[عزيزي الزائر يتوجب عليك التسجيل لمشاهدة الرابط للتسجيل اضغط هنا] [عزيزي الزائر يتوجب عليك التسجيل لمشاهدة الرابط للتسجيل اضغط هنا] [عزيزي الزائر يتوجب عليك التسجيل لمشاهدة الرابط للتسجيل اضغط هنا]
East Midlands town set for newspaper circulation battle
A circulation war is in prospect in a Northamptonshire town with three [عزيزي الزائر يتوجب عليك التسجيل لمشاهدة الرابط للتسجيل اضغط هنا] local newspapers all competing for readers.
The past month has seen the launch of the Corby Extra as a fortnightly publication in the town, together with the decision by Johnston Press to take the Northants Evening Telegraph weekly.
Now a third contender is set to enter the ring in the town in the shape of The Corby Eye, whose founders say they want to focus on news about the town.
The Eye is being launched by friends Kevin Sheen and Joe O who say they have grown tired of the press the town sometimes receives.
Kevin quit his job as an events manager at The Chartered Management Institution and JoeO left his sales job at a recruitment company to concentrate on the monthly free title which has a print run of 4,000 and is funded through advertising.
The pair who haveno formal journalism trainingclaim it is the only Corby paper, despite the recent launch of the Corby Extra by Extra Newspapers earlier this month.
Said Kevin: and I are Corby born and bred and had grown weary of the seemingly endless bad press Corby had been receiving both locally and nationally and decided a true portrait of the town needed to be both painted and printed.
Eye, as it is fast becoming known, is by Corby and about Corby and its borough. It is printed in Corby; it promotes Corby; it, hopefully, inspires Corby and, above all, it recognises the good in the people of Corby.
He added: contains nothing but good news and positive stories, it acknowledges unsung heroes and endeavours to promote the fantastic, but sometimes unrecognised, good work that the police, the council and all the local charities do in and around the borough. Kevin: is praise indeed to us that other publications have jumped on our news, community based newspaper idea and we welcome anything and everything that promotes Corby. newspaper is also available as an online publication.
It mainly rewritten press releases, full of news and a lot of generic filler stuff. It also very thin.
And The Eye sounds like it going to be very similar to Extra but free, so it will clearly put Extra out of business in the town.
Competition at this level is not necessarily a good thing. And it can be very [عزيزي الزائر يتوجب عليك التسجيل لمشاهدة الرابط للتسجيل اضغط هنا] harmful for journalism.
There simply isn room for all of them in a town like Corby.
The only paper doing news will inevitably get hurt it lose readers and ad revenue, more jobs may have to go, and the community becomes even more poorly served due to fewer journalists.
My own paper lost 1,000 readers overnight when a news only free launched. It folded four months later and all it achieved was damaging profits enough so we lost an ad rep and part time reporter, and several hundred people stopped buying their local paper. Newspaper design being not important is not likely to be viewed [عزيزي الزائر يتوجب عليك التسجيل لمشاهدة الرابط للتسجيل اضغط هنا] as a great hope for journalism and journalists. Good news is often not the good seller people, including daily newspaper editors, say it is.
But I tend to agree with cb. A lack of competition has, in my view, allowed the newspaper moguls to cut back and preside over the slow death of the industry. Let have more competition and win readers back.
Ashley Highfield decision to turn some Johnston Press dailies into weeklies clearly leaves the door wide open for local competition in these towns. While the editorial content may be questionable in the new start ups, more important to JP is the loss of advertising revenue, and JP has 350million of debt to pay off. Weeklies and websites will not cover this, particularly if competition nibbles away at advertising. Maintaining the dailies and print revenue, where ever possible, for as long as possible (and remember [عزيزي الزائر يتوجب عليك التسجيل لمشاهدة الرابط للتسجيل اضغط هنا] all JP papers are profitable, making an average of 20% profit margin according to Highfield) may have been the better option.
AMan only paper doing real news? Just out of interest, how many reporters actually live on patch now?
If more than one person actually did, they realise the shocking [عزيزي الزائر يتوجب عليك التسجيل لمشاهدة الرابط للتسجيل اضغط هنا] name the paper has within the town. It not about telling the news with rose tinted specs, it simply about telling the news correctly.
It simple to criticise papers for re hashing positive PR. How much locally produced news is simply that positive or negative re hashes of corporate PR.
Do a story count and see what generated off diary, through contacts and incoming PR. I dare you.
So, erm, how does this relate to Corby. Extra and the ET do the same thing. In a same style. with a similar ethos. I wonder what the common link is?
El Weasel I have no idea how many reporters live on patch or it reputation locally. I not from there.
But if the paper had that bad a reputation it wouldn sell any copies, let alone the several thousand it does.
All I know is it is at least trying to report news. As in stuff that happened. Look at its homepage (for Corby):