A regional publisher is set to launch a second new website in the heart of a rival’s patch, it has confirmed.
Reach plc will be setting up what is understood to be a digital-only project in the Johnston Press heartland of Edinburgh.
JP newspapers the Edinburgh Evening News, The Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday and their companion websites are all based in the Scottish capital.
The planned move follows the launch of digital-only operation Leeds Live in November last year, in competition with established JP dailies The Yorkshire Post and Yorkshire Evening Post.
Other cities where standalone news websites have been launched by Reach forerunner Trinity Mirror in recent years include Belfast, Dublin and Glasgow, all of which go under the ‘Live’ brand.
Reach chief executive Simon Fox, pictured, confirmed the plan to expand to Edinburgh in an interview on Monday, the same day the company revealed it had written down the value of its regional portfolio by £150m.
Explaining the re-valuation, Simon told The Guardian: “It is about the print assets.
“In terms of our regional digital strategy, we are going into cities where we never had a print presence, like Leeds, and we are about to open in Edinburgh. Those are unrelated to the print assets we hold.”
Reach declined to provide any further details on the new Edinburgh project when approached by HTFP, but it is understood the launch could be either weeks or months away.
The launch of Leeds Live was initially handled by five journalists seconded from other TM publications, but eventually led to the creation of six new permanent roles under publisher Matt Millington.
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Given these developments, one wonders why they didn’t just take the Iliffe money and do the same in Cambridge. £13million in the bank and six reporters in a city centre office against 250k on redundancies and pay-offs and moving what’s left of the staff to the A10 wilderness. Odd business decision.
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Must be more money in websites than we thought.
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Reach, Local World, Trinity Mirror – call it what you may – don’t think about investing in what they’ve got. Presumably, as they don’t really care about quality journalism, they’d rather invest in ‘new’ areas to try to cause more mayhem.
I love the fact that it is website-only, because any Reach website is clunky, you’re paralysed by ads and quizzes as soon as you open a page and it is far from user friendly.
But I’m sure the deluded ‘yes’ men and women will defend this latest madness to the last.
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Investing in clickbait sites to bring in a few quid. And using the awful Reach website template, which is designed to stop you looking at your clickbait content, but hey, so long as you fight with it for 30 seconds, it’ll register with Google and you can charge your advertisers.
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Only one hope is they give The Scotsman website a run for their money.
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Presumably this is the Edinburgh Live that former Buzzfeed hack Hillary Mitchell has been tweeting about and looking for football writers for over the last few weeks, and which has been tweeting merrily away at EdinburghLive_?
Given they tried this before – and failed – with Aberdeen and Dundee, and that Glasgow Live is basically a regurgitated mess of stuff the Glaswegian used to cover with Daily Record content thrown in to pad it out, it’ll be interesting to see how they screw this up – especially given they’ve gutted their Edinburgh office in recent years
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JPs websites rank with Reach for user-unfriendliness so should be interesting battle of the non-Titans
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Another glorious set of local newspaper websites where they can copy and paste… 9 types of people you find in [insert region name here] Ikea !!
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