky look and denture adverts.
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What is the exciting new typeface then? Looks a bit uninspiring to me. Arial, and some italics all in caps?
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I honestly wish nothing but good things for my old employer, the MEN. But I remember the first efforts to win an ‘aspirational and younger audience’…that was about 25 years ago. Then as now, they would have been much better off trying to serve the needs of the older, less ‘aspirational’ readership who had been loyal to the paper for many years.
Instead, there were times when execs actually congratulated themselves on circulation declines because, having lost more of those boring buy-it-every-day oldies, the remaining readership was of a higher ‘quality’ according to the ABC1 Demographic.
Those young and aspirational new readers did not materialise 25 years ago and they sure as hell aren’t going to be found now. As many have remarked, young people do not read newspapers. They might dip into the MEN’s online offering, but when is that going to generate even a tenth of the revenue needed to keep all those people employed in Chadderton?
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I think the younger readers ‘aspire’ to own iPhones and iPads not prin ted material.
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Wish it the best of luck but bet it is still the old menu of death, disaster and low life. MEN lost its way and circulation when it abandoned news coverage beyond Greater Manchester, made redundant some of the finest journalists in Britain and replaced professional photographers with freebies from readers and Google!
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I was involved with the MEN in the 1970s/80s. I don’t understand today’s concept of aiming at a specific age group. Local papers should be aimed at all local people – regardless of their age.
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You can keep polishing a turd, but it won’t smell any better. The MEN has sacrificed its older readers in the rush to embrace the on-line revolution and attract a generation that doesn’t buy newspapers. Why would anyone bother to buy today’s paper when the best stories immediately appear on the website? You have lost most of your newspaper sales and valuable newspaper advertising. On-line ads don’t replace the revenue for newspaper ads, and you don’t get a penny from internet hits. The future is more job cuts and pay cuts before you go out of busiess.
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Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Seriously, though, the MEN lost its way when it started slavishly following the red tops on their pursuit of “stories” about Coronation Street and other soaps in the 1980s. Real news stories were hung out to dry unless they contained a reference to Elsie Tanner’s knickers. Evening newspaper readers expect better and I can’t see Mr Irvine’s innovation meeting that aspiration
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I’m not sure what the Piccadilly Gardens story is about, but I certainly can’t see the lead story (especially with that head) or the Primark baby story as especially appealing to “younger readers”.
Not that they’re an entirely homogenous group, of course, but I suspect that the only “younger readers” who might be torn away from their iDevices are those with a taste for really serious stories on environment, social justice, culture, etc. – not human interest/family dramas.
Whether there are enough of them to justify a print product is a whole other question, but just possibly as part of a package along with a really well-developed online product…?
Meanwhile, the “friend dropping in” line is just cringeworthy and I can imagine more of this audience laughing at it than taking it on board.
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And how “aspirational” in its choice of shop was that baby in the bottom right story?
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I remember in the 1990s (nothing new you see! the once-superb Brighton Argus taking such a stance. One of its first efforts was a double page spread on handbags. The paper never recovered, though no doubt its current skeleton staff work their butts off to keep it afloat.
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Bloody hell, that is unredeemingly awful.
Bloomin’ templates.
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Quarkitis (n) -a little understood medical condition that affects newspaper designers. The condition is nearly always terminal as it attacks the the part of journalists’ brains that control the ability to design cogent and intelligent newspaper pages. It also affects the ability to crop and choose images, causing sufferers to waste acres of newsprint with vertical images cropped as horizontals and vice-versa. The only known treatment is with regular doses of the tracking and kerning drug osteotypothaguras. Other medical experts,however, put the increase in the condition down to the dismissal of journalists and designers who knew what they were doing.
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If this is the future, I’ll take the cold, rice pudding.
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says Van Gaal works better!
Does anyone check pages any more?
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It says ‘younger’ not ‘young’. Target audience more likely to be 40 than 15, 55, not 20. Just saying
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