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Local World launches national website featuring ‘weird and wonderful’ stories from its regional press titles

By William Turvill

Local World has launched a new national website “aimed at a young social audience”.

Quirker.co.uk takes the “weirdest and most wonderful stories” from Local World’s regional newspapers and websites and “repurposes them for a new, national, audience”.

A Local World press release said: “Quirky stories already published locally are selected by a small national team, based in Local World’s Kensington HQ, and re-edited to target a social audience – then published directly to the site, with links back to the originating article.

“The site was developed by Local World’s in-house digital team, working together with leading Shoreditch-based agency Wilson Fletcher.”

Local World’s digital content director Steve Anglesey said: “Quirker is a terrific home for the most eccentric, funny, Man-Bites-Dog, weird and real life stories we produce as a group every day. This platform gives us an opportunity to really capitalise on the virality of this content, reworked in style and format for a young, mobile audience.”

Matt Kelly, group digital director, said: “Quirker is just one strand of our strategy to grow in relevance to a digital audience. There is no more enticing, or commercially exciting, opportunity in digital today than reimagining the power of local content. Watch this space."

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