Newly appointed editor of the Daily Sport, Pam McVitie, hopes returning to a newspaper-style approach she can turn around the decline in sales, which has been partly blamed on the slump in the building industry.
McVitie, who has been with the paper ten years in various roles including news reporter and news editor, took the helm yesterday. She has been succeeded as deputy editor by deputy news editor Gary Doran.
The newspaper has only been ABC audited since the beginning of the year, but in that time sales have dropped 22 per cent to 79,415 for August this year.
McVitie said: ‘There’s no doubt it’s an uphill battle but everyone is going through the same thing. Especially with the decline of the building industry, they’re our stalwart readers, but we’re going to push ahead and hopefully people will realise that the Daily Sport is back to where it use to be and more.”
The latest appointment follows a period of flux at the top of Sport Media Group.
Barry McIlheney, founder of lads weekly Zoo, was brought in at the begining of this year as editor-in-chief along with editorial consultant and Loaded founder James Brown, and together they redesigned the paper into a daily lads mag.
After plunging sales that approach was ditched and there was a u-turn on the ‘newszine’approach in July when McIlheney was became group editorial director and former Cambridge Evening News editor Murray Morse was brought in as editor-in-chief of the Daily and Sunday Sport.
McVitie, 41, admits that the ‘newszine’redesign was a failure and for the past two months they have been reverting the paper to its previous form.
‘It just didn’t work,” she told Press Gazette. “I think sometimes you underestimate the reader, you think that they don’t want anything to read and that’s a mistake.”
“Going forward we’re going to build on what we’ve done over the last couple of months. More stories, plenty of fun. We’re not adverse to tackling the big issues of the day, but we’ll do it Daily Sport style. We’ll also have lots of sexy babes and will keep the glamour count up because that’s the bastion of the Daily Sport.”
McVitie added that she wanted to give the reader a reason to buy the paper every day, which she felt was lost was lost when it changed to a ‘newszine”. She said: ‘We need to be aware of our own niche, which is fun, sexy and topical. We want to say the things other people are thinking but won’t say.”
The first female editor of the paper, McVitie said she gets a mixed reaction when she reveals her job as most people expect the role to be filled by a man. ‘I’m very comfortable. Outside of work I do a lot of kick boxing and kung fu, so they call me Mr Pan.”
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