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Trinity Mirror to shut two county-wide news websites

Trinity Mirror is shutting two county-wide news websites – saying they lack the readership to sufficiently match the company’s “digital revenue ambitions”.

The regional publisher has announced Get Hampshire and Get Bucks, which covers Buckinghamshire, will be closed from Tuesday.

Visitors to the former will be redirected to the neighbouring Get Surrey site, while both brands will retain a presence on Facebook to complement TM’s print titles in the two counties – the Buckinghamshire Examiner, Buckinghamshire Advertiser, Surrey Hants Star Courier and the News & Mail series, which has Fleet & Yateley, Farnborough, Aldershot and Camberley & Sandhurst editions.

No jobs are affected by the sites’ closure.

Get Bucks

Staff were told about the move in an internal memo sent on behalf of Simon Edgley, TM regional managing director for South East & Central & East, which has been seen by HTFP.

It reads: “As you know the Trinity Mirror digital strategy is to grow an audience of scale built on local, loyal readers for our key sites.

“Our newsrooms are built to be digital-first and driven by analytics. In the South East we have an enviable record of audience growth. Thanks to the clever, hard work of editorial, page views in June across the key sites, Get Surrey, Get WestLondon, Kent Live, Croydon Advertiser, and Essex Live were more than 50pc up on 2016.

“Following a digital portfolio review, we do not believe that we are in a position to grow the sites Get Bucks and Get Hampshire to the audience size required to deliver on our digital revenue ambitions. We have, therefore, regretfully come to the decision to close these sites from 1 August.

“Get Hampshire will redirect to the successful GetSurrey site which had 5.5m page views in June and where there is a proven appetite for these stories. Get Hampshire and Get Bucks will retain their presence on Facebook to complement our continued engagement with our readers in print.”

Get Hampshire was founded in 2008, while Get Bucks began in 2013.

In recent years, Trinity Mirror has switched to a system of operating county-wide websites in some regions, closing the sites of individual newspapers in the process.

As well as the titles mentioned in Simon’s memo, the company also operates county-wide sites in Cornwall, Devon, Gloucestershire, Lincolnshire and Somerset.

25 comments

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  • July 28, 2017 at 10:35 am
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    They said they were having a company wide audit of the commercial operation and so we should expect them to announce closures and the moving on of underperforming staff and parts of the operation,but its surprising when they report huge ad revenue losses for the first 6 months of the year they ‘promote’ two managers thus incurring more costs.
    newspapers people arent buying and the ad reps can’t sell enough adverts into and now websites they can’t monetise so merge with geographically neighbouring web sites with no commonality at all which will in turn weaken both brands …
    It’s not looking good there is it

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  • July 28, 2017 at 10:49 am
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    Where will I go to find out about the top 10 burgers in Buckinghamshire now? Who will sate my hunger for triviality in the absence of these sparkling Trinity Mirror offerings?

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  • July 28, 2017 at 11:04 am
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    Those pesky readers thwarting Trinity Mirror’s catatonic plans, yet again…

    Chocolate rations are up, comrades.

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  • July 28, 2017 at 11:07 am
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    So….the idea of having news websites without local papers has failed. Hate to say it but….an awful lot of us said it was a bad idea!

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  • July 28, 2017 at 11:08 am
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    How many times do I need to say this?…Digital Dosent Work! Esp for local weeklies. Advertisers don’t want to have a micro-ad on ppls smartfones. Plus they know pop-up ads are annoying. No ad revenue means the news stories are being given away for free. After years of trying TM, JP et al still can’t monetise the internet. Give it up folks…DIGITAL DOSENT WORK!!

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  • July 28, 2017 at 11:12 am
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    @User Generated Content..
    Don’t worry…try your local JP paper…it’s packed full of ‘company wide generic pages’ where you can find out how to look after your knees and all sorts of rubbish which takes away space for REAL local news.

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  • July 28, 2017 at 11:30 am
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    Dead digital horse we all can feel your anti digital passion and I’m sure majority of us share it too but not only does DIGITAL NOT WORK! but sadly neither do printed local newspapers anymore and no amount of wishful thinking will bring them back, the writing was on the wall years ago which is why print publishers ‘ had a stab’ at online publishing and commercialising but failed spectacularly by which time the drain away from printed papers had become too much to stem the flow so now they’re caught between a rock and a hard place with their only two revenue generators both crashed and burned leaving them high and dry and needeing to make serious cuts to reduce costs.
    There is no future in large scale regional publishing,
    the worlds changed and you can’t put the genie back in the bottle and the sooner everyone accepts this the better.

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  • July 28, 2017 at 1:58 pm
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    The usual naysayers at it again. This is nothing to do with digital not working; it’s just that Trinity Mirror isn’t the dominant publisher in those markets.

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  • July 28, 2017 at 2:25 pm
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    @nelson
    If you put out a good quality, unique product with stories/pictures that people actually want to see and employ good hard news journalusts to get the juicy stories then papers will sell.maybe not so much on a regional basis but local weekly news will always attract a good readership. The key though is quality, a factor that big companies like TM and JP are no longer in a position to deliver. Once great paprs bought by the big guys have become rags as they are bled dry and handicapped by the gas guzzler of a debt ridden parent company.

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  • July 28, 2017 at 3:55 pm
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    @Nelson……”Dead digital horse we all can feel your anti digital passion and I’m sure majority of us share it too.”

    It makes me laugh that everyone here moans about all things digital whilst posting these moans on a website.

