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March 3, 2005updated 22 Nov 2022 2:33pm

Belfast Telegraph says tabloid edition added 30,000 to sales

By Press Gazette

By Dominic Ponsford

The Belfast Telegraph’s first tabloid edition drew an extra 100,000 readers, according to editor Ed Curran.

He said: “The paper is a huge advance on anything we’ve published
before on a Saturday – it’s 128 pages printed on our new press with all
sorts of colour availability.”

The Saturday edition is not only
tabloid but available from 7am, so is a radical departure for the
Belfast-based evening broadsheet. An updated edition is available in
the early afternoon.

New additions include a 24-page property
guide, 16-page TV guide and an eight-page racing supplement which is
changed to a photographic look back at the week in the afternoon
edition.

Curran said Saturday sales in the first week are
estimated to have increased from 70,000 to 100,000 – which makes for
100,000 more readers, working on a ratio of 3.5 readers per copy.

Curran
said: “We have had a major advertising campaign and there was probably
a degree of curiosity in the first week – but we really were delighted
with the positive response of our readers.”

The Belfast Telegraph
is seeking to turn around a year-on-year sales drop of 8.7 per cent for
its Saturday edition in the last round of regional ABC figures (which
was partly due to a reduction in giveaway copies).

The Monday to
Friday edition of the Telegraph is one of only two broadsheet evenings
left in the UK. The other is the Halifax Courier .

The launch of
the new Saturday morning edition has come at a dynamic time for the
Northern Ireland newspaper scene. A cross-border morning paper, Daily
Ireland launched last month and the Irish News is planning to drop down
in size from mid-size Berliner format to tabloid this month.

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