Trinity Mirror Regionals’ company-wide exercise “From Biggest to Best” is being followed by a companion project – “Beyond Best”. The programme will look at future opportunities within TMR.
“Its aim is to identify further initiatives to help drive our regional division even further ahead,” said a company spokesman.
“A team led by North East regional managing director Steve Brown has been working to investigate these key opportunities.”
The original exercise, started in 2001, aimed to provide best practice guidelines in all departments of the companies’ 244 regional titles, including editorial.
As the changes engendered by the results of the research, like centralised subbing for groups of weeklies, were introduced to the newspapers, they have had a mixed reception.
Many journalists regarded them as cost-cutting measures but TMR has consistently denied this, claiming the target is efficiency and that there has been plenty of reinvestment.
The target date for achieving leadership in best practice is 2005. There have already been visits to overseas newspapers as part of “Beyond Best”.
By Jean Morgan
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