A regional daily has apologised for no longer covering one of its patch’s football clubs regularly.

The East Anglian Daily Times has said sorry to fans of Colchester United, whose games it used to cover until recent years.

Liz Nice and Mark Heath, editor and head of sport respectively at the Ipswich-based daily, were taken to task on the issue during a video question and answer session with paying subscribers.

They also addressed the issue of sports results sometimes not appearing in the next day’s edition of the EADT, owing to Newsquest, which took over the title last year, having earlier print deadlines than previous owner Archant.

The EADT’s football is primarily focused on coverage of Ipswich Town, while United-related stories appear only sporadically on its website.

It decision to stop covering Colchester was taken when the paper was still under the ownership of Archant, prior to last year’s Newsquest takeover.  The Colchester club is still covered by its Newsquest sister title the Daily Gazette.

For the session, reader Sue Webster had asked: “Why are the sports results not in the next day, and why no Colchester United football news please?”

In reply, Mark said: “Since we’ve been acquired by Newsquest the deadlines have shifted, as it were, so our daily deadlines for print a lot earlier than they ever were.

“I guess because Newsquest have got a load of papers to get through a printing press, which means that a lot of the time, the deadline has been and gone while sport’s still happening. That makes it very difficult for us to put sports results in and we don’t want to put incomplete results in.

“In terms of Colchester United, this was a decision made under Brad Jones, the previous editor, with me involved as well clearly.

“About three or four years ago now, we decided to stop covering Colchester United mainly because we were spending a lot of time covering it and what we see now – we’re aiming at serving a web audience – and we can see what people read.

“We get stats for everything. For Colchester United, I’m afraid to say, there just wasn’t that level of interest there in terms of readership and we couldn’t really justify the time we were spending on covering the club – and the money.”

Liz, pictured, added: “It’s a shame we can’t, but a lot has changed in journalism since I started in 1992.

“We had a lot more people in the newsroom and things have changed.

“We have to cut our cloth which is not ideal, but we try to do it with the readers in mind and we’re very sorry to Colchester United fans that are there, but there are other smaller interests that perhaps we used to cover in the past but can’t now because we simply just don’t have the resources to do it.

“We try to do what we can.”