Just a fortnight after announcing massive cuts throughout the company – Trinity Mirror has revealed the launch of a sports supplement at the Daily Record.
SportsWeek has been touted as a unique product which will provide regionalised in-depth coverage of sports which are sometimes neglected on the national back pages.
Six new editorial staff have been taken on to produce the supplement, two reporters and four subs.
It appears for the ?rst time on Wednesday, 13 August, and will include coverage of Scottish Premier League football, junior football, the Highland League, rugby, golf, boxing, speedway, ice hockey, athletics, American football, basketball and cricket.
The four regionalised editions will each contain 16 unique pages. They will include local columnists, league tables, results and a fanzine page.
The latest ABC ?gures show the Daily Record, Scotland’s biggest-selling daily, to be losing readers at a steep rate: circulation for February to July was 511,816 – 8.84 per cent down on the same period last year.
SportsWeek has been launched as a result of a research exercise called the Spirit of Scotland Survey, which was intended to establish how people de?ne Scottishness and ?nd out what they want from their newspapers.
Jim Traynor, Daily Record assistant editor (sport), said: “This is a unique initiative and really brings a groundbreaking approach to newspaper sports reporting.”
He denied that it was an attempt to poach readers from Scotland’s regional dailies saying: “We didn’t consciously look at that, this is to give our readers a bit more service. We found we didn’t have enough room at the back of the book to cover the more newsy sports items .
“My intention with it was to give our readers a better coverage of every sport without taking sport from the back of the book to the detriment of main sports.”
He added: “No other national paper has done something like this – it’s a massive undertaking.”
Two weeks ago Trinity Mirror chief executive Sly Bailey announced the results of a company-wide strategic review and she called for an end to in?ghting between the Daily Record and the Scottish Daily Mirror.
She said: “It is not acceptable that the Daily Mirror and the Daily Record compete aggressively as they have been. They are knocking the hell out of each other on position and price.”
By Dominic Ponsford
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