    Irony overload.

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  • July 28, 2017 at 5:33 pm
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    Oh prophet (or is it profit?) Zenithar, We SO want to believe in the digital god but we are weak and we lack faith.
    Please give the figures then. Tell us how much MONEY digital is making (not hits) against print ad income.
    It’s not nearly enough, is it?
    Or please enlighten us.

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  • July 28, 2017 at 5:39 pm
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    Glen Izard
    That’s because there isn’t a printed version of HTFP so we have to comment on line, writing a letter and posting it is a bit old fashioned I find and I don’t see any advertising on site either so a tad irrelevant in the context of the main point of web sites closing due to pumisgeds being unable to monetise their digital offerings

    Zenithar; are you saying digital is working?

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  • July 28, 2017 at 5:40 pm
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    Doh
    *Publishers
    Apologies
    my fault as I was racing to the post box to catch the post to reply

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  • July 28, 2017 at 8:53 pm
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    Kent Live were more than 50pc up on 2016.The Kent Live website didn’t start until mid 2016 so that’s not really a comparison

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  • July 31, 2017 at 9:27 am
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    Kent LIve was (sic) more than 50 per cent up….was that hits or ad revenue?

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  • July 31, 2017 at 1:53 pm
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    Is digital working? Define “working”. Digital audience and income are increasing, while print audience and income are decreasing. Eventually digital will make more money than print. It’s a certainty.

    Yes, print makes more now, and no, digital will never make as much as print used to, unless you’re Facebook or Google. But if you want local news to survive in anything like the form it is now, then you have to find a way to make digital work.

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  • July 31, 2017 at 7:02 pm
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    Digital might well one day make more than print; it’s really just a question of how much (or little) that is, and whether what’s being ‘sold’ still qualifies as news. It won’t, in all likelihood, a) because news is expensive, and that cost will exceed possible income, and b) because what digital has done is largely to kill the public’s appetite for news in favour of the sort of easily digestible trivia User Generated Content identifies. It’s a race to the bottom which print can’t win for the simple reason that you can’t ask people to pay for what digital supplies. You can, however, give it away; in fact that’s all you CAN do with it, and hope there are enough mugs out there to pay for a few pop-ups here and there which will enable you to retain the services of the handful of cutting-and-pasting teenagers in Macedonia who now constitute your workforce. Digital does work, in the same way that herpes works, or potato blight, or death watch beetle. You can try to stop it, but nature (in this case human nature) always finds a way. We are, I think, witnessing the consequences of reaching peak information, when there’s just so much going on and it’s so complicated and remote from our daily reality that actually, most people would probably rather just read about the ten best burgers in Buckinghamshire, and then go back to watching Love Island. I’d like to think I’m wrong, but I suspect I’m pretty close to the mark, sadly.

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  • July 31, 2017 at 7:03 pm
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    Zenithar
    ‘Digital will make more money than print’ ??
    Most hilarious comment on here

    Based on what exactly?
    Print advertising revenues being so bad and falling further that the pittance digital brings in will seem vast by comparison presumably?

    Old publishing groups are unable to monetise digital news as they’re entrenched in old methods and are trying to adapt news print processes and newspaper and print commercial thinking to a digital arena medium and it’s simply not working, the reps are uncomfortable with it the mangers haven’t embraced it because they too don’t believe in it and everyone’s out for an instant revenue hit.
    The whole ethos of trying to convert print thinking and selling into digital has failed to happen.

    The big groups simply aren’t set up to commercialise advertising on parochial news web sites and have wasted vast sums of money,time and resources in attempting to jump aboard this fast moving medium.
    New digital first businesses and progressive sales people unemcumbered by old thinking and who actually believe in what they’re selling are stealing a march and much needed revenues on the traditional print groups who are, to all intents and purposes just playing at it, they’re managing decline whilst new independent publishers are using their web sites as an add on and primarily offering top quality relevant news via localised papers or magazines which have fine be an audience.
    There’s no long term future in traditional local news papers and with digital failing to launch it’s not clear what next for the large local publishers burdened with high costs and overheads and who can only look to damage limitate until costs exceed income enough to make it unviable to continue.

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  • August 2, 2017 at 2:33 pm
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    Some of what you say is correct, Word Furnace. The traditional newspaper groups *are* struggling to adapt, because they’re engaged in the painful balancing act of maintaining print while trying to grow digitally.

    Processes and people are still geared towards print. But once the balance tips towards digital, as it inevitably will, the processes and the people will change.

    Steerpike – what on earth is wrong with listing the 10 best burgers in Buckinghamshire? If I lived in Buckinghamshire, I’d want to read that. It’s more interesting than this “news” story:

    http://www.bucksherald.co.uk/news/aylesbury-vale-district-council-s-business-services-arm-incgen-launches-glitzy-awards-1-8077456

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  • August 7, 2017 at 2:46 pm
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    Zenithar
    I agree with your response to a point about once the digital balance tips however having worked with and spoken on s constant basis to ad reps who find themselves targeted to sell digital, a medium
    neither they not their managers understand or have embraced, it will take a clean seeep of the commercial teams and departments to introduce digital online sales people as opposed to traditional print said people. Change won’t just happen,the whole structure and thinking needs to change to enable publishing groups to be able to compete with other more established and effective sites,part of this will mean vastly improved relevant and unique content which will be wind at attracting much higher audience traffic to the sites.
    Under the existing sales set up it just isn’t and won’t work

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